New Blog

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20,000 Leagues under the sea

Extras?

Comic book club mini comic

A pose/render practice

A mech study, from imagination

Just want to post a little someting i did on the side of the main project.

Interactive Narrative

Early design of Flints plane based on the Russian I-16

First sketch

We have been assigned a project in which we are to make an interactive narrative of some sort. My first idea was to make a comic, since I always wanted to make a comic. And the interactivity part will be some sort of a bonus. After a lot of initial ideas, raging from, dragons, airships, submarines, underwater exploration, scifi,  planes. I decided to go  with what i like drawing the most. Planes, because since it will be a comic, and i will be working on it for some time, I might as well enjoy it. The hardest part was coming up with a decent story. I knew i couldn't go too complicated. Since if I branched out with choices too much it would turn into a  giant cluster ball of death. and that would not be nice. So i definitely wanted to go simple.

loosely based on the WW2 J7W Japanese prototype

I knew my art style, I knew the basic setting, but I still had no idea about the narrative. So i decided to do what i usually do, and it works....sometimes...IMPROVISE.

Flint shows locke his found artefact 

I started with a concept sketch i had from the beginning of this project. It was to be the main characters plane. Ok so i had a main character idea. A pilot. An adventurer? possibly so i worked on my concept plane and turned it into an illustration. I was quite happy with the colors and overall look so I decided to  go with it and add some panels. so, there a story started to unfold. A pilot approaching a ship. Is it  his ship? what ship is it? what is he doing there? I just decided to go with it and improvise, make up all these questions as i go with the next panels.

Here are some early panels with no text, many of these changed later on

I was heavily inspired by the old game Crimson Skies, my all time favorite game.

Since I dont read comics that much I was not really inspired by any,so I  took inspiration from other sources like my favorite artists 
Jake Parker for example who uses very simple shapes in his vehicular designs. and very stylized technology. His art style can be most seen in my airship design. Basically I wanted to have fun with this project. Try out a slightly different style. Polish up my rendering technique. And finnaly make a comic, which I have always wanted to do. It is much more difficult than I thought. The process of coming up with a decent narrative was the hardest so far. It is clearly not my strong part. But in the end I think did pretty good. If there is one thing I have learned from this project. It is to go with the first idea that pops up in your head. I wasted so much time just thinking up different ideas and plots. But noone of them really worked so in the end i went with the first one i had.

Flint attacks the bandits, The enemies jet  bike design is supposto look sort of like a piranha/Troll

Flint and locke destroy one of the bandits, The turret is actually based on the B-17 turret

Creative Connections 2011

Last week (12-19th November) I participated in a Doddse Europe event called Creative Connections. It is an annual event in Oberwesel Germany where a group of 150 selected talented students from all over europe go for a week and participate in many different artistic activities raging from drawing classes to performing arts. I have attended this event for the last three years 2007-2010. While in SHAPE High Scho-l. Now my good friend and ex-art teacher Bill Root arranged my participation again, but this time as a staff assistant teacher. Here I would like to tell you more about my brand new learning experience.

Creative Connections takes place in a big youth hostel fitted with classrooms and seminar halls. For an entire day students attend their chosen class where they learn about different techniques and work on a number of projects. The finished work is than displayed at an exhibition.

I was an assistant to Weston Maggio, a digital imaging teacher and a Wacom tablet/Photoshop expert. My work consisted of helping out students with problems and questions, Helping out with getting their ideas out and making a quality digital poster. This proved to be very helpful for Weston since he could concentrate on teaching and lecturing and didn't have to be interrupted by little problems students might have. I also helped out around the hostel with computer related problems and at the exhibition I was in charge of the students that helped setting up the gallery. Me and a drawing class student also made a little colaboration, I used her pencil portrait of one fo the organizers and digitaly colored it in photoshop. At the end of the event we gave The portrait as a gift. Through out the week I was also asked to present my college work, And give students a presentation and lecture about getting into university and tips about making your portfolio. Also a small presentation about keeping a successful and productive sketchbook. I got some great feedback and many questions from the students after my two, hour long presentations.

Because of the romantic setting that CC is set in I decided to use some of the scenes as illustrations for my Zork re imagination. Oberwesel is a town on the Rhine river, A valley that is scattered with castles and interesting Bavarian locations. This proved to be a perfect setting for my Game. The youth hostel was right next to a beautiful medieval castle. I took lots of pictures and many are going to be used in my illustrations.

This week has given me so much, it was a wonderfull learning experience. Becasue attending an event that i was in back in the day as a student, and now going back as a teacher. It has given me a totaly different perspective, and a interesting view on a teachers life. And also waht goes behind the scenes of such event. After this week I am very much thinking about going into teaching after University. Even if I had a hard time getting used to speaking in front of people. I am sure practice will help. After I came up with an effective process it was really easy and very enjoyable to talk in front of people about something you love. I tried not to stick with any sort of guideline and just improvised and made up the order as I go. The students were very interested and asked lots of questions.

I really hope that I can come back next year. This was one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had. I learned so much but also gave a lot and served as a role model to many of the students.
After the event was over, I had a chance to talk with some of the teachers, Wes and Mr.root even suggested that next year if things go well, I could even teach a part fot he class myself. Which I am very exited about.

Pitch Concepts

Here is a few Concepts from my sketchbook, These are very rough and mainly just an initial visual idea of some of the characters. The Airships might make it into the final game possibly. The last image is a concept I did a few months back as my own side project. but I thought he might actually fit into the game really well as a character.

Zork: Lores of Boramia, Mock up cover art

First version/Final version

 This is a mock up cover page for the game, I thought that making the cover, or some sort of a theme based design will show how the game will look styleistickaly during the pitch. In the first version the font was too hard to read, The second one still isnt perfect but better. I also finnaly came up with a subtitle, Lores of Boravia. This title should be fitting since the game revolves around a legend and contains fantasy folkroles from the gameworld. Boravia is a made up kingdom, based on Moravia. Since the culture is based on the slavic culture. 

Doors

The main project this term was to create a 3d door in Maya. Since the directions of how the door is suppos to look like were rather free, I decided to go simple and creative. My image for this door was a ruined wall with an archway and a old wooden door inside it. It would not be attached to other doors rather a lone object possibly in the middle of a field or such. So a started working a rough concept in Photoshop. This was quite easy since i had a clear image in my head. The wall would be made of old stones and the archway would have runes engraved in it. This is what the first concept looked like:

The design looked good, and seemed easy to create as a 3d model, But i wasn't too happy with the wooden door itself, So I redesigned it, Gave it some Celtic knots and changed the main symbol on the archway. Now it was ready to be modelled. I didn't include a side view since i knew exactly how it would look from the side, plus the model is rather flat and the front is the most important.

Than I started modelling, It took a while to get used to the modeling techniques in Maya, but after a while it seemed natural and the model was coming along well. I took an approach as if I was building an actual stone wall/door from bottom up making each individual brick and placing them on top of each other.

After my door was finished and I was happy with it, I unfortunately found out that triangle polygons are going to cause problems when exporting to mud box, this was a problem since my door was filled with triangles. So instead of painstakingly removing the triangles i redid my entire door, making sure the brick contained no triangles.

Now that my model was ready. I had to go through the pain full task of UV mapping. But with the use of some very help full online tutorials, I managed to make this much easier for myself. Since I learned about the automatic projection option. This has helped me out greatly since i didn't have to go trough the "tetris" process. After that I brought my UV map to photoshop and started texturing, which was a surprisingly fun process and with the use of some high res textures it came out very nicely. Finally I added some details like the grass on the bottom of the stones and the platform which the door is sitting on. If I had more time I would have textured the platform itself as well, and added some details like little stones scattered around the door and making the model look like a miniature terrain for a fantasy board game. But overall am happy with the result.

Flash Game Dev - 5

This week the goal was to follow the set duedates and try and get as much done as possible. We had a discussion on how to get things moving faster. Since there is so few of us, am we cannot dedicate our fulltime to this project things have been getting rather slow. But I managed to finish up all of my ship sprites, plus try some animation. Shannon the made the first version of a possible theme tune. Zach created a wiki to put all of our ideas together, which made the whole project seem more tight. Alex started working on the tilesets for the islands. And Steve did a great mock up of the UI. This is all great, but its not like we have moved on much further from where we have been. One idea for geting things moving faster, is to imrove comunication between the team, So Zach has set up a group chat on mibbit.net where we can go whenever and chat as a group. After one session we have come up with a decent plot, and a story board for the first mission.

Making something so simple as a flash game, is much more time and thought consuming than one would think.