Aztec Vase [WIP]

1,100 Tris. Vase made to be used as something you can break to get a special item in my platformer game. Spent a decent amount of time modeling and texturing this. Credit goes to http://www.flickr.com/photos/archer10/ for his vase picture I used as reference.

Finished Low-Res

11,998 Triangles. Still need to touch up the lighting for the renders (this looks really rough still) and a few things in materials and textures, but for the most part it's finished and ready to rig.

Progress on the low poly and mushrooms!

Finished another mushroom. The big mushroom is going to explode through fracture and going to work on a particle effect for it.
On the Character side, I am done baking my normals (although some need to be re-baked because they came out kind of funky). I am now in the process of texturing in 3dcoat. Being my first time texturing in 3dcoat and so used to zbrush/photoshop texturing I am still trying to find the most efficient way of texturing in 3dcoat. 3Dcoat is very powerful i am finding because I can adjust normal maps and occlusion maps really fast and the switch between photoshop and 3Dcoat is seamless giving me less restrictions than my zbrush/photoshop workflow (not to mention zbrush got really slow at times when texturing highpoly tools).

Late Night Mushroom Project

Made a mushroom to be destructible for my plataformer. Also played around with sub surface scattering on the underneath of the mushroom. Used the new complete workflow learned from our character class to complete this even faster! High res in zbrush, low res/UVs/ and base texture in 3dcoat, to finish texture in photoshop and combine a detail normal map into the xnormal normal map to finish it off.

GDC and packing UVs

So over spring break I went to GDC where i met a lot of incredible people ranging from college students to indie developers to lead artists and CEOs. One thing I found to be common is that they are all in general, very friendly people and easily approachable. Just because you are a student doesn't mean you cant go up to a big shot and start a conversation.

In all I got a lot out of it, made some good connections and learned an insane amount about the industry and what I have to do to improve my portfolio. There were a lot of inspiring talks such as Quantic dream's Kara demo which displayed their new engine's amazing capabilities of motion capture to portray emotion. The art of Uncharted's Art presentation was pretty incredible as well, talking their game is not a documentary, it's an attempt at a better rendition of real life, so don't just copy real life, make it better in the game, adjust colors, move things around, add new things etc.

After spring break I packed my UV's as tight as possible in preparation for baking. We are given 4 days to do this, and then another 4 to texture and create materials (along with all my other classes) so I am not expecting to get much sleep any time soon.

Aztec Environment [WIP] update

Worked on my Aztec environment a little more. Pretty much just added foilage, terrain and adjusted lighting a bit. Still have a lot to do