All posts tagged Work

Dust Bowl Disciples

 Martin · 9 years

If you've ever looked through my album of drawings for the Year of Art 2011 project, you might recognize one of the illustrations used in the Los Angeles Coalition for Water Conservation (LACWC)'s new campaign, Dustbowl Disciples.

46 seconds into the video they produced, you'll see this:

And that should look pretty familiar - here's drawing #150 from the Year of Art 2011, appropriately titled 'Dry Mouth':

Some of the people who worked on the Dustbowl Disciples project were kind enough to reach out to me about using the artwork, and I was happy to help. I re-drew this illustration for them, providing a much cleaner vector version!

I wrote this post with the intent of highlighting the use of one of my illustrations, but I'll close it by saying that if you've got a project which requires illustrations (new or existing), do get in touch with me using my contact form. I'm almost always up for work like this!

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Making of an Image Mask

 Martin · 11 years

I was working on a somewhat complicated image mask of a motocross rider the other day at work. Whenever I work on complicated things like this, I try to save every few minutes to make sure that if Photoshop crashes, I don't lose much of my work. When I was done, I had a short progression of images that showed my progress as I made the mask, and I thought it'd make a neat animation. Check it out:

In case you're not into computer graphics, an image mask is a special bit of extra data attached to a layer of graphics, represented in grayscale, where black represents total transparency, white represents total opacity, and the values in between make up the range from transparent to opaque. Basically, it's a way to tell Photoshop (or other image editors) where you should be able to see through parts of an image. Masking is obviously a very important part of working with computer graphics.

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Creating Items for Team Fortress 2/Steam Workshop

 Martin · 11 years

I've recently been dabbling in creating items for Team Fortress 2, via Valve's Steam Workshop feature.

If you've never heard of Workshop, it is a system Valve integrated into Steam where people, outside of the official game development teams, can create assets for use in-game and submit them for community vetting / approval. The respective game's dev team then gets to choose from the crop of community-crafted items to add to their games and usually, to sell as micro-transaction DLC, for which the original creator of the item is compensated.

It's an interesting thing, to say the least. Especially for people like me, who are already interested in creating 3D models and who already play many of the games which participate.

So anyway, I've been trying my hand at making a few items for Team Fortress 2, and so far, so good, I think. As of now, I've created four items, and with each one I feel like I've learned a lot of new stuff about the process, and about being more efficient with the process. So much so that I suspect that I could (and probably should) go back into the original files at some point and update them to include all the things that I have learned. We'll see though.

That's all for now... If you want to check out my Steam Workshop items, check them out here. I'd appreciate an upvote or two!

3d modelingdesigngraphicssteamteam fortress 2workworkshop
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