Pixelling and teaching

Pixelled up a little baby dragon for a friend, and started animating it (not done yet, gonna add some movement to the head, probably a nostril flare as well):



"But I want a BIG ONE!"

I think I'll go pull my hair out now.

...

Timelapse of the unicorn speedpaint

...

Spending most of the night hammering away at the keyboard, giving art lessons of sorts to a fairly enthusiastic 14-year-old has reminded me how upset I was at watching two potential teaching gigs in less than two years go up in smoke, through no fault of my own, and of how satisfying it is to see (metaphorically speaking, in this case) that wild-eyed enthusiasm of someone eager to learn, lapping up whatever knowledge you can impart. Maybe I should consider taking my friend up on teaching game art at a local technical school. Pay's pretty shit, though, and I dunno if I want to teach fulltime. There's also the fact that from what I hear, the current faculty is, for the most part, pretty shit at their jobs, and political infighting is rife. :\

Then again, maybe the joy and satisfaction of imparting knowledge to the young'uns, in topics I know and love, might be enough to trump those factors.

Maybe.

Argh.

Unicorn

Yay, did a speedpaint. Felt nice to just paint for an hour or so, without worrying about UVs, seams, texel density, etc. (click for larger, 800x5-something)

Millionaire Tycoon Bastard

Kiss the ring, bitch.



I'll finish him up eventually (maybe do another variant or two while I'm at it), but I was itching to get back to the DS project (I gotta come up with a working title at some point).

Started putting together a test environment, just to get a better idea of the sort of per-frame polycount I can expect to be dealing with. The terrain is a hopeful at the moment, and whether the final product will be triangulated depends on whether the DS hardware will consider a non-planar quad as a quad, or a pair of tris (if the former, it'll help just that little bit with the DS' 2048 poly limit).

Did up a 2-storey (plus rooftop deck) house that's currently not very practical. I'll be adding rooms and whatnot soon enough. Currently the [vastly incomplete] scene stands at about 1250 tris (though mostly in quads, which will give me more leeway with the DS poly limit), and with occlusion and backface culling, between 500-700 tris (mind you, only a portion of the scene will be visible in gameplay, or so the plan goes).

A silly anigif showing the floors:

More DS Stuff

Redneck resistance?


More mix n match fun (less redneck, more merc!):


And took a break today to reskin the big chunky bastard. Still WIP:


Probably gonna work on some tilesets for the DS game tomorrow.

Shanghai!

Looks like I may be hitting Shanghai sometime soonish (emphasis on "ish"). The MB/CA.org workshop is now no longer set for Florence (that's been pushed to next year) but Shanghai. As long as it doesn't fall on the second week of June, I'm good to go. Woohoo.

More DS fun

Started off creating some art assets and making notes about gameplay mechanics for a game I intend to ultimately put together for the DS. Still a ways off, since I need to kidnap a DS programmer, but things are looking promising. I've got a buddy who's already helping me out with art assets as well as suggestions on gameplay mechanics and controls, and another buddy who may hop on board to help with concepts (this would rock hard, since he's an awesome concept artist and illustrator).

It's been interesting so far, since I've set myself some fairly ridiculous technical limitations due to the genre of the game, along with the rather limited horsepower available to the DS. Hence, characters that range from 100 to 150 triangles, including optional bits like pouches, etc. Swappable body parts are in, though, which should help with variety. Textures are fucking tiiiny, at a total of 64x64 per character, split up into various maps, but I've also unwrapped the humans in such a way that they can pretty much share textures if need be.

Less talk, more pimp:

Wires


First texture set is a bit of an homage (still wip). Note that both male and female models are sharing exactly the same texture


Then I went off and got myself a little sidetracked, lol (also wip)


edit:
And some mix n match testing with the textures from above (I knew I had a good reason for splitting up the mesh and textures!)

Random stuff... and phuket(?)!

A couple of thumbs, trying to come up with a style/mood for some characters for a personal DS homebrew project.



Pretty much finished up my self portrait thing:







I suppose I should probably try and get a simple environment done up for the models so far (Big Chunky Bastard, Fiat500, self portrait)...

A baby tiger, loosely-reffed:



A buddy of mine is using my Big Chunky Bastard for animation practise:
General dicking about
Sparring (with himself)

And, might be off to phuket for a few days next weekend, tentatively set at Thursday to Monday. Woohoo, should be awesome; the place looks absolutely gorgeous, and I finally get to check it off my list of places to visit.

Even more pimpage

Haven't actually sketched/painted anything in a while, so it was somewhat refreshing to get pressured into doing just that to cheer someone up. "Make an anime/manga me!"

shit, I don't /do/ anime/manga!

And hence, this turned out more Betty Boop than anime/manga:





"Fairies!"

Sketching in msn can really suck sometimes:



So I switched back to PS, and riffed something up that I'm pretty happy with, and may actually bring to a more finished stage. At the very least I'll finish slapping on the colors and do a simple background. If I'm happy enough with it, I may go further and do a proper illo out of it.





And of course, managed to sink some time into the lowpoly me. Sloooooowly getting there.

Yet more pimpage

Something a little more poly heavy this time, somewhat of a self-portrait, psp-ish spec. 1010 tris including the accessories, 256x256 for the main texture, 128x128 for the bag, 128x64 for the hair, and 64x16 for the shades (the texture sizes may change as I get to work on each of them).

psp-ish sized render, 100% self-illum, just getting started on the main texture:

New pimpage

Finished up the Fiat. 192 tris includes the 1-quad shadow.



And a shot with monochrome vert lighting:



Shit this stuff is fun.