Here's the final of the poster I made for one of my ex-coworkers, who is at the 49ers/Seahawks game on Thanksgiving. Maybe they'll get it on TV!
Either way, you can enjoy it here now.
Here's another status update on what I'm calling "Parks" for now, a low poly art project I'm playing around with.
After a little more work, here's the final set of portraits to be used for the football sign I mentioned in the previous post. For any 49ers fans out there, do these guys look recognizable to you?
One of my former coworkers at CytoSport commissioned me (with beer) to create an illustrated sign for her for an upcoming 49ers game. Here's a work-in-progress image of some of the player portraits for the image.
This is another graphic I created for a podcast I frequently listen to, this time for How Did This Get Made? You'd have to listen to the Monkey Shines episode to get the full context for this graphic, but I recommend it - it's a great podcast all around.
This image was created as an idea for a t-shirt graphic and was unsolicited.
This was a graphic I created for one of my favorite podcasts of the moment, Matt & Mattingly's Ice Cream Social. The quote at the bottom of the graphic is a quote from the show.
I created this unsolicited and sent them the artwork when I was finished. I hope they use it for something fun!
This is a quick render of a Blend file I've been playing around with in my spare time recently. I was feeling inspired after seeing a simple landscape painting at one of my wife's relative's houses.
The idea I'm pursuing with this project is to organically add things to the scene as I see fit. I'm keeping everything to a relative scale, but not worrying much about keeping things on the grid or being precise about placement.
I'll post more later as I continue!
When I create WordPress themes for my website, I usually add a silly screenshot, so when I view all the installed themes in the back end of the site, I can tell which is which easily. This is the image I created for the current theme (2014). Enjoy!
I'm not sure if many people (or anyone!) noticed, but I recently updated this website to have a more modern look, and to better represent the work I've done over the last few years.
So far, so good, I think. I like the way everything looks and functions, and in terms of updating old content, I'm about 95% there. As of this writing, all that's really left to do is update my "techniques" page, and maybe update some of my old GameMaker examples/tutorials to GameMaker: Studio.
Speaking of GameMaker, part of the site changeover had me going back and reviewing a lot of the old art and games I've produced, and that got me feeling nostalgic- particularly the part where I went through all of my old GameMaker Community forum avatars. That really took me back and got me thinking about all the fun I had at the GMC back then. The personalities of that place! The goofy games everyone made! The strict rules of the forum! Ah, man.
I created my first big game, Hover Tank 3D, and released it on the GameMaker Community in January 2006. I had spent the better part of 2005 working on that game in my spare time. I even briefly gave up on it at one point when the online system I was using, which depended on another user's web service, suddenly stopped working, and I was faced with taking the entire multiplayer portion of the game back to the drawing board.
During the time I created Hover Tank 3D, I had a really crummy job. Well, maybe it wasn't that bad, but the pay was terrible. One of the perks of the job was that my boss would let us skip lunch and then go home early, so I got quite used to going home early and having an extended afternoon of game dev. And even though things are a lot better now than they were then, I do still look back on the amount of time I had to devote to my game development efforts with a little bit of envy.
I have gotten to load up some of my old projects in GameMaker: Studio lately, and after finagling with them to make them work in the newer version of the program, it's been fun seeing them come to life again. I have an idea about merging the new physics engine with a game like Hover Tank 3D to make something a little more accurate than the old game... but we'll see if I can find the time to put it together. In the meantime, it's been fun remembering all the fun of the past.
Anyway, if you do happen to read my blog occasionally, and you've come back to check out the new design, I hope you like it, and thanks for reading. And if you have any fun stories about the old days of the GMC, feel free to post them in the comments. I'd love to hear them!
Though I don't personally use Google+ much, my current job requires the use of Hangouts, so I jump on from time to time to chat with my boss. During some of these visits, I've occasionally added people and organizations to follow there, just so the "wall" isn't quite so boring.
The other day, one of the posts that appeared highlighted the release of a newly open-sourced rendering engine that is compatible with Blender, called Nox. I've never used Nox, and I'm not sure if I plan to yet, but they had posted a test image of a three-ringed torus with a wood texture, and I liked the look of the material they'd created:
Since I've been freelancing, I've used Blender's own Cycles rendering engine quite a bit, and I've gotten really fond of the node-based shader system it employs. I thought this might be a good opportunity to test my skills with Cycles, to try my hand at recreating the wood material from this render.
I got a basic scene with a curve-based torus shape, backdrop, light, and camera set up, then grabbed a wood texture from Good Textures, did a little bit of Photoshop work to make it more seamless, and got to editing nodes. Here's what the basic scene looks like in wireframe:
After spending some time getting colors right, utilizing the details of the texture for bumps and specular highlighting, this is what I came up with:
My torus is a little chunkier than the Nox torus, but I like it like that. It feels sturdy to me.
Although I'm happy with where I got with this texture, I didn't get it quite the same as the Nox render. The shiny highlights just aren't there yet. It's a good start though, I think.