Project Rain Final Project Finished

Finishing up college! Happy to achieve my goal of not only producing a 1 minute film, but turning it into a playable game. This was an ambitious project to go solo but it provided me with valuable experiences.

Like I mentioned in the previous post, check out projectraindev.blogspot.ca to view more about this project.

Since I'm graduating with an animation degree I'm pretty much done with institutional schools and ready for work as a 3D environment artist/modeler. Video game projects are my primary focus, however I am open to opportunities in animation, VFX, arch-viz or other interesting industries using 3D technology in innovative ways. Here's my portfolio website: http://dariksmith.com/

And here's some screenshots along with my student film/gameplay recording. Produced in Unreal Engine 4

Project Rain Development Blog

I made a separate blog for my final project as a place to organize all the art. Here's the link. http://projectraindev.blogspot.ca/

Since I've been animating and working on the game mechanics for the past few weeks, not much new art. But the next couple of months will be exclusive art mode. The models are pretty much all blocked in, but have lots of cleaning up to do!

Here's some concept art of the detective's office. The 3D version of this enviro is intended to be used in the main menu:

City Hall Concept Art

This is a more updated concept art piece for a the UDK environment I'm creating for the action analysis assignment. Next step is to really get into the 3D aspects.

Polycount thread: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=127465

 

 

Helmet Model

Helmet modeled in Maya/Zbrush, rendered in Keyshot. First time doing hard surface modeling in zbrush, so much fun!

Gotta give props to these artists for sharing their tips:
ZBrush @ SIGGRAPH 2013 Recap

Action Analysis Concept Art

This is some concept art for my major project this semester. I didn't get to finish all the designs I wanted, but this is what I have for now. I'll update this post as I finish the rest of the designs.

Dragon

Haven't updated this blog in a while cause last time I had an issue. Whenever I uploaded an image, blogger messed up the colors. It seems to be fixed now so gonna update more.

Painted this for my mother a while ago. There's going to be a bigger update later in the week for my current project so stay tuned!

Forest

Just a new environment painting inspired by sketching adventures.

Weekly Challenge 2: Urban

Struggled a lot with this one! It's easy to get lost rendering and lose sense of the graphic shapes. Hopefully doing more traditional studies will help.

The thumbnail sketches:

Weekly Challenge 1: Bloody Mary

Two of my school buddies, Jerome and Khoebe wanted to do weekly concept challenge for the summer. I decided to join. It was fun painting this character, but I need to develop my concepts further before rendering.

Dredd

Leather study turned into Judge Dredd fan art.

Bike Study

I enjoy painting motorcycles.

3D Village

While this environment is extremely simple and primitive, I learned a lot about UVing and creating tillable textures. While this is rendered in Maya Viewport 2.0, I was able to import the models in UDK. The next challenge is a study of realistic materials and vertex painting. Environment art is so much fun, but a lot of work and planning!

Finished Character + Designs

I finished this model weeks ago, but I'm doing a massive art dump today, so thought I would show the final and the thumbnail designs/ turn around sheet. The character is part of a collab project I will reveal later when some more progress is made. It's pretty exciting because this was my first real collab project and I learned a lot about storytelling, design, 3D, taking on leadership/ mentoring role and a bunch of other stuff. It didn't go as smoothly as it could have since school is intense, but I'm proud what we created so far and I'm excited to work on some new stuff in the summer.

I did the initial designs shown here, but my friend made the final design which I drew as an ortho and modeled 100% in maya by myself with texturing handpainted in Zbrush/Photoshop.

Daily Sketching Experiment

This week I challenged myself to do a sketch a day. I succeeded and it was a lot of fun! Unfortunately I  can't keep it up for the entire semester because there's still a lot of 3D to learn and produce, plus this semester is going to be big for working on painting/layout. At least I got some experimentation out of the way and I learned anything is possible if you have time + sacrifice everything else in the present moment to get it done. A valuable lesson which can be applied anywhere.