Intermittent Pixels

Hello World!

I just returned from an amazing PAX down in Melbourne Australia where the legendary Chris Roberts gave an awesome talk on his history in the games industry and the future of his latest game, Star Citizen.

Chris has been my role model for games development for as long as I can remember. At the CIG party on Saturday I had the incredible fortune to meet the man himself and even got a photo :D

The single most awesome party in Melbourne this year!

Meeting the legendary Chris Roberts!

There was some amazing cosplay at the convention this year. In hindsight I wish I'd have brought my new D5200 to photograph. There were a couple of really good cosplayers dressed as Red (Transistor), an absolutely spectacular Garren (League of Legends) and even a Goat Simulator costume!

I managed to get a couple of photos of a fantastic Pyro and Sniper (TF2), and even a group dressed as Lemmings!

Awesome Pyro and Sniper cosplayers who were awesome enough to pose for photos.

Lemmings :D

The whole event was a blast from start to finish. I met a lot of incredible, friendly people, caught up with friends from the dev community who I hadn't seen in years, and even made a few more connections with some seriously cool personalities.

Highlights at the con itself were catching up with some of the AIE guys who I hadn't seen since graduation in 2010 (go check them out at the AIE website!), a fantastic final round for the Omegathon (they played Combat!), and the amazing Enforcers (who were the life of the party when we were waiting between panels)

Combat was played for the last round of the Omegathon.

Even the queues came with games to play! (We dubbed this PAX ball. Show us your pics on Twitter with #AUSPAXBALL)

Now I'm back home missing PAX, but super psyched for next year. In the meantime, I came home with an awesome bag of loot to remind me of what an amazing adventure it was :)

More painting. The shield is starting to look decent.

Need to spend a lot of time on the hammer and the cloak now. Not sure what kind of metal I want to paint for the hammer head and chest emblem.

Painting practice on a broodlord; its a really nice model to work with.

I was rather lucky with it (being a finecast model) as there were no bubbles at all.

I'm still doing some research for how to highlight the chitin nicely without making it look too bright and cheery. The talons need a lot of work too.

I've started painting my shield-toting lone wolf. So far its looking decent, but once the highlights are done I'm hoping its going to look fantastic.

Big thanks to Hayden from Games Workshop Woden who has shown me an absolute ton about painting miniatures.

A new lone wolf. Potentially part of my conversion comp entry. Just need to see if I have a flying base long enough to take an unfortunate chaos marine getting slammed by that shield :3

The lone wolf is looking decent now that he's mostly together. I'm starting to see some real progress as the model comes together, but theres a lot of work left to do on the joins and the sword before I get to sculpting detail.

Something I've found is a good way to pass the time while glue/green stuff dries is to have a second project going side by side that I can switch to. Just started work on the neck muscles of my doombull.

In other news, some random doodling between calls / while on hold. Also below that, a sound reason why I should not be allowed to use MS Paint on my lunch break, EVER.

Hello world, long time no see!

Here's a quick dump of a small project I've been working on over the last few days.

Long time no login. I really need to grind my blogging skill, its still somewhere shy of 50/525. Since last post I've landed an epic job that's got me doing both programming and graphic design. Sadly the graphic design is all practical stuff, so there's nothing shiny to go posting all over the blog.

In other news the level is still underway slowly. Christmas kinda threw a wrench in the whole thing when the guy I was working with went down south to spend some time with the family. Gave me a good opportunity to spend some time with my folks though. I don't seem to do that nearly enough apparanlty :P

Good news on the art front - the new job pays me enough that I managed to save for a Wacom Cintiq! Its the handiest thing I ever purchased for my computer, and speaking of which, I'm writing these days from a laptop which is hilariously more powerful than my ageing old desktop.

In games, I've been playing a fair bit of Skyrim in between gearing my pallie on World of Warcraft. If your getting bored with the main storyline or finding the battles are all either curbstomps for you or your opponent, go grab some quests from the legion or stormcloaks. They both offer a good opportunity to level and fight something other than dragons or draugr. Alternately, the story for the Thieve's guild was great, and the Dark Brotherhood wasn't bad either.

I finally have time to do arty stuff again. Here's a dump of stuff I've been doing in the last however long -

Been a while since I last blogged. I've been mainly working retail to pay the bills and haven't really had time between shifts to make pretty stuff or do much coding. In the time I have had though I've broken into a whole new world of making games for android. Honestly I have to say eclipse has to be the nicest IDE I've used to date, even if getting the right installer and packages for android down the pipe was a little frustrating and more than a little painful on my bandwidth challenged connection. Deploying applications to my new phone is laughably simple too, with just a few clicks required to sign the application and export it fully functional. So far I've managed after a few hours of tinkering to get a full dump of my phone's system specs from my first app, and directly drawing to the screen from my second one. Working on getting moving objects at the moment and from there I've pretty much got the basic tools I need to make a game :D

On a tangent to smart phone development, I've noticed most phones these days either come stock with a QR code reader or have the ability to download one of numerous free readers off their native app stores. With that in mind I had a thought: why waste time getting people to read tiny writing on a business card when they can just scan a code and go straight to the source?

And hence my business QaRd was born.

Just a quick update on what I'm up to with the hover bot. I've thrown some basic colour on it, but so far most of my texturing work has gone into fiddling with the eye and the screen. Also I've been trawling the internet all day for stock textures.

Productive!

I've had a few days off and amongst the continued hunt for jobs have unwrapped my hover bot. I also spent a few minutes throwing together a Team Fortress 2-ish material with Fresnel and Ambient Occlusion affecting the diffuse map and the self illumination. Makes for some interesting rim lighting without creating an awkward over-exposed omni like we were taught :D

Heres a peek at how its going -

At the moment I'm working on a remake of my old beastman character from second year art at the AIE and a trippy hover bot. The beastman I was never really satisfied with the first time I worked on it as I ended up getting sidetracked with other assignments and such, not to mention the social aspect of AIE which was pretty persistant and waaaay too tempting (*cough*minecraft*cough*). So far I've been working on a bust to nut out its facial features before I work on a full body shot and then the model.

On the other hand the hover bot is the first part of a series of mobs I'm modelling for the game that ended up being our end of year assignment last year. When we initially drew up the designs for the game, I had a particular art direction in mind that I let go of pretty quickly for the sake of everyone having some showpieces for their reel they could be proud of and satisfied with.

Here's the two so far -

Had a good couple of days for sketching stuff, so here's some old and new things to check out. I'm particularly proud of my minotaur sketch which i hope to elaborate on in more drawings later.

So I've ordered this soundtrack off ebay and I'm totally psyched for it to arrive. Its the first time I've used the service and so far its been totally sweet. I love my vg soundtracks, especially older ones from the 80s/90s that I grew up with. Also there's this really good video on youtube about chiptunes that's well worth a watch.

In other news I've cancelled my World of Warcraft subscription as of yesterday which was a pretty hard step. I'm going to miss the game (oh god, i just lost the game >_>) but on the bright side it will give me more time to work on the important things. And spending more time with the loveliest girl in the world :P

For today's art dump, I have some minecraft skins I've been working on here and there over the past few weeks.

Hello world. I've been looking at different blogging sites on the web and decided to give tumblr a try. I guess I should start with a little bit about myself.

I'm a 3d artist in my early 20s living in Australia. I've always wanted to work on awesome games and dream of one day running my own games studio. While I originally wanted to work for a big company, over the course of my education I've become a bit disenchanted with the triple-a industry at large. Now instead I have set my sights on independent development instead (but would still drop everything for a job offer with some companies... <3 Blizzard and Valve :D).

At the moment I'm working regular jobs to make ends meet while juggling between learning to code and working on my art trying to make something cool that everyone can enjoy.

I enjoy playing games as well as making them. I've poured more than a few hours into World of Warcraft and Minecraft, as well as a copious amount of time into games like Iji, Cave Story, Sword of the Stars and every Pokemon game that releases. Not to mention I'm also a fan of War Machine/Hordes and still looking for a group to play Dungeons and Dragons again.

That's about all I can think of rambling on about at the moment so here's an art dump to get this started -