Winter Break Master Post

Here are the pieces I posted in the character animation student gallery, each of these is based on a video game and most have commentary on the links right below the images.

Lost Woods

Brinstar

Dinosaur Land

End of Time

Worms

Sky Garden

Grand Prix

Mana Fortress

Whispy Woods

 Year 20XX

That Dam Level 

Boy and His Blob

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AND A BONUS ROUND! 

As a thanks for visiting my blog directly, here are the rest of the things I made over the month between semesters!

Purple Emptiness

Low Resolution

AAAAAAaaaaaand a random illustration commission:

Half-Blood Prince

A Cave and its Blob

This is really difficult to identify, it's an obscure way of showing an obscure game....

Boy and His Blob from the NES!

Whispy Woods

KIRBY! Cause I've had a fondness for Kirby for as long as I can remember! Based on Kirby's Dream Land, but really, every Kirby game has had this level.

The Mana Fortress

With each day comes a new lesson to learn. Today's lesson? Never put 50+ lights into a single Maya file that you're planning on rendering on your laptop....

So 2 hours of rendering just the normal render, and then another hour on the Occlusion layer, later and I have my final render!

Say hello to the Mana Fortress from Secret of Mana. I kind of invented the door, but the rest is pretty close to what's in the game.

That Dam Level

So this one was interesting. How do you design a composition for an underwater scene? Better yet, how do you LIGHT an underwater scene?! Both in terms of planning and then in terms of execution in Maya. I HAD NO IDEA WHAT THE ANSWERS WERE TO THESE QUESTIONS!

So I faked it. I went online looking for underwater lighting tutorials, and I found one that had me throw a ton of random switches to get the exact result the guy intended, but he never explained what I was doing, so I can go flip all those switches again, but it only gets me exactly what I had before, and if I change things the whole scene breaks. Basically? Useless tutorial. So I had to come up with my own way of doing underwater lighting, and hopefully it works....

Anyway, this is from one of the most infamous of all levels in the entire history of gaming. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1 for the NES, the underwater Dam level where you defuse all those @#$*ING BOMBS.

Grand Prix

Big Blue from F-Zero, reimagined into 3D, and thus given a half pipe to allow for the speeds present in that game.

Sky Garden Diptych

Look at me, doing a diptych! 

This one's a bit vague I think, but it deserves the extra attention of the diptych for being a piece from my favorite SNES game of my childhood. The game is Illusion of Gaia, and it was my favorite game for a very long time, and I'd still put it at the top of the list for the SNES system itself. The scene here is the Sky Garden, a memorable section of the game where you had to solve puzzles on both sides of these islands that were floating above the Nazca Plains (incidentally, this game is probably the only reason I actually know what the Nazca Plains are).

Worm-Infested Scenery

The sad part is that if you know me at all you probably don't need an explanation of what this is an image of...

Anyway, this is a generic island from Worms 1, based on the most iconic "Hell" theme. The island isn't any level in particular, and it's rendered in a way slightly more akin to how they're doing the concept art for Worms Revolution, but the theme was based entirely off of Worms 1.

uh.... yeah.... I'm still doing Worms fan art, 10 years after starting... I feel kind of ashamed... OH WELL! :D

Half Blood Prince

Character design work done for a friend based on his Pathfinder character. The details I got were that he was a half-orc noble warrior, who tried to be a professional fighter but kept getting his butt handed to him by better fighters. I tried to show his arrogance and his money, as well as to enhance his armor with several superfluous design elements that would make him look more important than he actually is, and that would get in the way should he actually try to fight in a real scenario.

Purple Emptiness

Alright, so when I did the remake of my old work, I did that one second. I'd first tried to do a different piece of mine from a similar time of my life, and from the same program. This is actually my favorite from those old works, and the one that got the most popular among my friends and family at the time. I'd tried to recreate it first, but failed utterly and moved on to try something else instead.

Well now I'm back, with more skill under my belt in using Maya and in working with the polygons to make them do what I want them to do without adding more vertices arbitrarily. So now, with new skills in my repertoire, I return to complete this recreation. Hopefully you guys will like it.

Year 20XX

Another low-poly, this time 'round based on the first level of Mega Man X.

7353 Tris.