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:

Film Noir Environment WIP

WIP screenshots from my noir environment.

Thesis Project Teaser

I ditched my original film concept "Spirit Asylum" and a few other ideas in favour of a film noir inspired detective story set in the 1920s. There were many personal, artistic and technical reasons to make this decision. It feels like everything we take for granted in the world these days is built upon those moments in history. I've already learned a lot of what I feel are fundamental skills from just basing my work in that time period. Authentic fantasy can come after studying history and reality.

Loving Marmoset Toolbag 2 for previewing/concept design and going to use Unreal Engine 4 to output the final product. Quixel Suite is amazing too! So glad these programs come out this year and so affordable because without them there's no way my art would look this good. I want to get the final look/feel as quick as possible. The title "Project Rain" is just temporary.

Going to be a fun year for sure! Hopefully this turns out decent and gives a good rep for Sheridan's 3D films.

 Early Environments (Maya Viewport 2.0):

 Early Character Test (Marmoset Toolbag 2/Zbrush)

Unreal Engine 4

Finally upgraded my PC and got Unreal Engine 4! This is just an experiment; raw game at the top, apply post camera effects and the bottom is just a Photoshop paintover. It's pretty amazing what you can do with the engine alone!

Experimenting with Modular Level Design

Recently I found a few useful Maya scripts to assist with level design/environment art. Since I prefer to concept my whole environment in Maya before dealing with the game engine, these scripts are great. They allow me to split my scenes, quickly swap out pieces and export the scene to UDK for testing important things like gameplay and scale.


The scripts are:
Ninja Asset
Ragnarok Exporter

I'm still using UDK until I can upgrade my computer. I hope there's a quick way of getting assets inside Unreal 4 too!


Here's what Ninja Asset looks like. I actually separate my Maya scene into different categories like Architecture, Organics, a folder for WIPs and a folder for kitbash testing scenes.

  Here are some of the assets I made for the project so far. Most of them aren't UV'd and the topology is messy, but I'm just testing these ideas out for level design purposes.



The following images are just some of the quick kitbashed scenes I made

Actually this environment is for my thesis film project so it's not thoughtlessly kit-bashed. Brought into UDK and lit with default night lighting. With this technique I find I can explore design a lot quicker than drawing it out actually because it's faster to duplicate a bunch of shapes around than to try getting the perspective correct in the drawings.

The only downside to this method is the results can be limiting depending on the pieces you have in your library, but you can always create more as you go. Since I'm doing this for concepting the pieces aren't all perfectly aligned to the grid either, although I try to align as many modules as possible because it'll probably be less of a headache later.

One things for sure though, I love Maya scripts. What would my life be like without them...

~

Custom Shape Technique

I have an interesting project in the works, planning to revamp my blog too, but it's going to take time to prepare my materials.

In the meantime I started using Sparth's custom shape tool technique for design. I love it because I have a hard time coming up with interesting shape language on my own, so this is a nice way to speed up the process. Didn't spend much time on any of these thumbnails, actually 80% of the time was spent making the shapes but I have around 100 of them now so it should last a while.

So stay tuned for exciting stuff!

Some zbrush environment sculpts. Always trying new things.

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

 

 

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.