Combat Flight Simulator IV

This is about one year of work completely consolidated into one picture. Each plane was meticulously modeled down to the pitch of the propeller blade. There were three sources for these planes: a vendor out of Salt Lake City called Zygote, older versions from CFS3, and myself. I remodeled many of the details on the planes from the vendor and older versions to bring them up to the quality we were trying to achieve...about 40% on each plane. A couple planes required entire overhauls like the JU-88. Man, those were fun objects to model...loved that project.

Blast from the past...

I scoured through some old project hard drives and found all the directories of the outsourced vendor work I managed when I was at Microsoft. There are THOUSANDS of buildings...this is a small fraction cobbled together in a collage. Mostly Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong and a few randoms. These are all in-game screenshots proving that the specular and normal maps are working..that's why there's a hotspot on most of the images.

Latest improvements...

I showed this to a mentor of mine, Scott Wells. He's a Sr. Character Artist working on the latest and greatest Call of Duty characters. He had all sorts of suggestions to improve the quality and realism...things I hadn't even thought of. I'm feeling extremely grateful to have people like Scott willing to help me improve...it's a great feeling.

Japanese sculpt

I used to work with a guy named Woonam Kim.....he was from S. Korea and is a true Renaissance man. Former special forces officer in the ROK Army. Asian Literature scholar as well as a marathon runner. Did I mention black belt in numerous martial arts disciplines? Finished his Master of Fine Arts in Animation at Cal Arts in the early 'oughts and now has eight or nine Hollywood movie credits to his name.
We were talking about the Asian face one day and the differences between Malaysians and Phillipinos and Koreans. I asked him what he thought about the differences between Caucasians and he famously retorted "I don't know...all white people look the same to me anyways..." I laughed and have always remembered that comment...what a perfect counter statement to the usual western perspective.

Just thought I'd tell you about Woonam because he has nothing to do with this Japanese character I'm making. I'm only one day into this so far...at level 5 on the face. I modeled it in Max which took about three days for the head and whole body. I went a little nuts on the shoes and pants...but hey, why not....there's good detail in there.