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