Latest skin I did for League of Legends, Nami Koi! Model and textures by myself, effects and presentation by Riot Games.

   Made several of the Shadow Ward totems for a recent League of Legends update (backgrounds and effects by Riot Games)

Work in progress, started as a lunch sculpt. Would like to redo his lips, touch up the ears and refine the clothing.

Wip of an idea I had for an air-pirate crew member. Would like to finish this guy up!

Rough concepts for an in-house project, Valkyrie Entertainment 2010:

Valkyrie Entertainment work from 2011:

Modeled/Textured rocky mounds for Forza 4, Sedona Raceway.

Modeled/Textured turret for Hi-Rez Studio's Tribes: Ascend.

Modeled/Textured game-res Mortar Launcher for Tribes: Ascend. (video below)

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A lot of people ask me which skins/characters I've worked on for League of Legends, and I can never remember the names. Well, here's a visual close-up of the released skins I've worked on.

Would like to point out that all models are unlit with "Flat" lighting. All lighting is painted into the Diffuse texture.

3d interactive Model Viewer:

Katarina Cat

Ionian Master Yi

Barbarian Sion

Oni Shen

Agent Miss Fortune

Karate Kennen

Safari Caitlyn

Brand Vandal

the river

The days have blurred, the stairs have descended. I wake deep in somber dreams to the bright tease of promise. Stuck in the rut. Will get out, must get out.

Axe thing

Started modeling some axe from WoW. I know nothing about WoW... (anymore). But the concepts are tasty. Excited to finish the game res version of this, get all that awesome dirt and AO on it.

Original concept here.

"And your eyes shine, just like mine.."

Been really really busy, about to move again. Found this lil guy sitting on my desktop and did a quick paint over of my model. Kinda looking Tron influenced, but naw, he just needed more doodads. I suppose it's a current-gen take on Megaman. Must somehow find the time to finish this.

Who's this lil guy?

Started this at work a little bit ago, we'll see how it goes.

Jetpack almost done

This is the Jet-pack and Shoulder-pads to 90% completion. The Jet-pack came out to be 3690 tris, and occupies about 35% of a 1024x1024 normal and AO map. It's considerably higher poly than I intended, but this will be the closest model in the player's vision, something they'll be looking at a lot! So it's gotta look good right? So I took a hit on the boots.

This was the concept I was given for modeling the jetpack. Some adjustments had to be made to fit the shape of the character.

The excess polygons nearing the middle of the model were to avoid smoothing issues with the normal map baking. I should have used smoothing groups to fix this problem, but I'm in the habbit of adding extra geometry at work, because the Unreal Engine prefers extra geometry over smoothing groups any day!

Here's the texture map it sits on. It's shared with the boots, shoulder-pads, and radar upgrades. I left some room for a further upgrade I need to do, if I'm able to get to it. I'd really like to texture the diffuse and dirty it up a little, but time will be tight. I need to move on to a new enemy in the game.

Jetpackin

I think I'm going to start taking random screenshots of my work-in-progress stuff.

This is a sub-D model for Ava's jetpack upgrade. My goal is to get the low poly down to 2800 polys without losing the detail. Let's see how that goes.

Bob's Pizzeria

Was organizing my schoolwork and bumped into this one. This was a scene I did last year for an intro to Maya assignment. I remember wanting to make it a Pizza-bar for Air Pirates. Not sure that entirely came through but it was a lot of fun.


We were asked to take this room and turn it into something with a theme. I kept the stairs and entry way, and added a window peaking into the restaurant.

The rest of the room was populated with several tables and lamps as if it were an outside eating area.

In the end we were asked to create proxies out of all the low polys, and convert them into detailed high poly models. Then we were supposed to bake them into normal maps. It was a little confusing because this was our first experience in Maya, and normal mapping at the same time. I think in the end I only did normal maps on the chairs and tables. The bump on the walls was created with Nvidia Tools in Photoshop.

Unreal 3 Engine - Trees

I was messing around in the Unreal Development Kit today, and I noticed it comes packaged with a program called Speed Tree. I was curious to see how this works because lately in our game, we've been having a tough time figuring out how to model lowpoly trees. Well it looks like Epic billboards their leaves, and uses 8-bit alpha channels to blend the leaves together.

Skitzo Dancer

This is a simple animation I did for Justice's Remix of Skitzo Dancer. It was my first animation in After Effects and now I have all sorts of ideas for crazy music video ideas. I've received some nice compliments on this one but I gotta say, it only looks decent because of the motion blur, and my knack for timing due to all those hours spent playing japanese Music/Rhythm games XD

HMS Terror Project

This is a painting I did for concept art class. I spent about 2 hours on thumbnails, 2 hours on research, 6 hours on a failed attempt to model several ships and paint over the turn arounds, about 10 hours for 3 colored compositions.

The project lasted 5 weeks and the total time spent on the above image was about 15 hours. The final image was based on two classes of feedback, and the engine was a photo that I modified and paint-over to save time (something we were encouraged to do).



Above are just a couple images of the process. I end up going with the purple color scheme, but changed the composition to highlight the details of the ship.

Modeling Process

So after several creature models, I think I've finally came up with a sound pipeline for getting them done quickly. I'm posting this here because I think a lot of student character modelers who may (or may not) be reading this, have no idea about the alternatives to polygon modeling, and albeit, I think it's a much quicker one.

(Low Poly with Normal, Diffuse, and Specular)

Here's my process:

1. 3ds Max - Block the model in using simple box extrusions
- It can look like crap here. Just make sure that it's entirely quads
- Note: A better way to do this is using Zbrush's Zspheres. But since I'm working in Mudbox, I believe this to be the best way

2. Mudbox - Import and subdivide the model for high-detail sculpting
- Sculpt to 90% completion
- Avoid texture detailing so you can start working on the lowpoly (for the animator)

*3. Topogun - Create a low poly mesh on top of the high-detail sculpt
- Consider your poly-count
- Use this opportunity to focus on clean edgeloops
- Topogun does all the modeling work for you :) Just focus on the topology
- Before exporting to Max, make sure the silhouette reads

(Above: Creature being retopologized in Topogun)

4. 3ds Max - Unwrap and Rig
- Create a quick simple rig to test your edgeloops
- Hand this file to the rigger or animator

5. 3ds Max - Bake Normals and Ambient Occlusion maps

6. Photoshop - Use maps to aid your texturing
This stage can go sort of two ways. You can either go back to your mudbox file and sculpt

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Pros: Intuitive. Removes the constraint of working within a polycount, and allows the artist to focus on sculpting rather than topology.

Cons: Animator does not have a test rig/model to work with until the Hi-Poly sculpt is 90% complete.


Links to the tools I use:
*Topogun - http://www.topogun.com
Xoliul Viewport Shader - http://www.laurenscorijn.com/viewportshader

Study of Kjartan from Sigur Ros. 15 min. Going to try and start a trend of speed painting every day, because I'm SUPER slow. I'm starting to use my swatch color wheel more like an actual color palette. So more blending and less hunting for colors. This went surprisingly faster than normal. Also I just realized I didn't draw a single line. . why can't i draw anymore V_V

Building Ava

Listening to: Ugly Casanova - Diamonds on the Face of Evil