Free Games. Check them out.

Here are links to all the games I've worked on through DigiPen. Feel free to download them and play them. As always these are free and accessible through their website.

Incandescence - My most recent game project. I joined this team when they needed more artists and built a tiling sky road and a giant guitar for them to help them flesh out their environment.

Bear Pile - Probably the most successful and fun project I worked on. This is a multiplayer, co-operative, wave-based, third-person tower defense where you try to save the last vestiges of humanity from rampaging bears with junk salvaged from piles of trash. I built the main character and the vault environment piece and redid much of the UI that, as you can see from the sample pictures, was badly in need of updating. If you try no other game on this list try this one. It's strangely addictive, especially in co-op multiplayer LAN and has a lot of variety in game play.

Ronin Duck - A 3d action adventure game. I modeled enemies for this game and built the main character to replace their placeholder. Unfortunately, my ronin duck was never able to get into the game via their importer, but he is viewable in the Models section of my website.

Orange Crave - This was my earliest project. A bouncing platformer. I modeled, rigged and animated the main character.

I also worked on the beautiful Facebook game, Odd Manor, which allowed players to build a magical garden and summon fae to fight off evil creatures and help rebuild the manor grounds. Here are some pictures. You can find more on Facebook by searching Odd Manor.

Drawings

Got tired of working on 3d for a bit and decided to do some quick drawings. I liked these two best.

Incandescence

While looking for more work and working on portfolio I wanted to keep working with games. I've joined the DigiPen game team Dead Pandas to work on their game Incandescence. This is a futuristic skating platformer with an electronic theme that has some interesting visual effects. I'm excited to help them build their game. I'm trying to help them build up their world since a lot of the students working with them are also busy with classes, jobs and looking for post-graduate work in the games industry.

BrandX Games, King X Studios, Odd Manor

I have been working at BrandX Games on a six month contract. Our game, Odd Manor, should be releasing soon on Facebook. It is a game about botanical alchemy used to summon fae creatures. You care for and design your garden and help your friends.

Feel free to pre-register on their website, linked above.

Now that my six month contract is up I'm again looking for work and projects.

My friend Ari Kleinburg is the animator for this game.

ArenaNet Creature Test

After going through FuturePoly's ZBrush course and learning about Topogun and Crazybump I found out about the ArenaNet Character and Creature Test in CG hub here. The final product was under 5000 tri's and had single 1024 diffuse, specular and normal maps.

I finished the model in about 11 days and posted it to my website.

1 day for gathering online reference and visiting the library.

1 day for turnarounds from the reference.

1 day for building the low poly base model.

4 days for creating a detailed ZBrush model.

2 days for retopologizing in Topogun and Unwrapping.

2 days for painting textures and generating maps with Photoshop and Crazybump.

I tried to create a detailed and anatomically accurate underbelly for the model where the legs were connected to the thorax based on crab and lobster anatomy. The reference image only had a top view and so there was a lot of detail left to consider about limb connections, feeder arms and feelers and body plates.

I've written in much greater detail on the page linked above on my website. Here's the final version with texture and maps. I think I need to continue to work on lighting to try to make the texture show up better.

Continued ZBrush

I've been taking the ZBrush class from FuturePoly for about a month now. I've continued to work on polishing my last two ZBrush sculpts and I'm also currently working on a low poly model to make into a third ZBrush model.

Here's the female head after some more tweaks and polypainting. The next step will be using Topogun to remake a lowpoly for the hair so I can paint it in photoshop. Thanks so much to Will Patrick and Joe Pikop for the instruction. I'm really happy to see what is possible with ZBrush.


I've also started working on a low poly model for this character I sketched in the style of Labyrinth. Joe has suggested that I start with the head as it's a pretty complex model and we don't have a lot of time left. I agree, although I'm a bit nervous about having another head in my portfolio. Hopefully in time I can finish the whole character. For now I want to make sure I can get through the whole process using Topogun and painting a low poly model based on the ZBrush model.


I also found a sketch I had been working on and have been motivated to continue to try to make an interesting painting out of it.

I really want to take the best parts of what I'm nostalgic about and fuze them with the technology available to create amazing art that keeps the epic and mysterious feel of days when we still weren't sure what the bounds of science fiction and fantasy were.

One of the games I enjoyed was Warsong for the Genesis. I loved the art and often used Garett as my avatar online. So I decided to update 8-bit art of Garett into something more epic. I took this picture here and blew it up and sketched over it on a lightbox to make a starting sketch. I'm currently in the painting stages and hopefully one day will be done enough I can add it to my portfolio.

What! Me UI?

Over the past year or so my Team Adorkable, a mixed team of DigiPen junior and senior artists, has been working on our game Bear Pile. Since our artists have graduated most of them haven't had much time to work on the game. However, the graphic user interface was still in desperate need of an update.

I had previously finished the art assets to make the vault door (viewable in my modeling portfolio) destructable in game. Now I moved on to the HUD, Paws Menu and Main Menu. Here's the current look of the Main Menu and the HUD with an open Paws Menu. In game the game world will be showing behind these icons. The Bear and Johnny's head are 2d art assets created by Talon Jennings that I wanted to keep in the UI.

If you are interested playing Bear Pile please come try it out. It will be at PAX at free play and an updated version will be available to play at the DigiPen booth. Of course our game is also available for free from DigiPen's website. We will continue to work on making this game better and preparing for competitions such as IGF and IGC.