Academy of Art University, Class of 2010

Imagine a room the size of a soccer field crammed with graduates poking each other in the eye with sharp cornered hats. The invite said the commencement ceremonies were supposed to start at 9:30am SHARP! We stood there like lemmings for 2.5 hours:



Here's the main event setting:



The MFA banner I walked in behind:



Doin' the perp walk:

About a third of the armor...

Created this armor with high res methods today....I'm doing it this way so the edges stay tight in zbrush and I won't lose any volume when I subdivide.

ART TEST!!! It's on...it's sooo on...

I was given an art test last week by a local game company. I'm working on it at night from roughly 8pm to 1am....in-between logging on to the Academy and seeing what my students are up to. I usually get around 3 or 4 questions a day so I answer those and then get busy with this character.

This is the female base form that goes underneath the armor. The game company in question would probably not appreciate me posting the concept art so WHAT I'm doing will have to remain under wraps. I'll describe the HOW instead.

About four evenings x four hours = 16 hours = two business days to model this. It's far too high poly right now...but I'm going to finish the modeling/sculpting and then dial down the triangles once I'm done with zbrush.

Caucasian sculpt

This is a sculpt for a garden variety, Caucasian, sporto-type. I sculpted the head in less than a day...about six hours. The pants and shirt took a full day.

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.