It's been a good long while since I've made a post here. Between working on my book blog, planning out my next writing projects, and my new day job, I haven't had a ton of time for random art projects. Over the weekend I managed to make time to try out a unique and weird new style that renders people as though they are made out of ribbons.

Overall I think the experiment is a success and I'll likely be using this style for some upcoming book covers.

2D Modular Environment

Since this project has been put on hold, I have decided to put up some of the images that I worked on for a side-scrolling adventure game. Our goal with the environments was to try and capture the level of detail seen in a Disney movie while still having the needed modularity of different. The result was hardly perfect, but this is also just the prototype for our concept.

Some of the More Notable Single Pieces

        

Some of the Larger Pieces:

Below you can see the various pieces all together in a visualization of the scene we hoped to create. You will noticed that some of the perspectives don't quite match up and there may be a couple of other things that do not look quite right. All that said, it's not a horrible environment and I learned a lot from painting the individual pieces.

Even if the project does not continue forward, I think I am pretty happy with this pass at creating a modular 2D environment that has a hand painted look. There is plenty that I can do better if I attempt to do this again, but this is a big step up from things that I did prior to this.

Learning Maya Part 1

During my time at SNHU, I learned to use a number of different programs including ZBrush, 3ds Max, CrazyBump, Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro, and game engines like Unity, Unreal, and Construct 2 (though Unity 5 is my favorite). Despite all that, I wanted to add another tool to my arsenal so I am trying to pick up Maya as well.

Why Maya? Well, as an aspiring game artist, I am seeing a lot of job postings asking for knowledge of Maya and I can't help but wonder if my not knowing it is hurting my chances of getting a job in the industry. Another strong motivator is that Maya LT is now a thing so learning to use this tool could open up a number of freelance or indie options for me. The sword below is my first project in this program which was made by following a tutorial by this YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/BrainPoof 

This isn't the most exciting or original design that I have worked on, but it's more of the new program that it was built in that I am happy about. Brain Poof's tutorials are some of the finest I have seen online and they seem to cover the complete game art pipeline within Maya including high res normal baking from the looks of what I have peeked ahead at.

At this point, I am only through the first 9 of some 40 + videos so I'm excited to continue this piece. I'm at the part where I have to unwrap it for texturing (which typically takes a while even in familiar programs) it so it may be a bit before this thing gets an update. There will be much more to come on this thing in the future.