HD videos and Kotaku

 So here are the two videos of the environments I completed this semester embedded in HD.
The StarFox Environment got on Kotaku today, so was supper excited.

[HD] Starfox Inspired Environment - UDK from Ignacio Guajardo on Vimeo.
[HD] StarCraft Inspired Environment - UDK from Ignacio Guajardo on Vimeo.

Star Fox Inspired Environment

Here's the environment by team Acidic Soap and I.

Depths - StarCraft Inspired Environment

Here are the final results!

Watch on youtube in HD 1080p for the full experience.

Starcraft Inspired Environment [WIP.2]

Many things left to do! Still working on a tessellated moving creep on the right that can be mesh painted where you want it.
Need to polish the assets as well like the bunkers and obelisk.

StarCraft Inspired Environment [WIP]

Still early in the game for it. 17 days left until the deadline. Here's a peak at the Starcraft inspired environment I am working on:

Star Fox Inspired Environement

This stuff is on my folio, but here we go for convenience, 1 month worth of work:
Fox's Room, Rendered in UDK. Movie reveal soon to follow:

 

 

 

[WIP] Fox's Room Paintover

Progress with some light paintover to showcase they type of things I plan to do next, mainly wires one the side and ceiling, making the space feel more lived in and some contrasting yellow light (which is not in the paintover.

One Week Game

I took this one step further and pretty much ended up with a game prototype. The goal of the game is to survive the longest; that's your high score. You are taking damage over time the entire game and the only way to gain health is through hitting the balls when they are healers. You'll know if a ball is an active healer if they have the circle particle active. The active healer will randomly switch out. You also have to be careful of not hitting the three balls off the stage, because those are your only ways of staying alive. You can boost for a short period of time to catch up to a ball that might be going off stage.

If played as a multiplayer, two players would fight to stay alive the longest while working to keep the balls in the field. Collision between players would probably be turned off in order to keep players from just trying to hit each other off stage. 

Technical breakdown:

The reasoning for morphing the game field is to give the player a sense of progression throughout the game.

Arwing [WIP]

Progress on the Arwing for the environment. Just slapped a metal and glass shader I had for preview purposes. 

Starfox Inspired Environment [Pre-Pro]

Preproduction has already started on this environment, which is an epic 1 month long project with a team of 4. Here are some top-down views and three camera views of my space of the environment.
Again, very early work in progress:

Beautiful Biome [Final]

Here's the video of it in action! Watch it in HD on youtube.

Beautiful Biome [WIP]

Progress on the hand-painted biome. The composition is currently getting fixed, ugly foreground plant is getting moved and refining everything. Also adding some cool vertex painting sand, sand color variation, blowing sand effects and replacing those two place-holder trees in the back.

Beautiful Biome [Super WIP]

Current progress on my Biome Project. It's a pretty short project, we only get less then two weeks.

Composition Layout - "mini oasis - desert"

This will receive a paint-over in photoshop to further refine the composition.

Rock Sculpts

Made sure to have different shape, form, and detail from different angles for re-usability

Highpoly progress on the Palm tree stump

Looking at the composition, I might make it a little taller to give it more screen space, since I want this to be my "hero-asset". I quickly desimated an earlier version of this just to throw it in the map composition to see how the shape plays out, which was a great idea, because based on the feedback I got from placing it in the level I immediately went back and made those observed changes. 

I also made sure I got the most out of this sculpt by making sides different then the other, so if I rotate this I can get a different looking stump, with also a pretty different silhouette just from rotating 

Props!

I again kept the optimization going, while retaining a high visual fidelity.
High versatility and visual sophistication was the main focus here. Have an asset be flexible when duplicated around the scene by making it vertex paintable, breakable, or toned.

A few tricks: Inverting the AO map inside the material editor and plugging a power node to adjust its contrast to essentially generate a "free" spec map that gives me those nice specular highlights on the edges on the metal. Of course, then I used a lerp node to blend between that generated specualr and a tiled noise specular.

Constantine, Algeria - 2,237AD

Constantine, Algeria, 500 years after the volcanic disaster. Completed this painting in half the time it took me to paint the last one, making big improvements on prioritizing exactly where to focus my time on.

Constantine Aftermath

Here is panoramic concept painting I completed with the theme: "What happened here?"

Completed in roughly 6 hours.

Then I gave it a detail/lighting pass (which also including some unnecessary noodling which I am trying to cut back on) taking me to about 9 hours.

Dubai Skyscraper Modular Kit [Final]

These were my final construction shots for the 14 day modular kit project.

Pretty proud with the outcome. Especially proud about my extremely efficient use of texture space. Ended up using only 2,400 total pixels, that's less then a 512x512 pixel texture for an entire kit!

I can make my master material into procedural windows, brick, tiles, window patterns, sci-fi trims, different colors etc with material instance parameters, all of this while retaining texel density since everything is procedural and tileable. (edit: updated material sheet to better show this off)

Lots learned! On to the next project!

Dubai Skyscraper Kit pt.2 [WIP]

The building now has an entrance, and I am now in the process of making a kick ass scene along with making one last piece and lots of tweaks. As a note, the entrance did not require any new textures, I just made a new instance parameter from my two master materials. Loving my materials so far, very flexible.

Dubai Skyscraper Modular Kit [WIP]

Here's some progress on the skyscraper modular kit. I have one more piece to finish (the blue box at the bottom) before I go back and refine some of the other pieces. This is going to end up being made up of just 6 modular pieces.

The master material has grown a considerable amount in order to adapt to the different demands and patterns. I was a little worried at first for spending too much time on it but it payed off in the end. It's an incredibly flexible material and I am quickly able to morph it into something a lot different.

I also added some parallax to fake the inside of the building without having the geometry inside. I also added some tileable normal to give the tiles more detail.

Following up on my RGBA trickery I threw in an ambient occlusion map into one of the channels and multiplied that by a tiled texture in order to achieve the more high poly piece at the top of the tower. Another trick in my list is being able to delete geometry in my master material by simply masking it out using one of the channels of my mask texture so that I am able to have windows with and without a trim piece without having two different meshes.

Skyscraper Modular Kit [WIP]

I started work on a skyscraper modular kit. A lot of planning went into this before getting my hands into any sort of modeling/texturing or material making.

So far it's using a master material to generate the different tile and window patterns. The material is pretty much all procedural using a small 128x256 texture that I used to generate different patterns from using the RGBA channels. With this I was also able to mask out areas in order to designate different paramaters. For example I can designate how much reflection I want, the tiling amount I want, the color of the windows and strips and the color of the grid among other parameters using material instance constants.

I also managed to generate different patterns of tonal variation in the grid using another texture (16x32) also using the RGBA channels in order to add some medium-level detail. 

I am now in the process of adding some procedural finer detail/noise for up-close shots. I am saving A LOT of texture space using this master material and plan to keep this an extremely space efficient kit. 

Here's the Emirates Office Towers reference I am working from:

Column - GAD Challange - WIP

Progress on the Column for the GAD Challange. So far, done with this peice of the column, rest needs to be retopoed, baked etc. Screenshot from UDK.

I´ve been adding a bit of NURBS cruves to my workflow when sculpting some of my other pieces. Also have been experimenting with NEX and a few scripts for maya to further speed my workflow at work.

I´ve pretty much been observing myself and seeing what is tedious, time consuming, or I think could be done faster through some other process and adjusting. For example, I found myself often selecting some of the same objects in a particular scene I am working on by hand, so I looked up some scripts and found one that does that selecting job for you. I plan on learning a bit of MEL to address some of these issues myself.

GAD Column Contest

Very early progress of the column. Based on Modernisme architecture from Barcelona. Planing on having this basic shape of a column from Architecture already present and mix and matching pieces to give it my own spin. 

Learning a lot on faster workflows here. I've learned from my past mistakes and I am using maya to detail some of these hard surfaces a lot more. Before I used to pretty much do it all in zbrush but i've been finding that a lot of hard surface is simply easier in a proper 3D package, no matter how good zbrush has evolved with its hard surface tools.

Boss Battle, Credits, Design, and Final

Officially done with the game. Ok, no, not really, there's always tweaks I can make, it's a never ending job but in all, It's complete. It's been a rough couple of months with a lot of work, but I managed my time well and even finished a bit earlier than I expected. In the end I had a lot of performance tweaking to do which had me research a bit about LOD's, removing meshes, deleting/adjusting particle effects, downsizing textures and including resolution settings in the game in case anyone wants to play it on their own PC. Also below is the 1-page design of the game:

Final Cinematic Screen

Screenshot of the game composed for the final cinematic and splash screen. Close to the finish-line with the game. Should have all game-play video by next week. I am also working on the one-page design of the game and documentation for cooking the game and putting it together for the final executable file.

Aztec Plataformer Gameplay pt.2 [WIP]

Guest appearance by Melanie Seiderman-Morillo's character model as the questgiver!
Still working out some kinks and bugs but for the most part, the meat of the game is finished, currently working on the ending of the game, and the aprt I am working now is a part that is safely implemented through map loading, just in case i don't have time to finish.

Aztec Plataformer Playthrough pt.1 [WIP]

This is the platformer level I've been working on this semester. Everything is still work in progress.

The beginning section of the game doesn't have as many gameplay mechanics as the rest of the game does, so i will post the rest once i get further along in its development.

Boss Battle

The grand finale of my platformer will include a dramatic reveal of this ship. Yeah that's right, a spaceship lands in this Aztec world.

Aztec Plataformer Screens