Monday 8 December 2014

Honours Update - Uni Work

I've been very busy with my Uni Games Design honours project lately. My project is a "Diner in the Desert" and I've now finished 3D modelling the modular architectural pieces for the most important part - the diner itself!

Check out the board below for some pictures.










Thursday 13 November 2014

Game Design Honours Project!

I'm now 2 months into my 3rd and final year of my Games Design degree at UCLan. We've got 3 modules this year; our "Honours", which is a project of our own choosing, "Games Proposal", in which we have to concept a full game and create a pitch document, and "Futures", which looks at research methods and self-marketing.

For my Honours, I'm doing a 3D environment of a "Diner in the Desert".
Here are a few pictures of my work so far.




I've also made myself a website that you can visit here!

Saturday 11 October 2014

A couple of new tracks + EP update - Music


I've been working on a lot of music lately and have recently finished two new tracks. The first is a remix of Katy Perry's Dark Horse. It's a chilled electronic track with distant reverbed piano, fat bass, ambient breakdowns and intense buildups. It's reached over 100 plays in about 2 months which I'm very happy about!


The 2nd track is called The Casa and is a short-and-sweet blast of drum 'n' bass / electronic rock, with a guitar solo and samples of tracks by Chance The Rapper and Dance Gavin Dance.


Finally, I've also been working on some music for my EP entitled "Work//Flow". It's going to be 5 tracks of my own brand of electronic rock-meets-drum 'n' bass. Coming soooon.

Wednesday 10 September 2014

German Stick Grenade - Game Design Work

Today I finished another 3D model for my WW1 objects project. It's a stick grenade - or Stielhandgranate - which was used extensively by the German army throughout both World Wars, and has since become one of the most recognisable infantry weapons of these conflicts.

I was looking forward to doing this one. Because of how iconic it is, I felt that I simply couldn't not include it. I think that it's gone very well and I'm especially proud of the wood texture. As always, I used Maya to model it and Photoshop to create the textures (diffuse, normal and specular).

Here's some pictures:





In other news, I start back at Uni in a couple of weeks and I'm thinking about specialising in 3D modelling and prop design. This will be my 3rd year, so I should have plenty to post about :)

Sunday 17 August 2014

WW1 Brodie Helmet - Game Design Work

At long last, I've finished another 3D model for my WW1-themed project! It's a Brodie helmet which was the standard issue helmet worn by many Allied armies, including the Brits and Americans. This is only the second 3D model that I've completed for this project and I already feel that I've expanded my knowledge of Maya and Photoshop quite a lot. I've also learned a bit about the war, which is cool!

Here's the final presentation shots of my Brodie helmet.




My next 3D model will probably be the famous "stick grenade" used by the German army.


Tuesday 22 July 2014

My Trench Knife is Finished! - Game Design Work

Last week I started work on a 3D model of a WW1 US Army trench knife, which you can read about in my previous post - and today I finished it! It was modelled in Maya and textured in Photoshop, complete with Normal and Specular maps. Overall it took about 10 hours over the space of a few days.

Here's the final presentation shots and technical info:




This is part of my WW1 objects project, I plan on making a few more WW1 themed 3D models in the next few days if I get chance.

Thursday 17 July 2014

World War 1 Trench Knife - Game Design Work!

This week I started work on an independent game design project; I'm using Maya to create some 3D models of various World War 1 objects, as my own way of commemorating the 100th anniversary of the war. The first 3D model I'm doing is an M1918 Trench Knife which was used by the US Army towards the end of the war. It's not finished yet, I've got to make some changes to the model and then texture it.

Here's some pictures of how it's looking now.




After this model is completed I'm thinking of doing the signature WW1 British helmet and maybe a German stick-grenade, amongst other things.

Friday 13 June 2014

Garage Scene (Work in Progress)

So I finished my 2nd year as a Games Design student at UCLan a few weeks ago now, and even though I only just passed, I'm happy with how this year has gone. I go into my final year in September and it's gonna be a difficult year, so I decided that instead of just go straight home for the Summer, I would stick around at Uni for a bit and do some independent work in preparation for 3rd year.

I chose to do an environment because I plan to specialise in environment art and 3D modelling in my 3rd year. My plan was to make a small, simple environment, that I would try and fill with as much atmosphere and interesting stuff as possible. I decided on a mechanics garage.

Unfortunately I didn't manage to finish the full scene before going home for Summer, but I did get a fair bit done and I've gained a hell of a lot of knowledge in the process. Staying these few extra weeks has definitely been worth it and I'm excited to come back for my final year.

Anyway, here's a few screenshots of my garage scene as it stands now!






and finally, a high quality render of the desktop props...


This environment is now on hold and I'll continue working on it when I come back to Uni in September


Tuesday 10 June 2014

New Denim Kid Logos!

This week I finally got round to creating some logos for my Soundcloud page! This is the first step in my plan to try and get the ball rolling for myself as a producer over the Summer. I made the logos in Photoshop. They are fairly simple; plain block capitals with various pictures that I took showing through.

I did banners and square logos in a load of different picture and colour combos.


Banners:



Square Logos:


I'm currently working on a few new tracks that I hope to upload soon!

Friday 11 April 2014

"Withdrawal" Level Design Project - Uni Work

Our latest Uni project has been a group project to create a game level lasting 6-9 minutes for use with the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. This has been a huge project that we've been working on for a couple of months and it's coming along nicely. It's involved more work than any other project and has called on all of our skills including 3D modelling, level design, digital painting, level building and scripting.

We've achieved a lot so far but there's still a lot to do. Here's some progress pictures.






Friday 21 March 2014

This Week at Uni - Character Designs!

Super busy week this week, the submission of our character design module, which at first seemed miles off, suddenly snuck up, so everyone was freaking out and smashing out character designs, including myself.

I've posted some pictures of one of my character designs in previous posts, this one is now done:

 
We also had two other projects. One of them was to create two characters, a tank and a soldier, who belonged to a "visual family", meaning that they look like they could belong in the same "universe"/game. This one took a hell of a lot of time and late nights and is probably my favourite piece that I produced for this project. It was partially inspired by the Pacific and Band of Brothers series with a pinch of post-apocalypse included.


Finally, I have a picture that is currently unfinished but I'm going to return to it and try and boost my mark at a later date. This one is of a "cannon fodder" character - generally the most common type of enemy, that you see (and kill) a lot of in a game. I went for a more comedic approach to this one, playing on the cannon fodder idea. It's a zombie being tricked into stepping on a land mine. It's far from finished but I thought I'd post it anyway.




Friday 21 February 2014

This Week's Work

This week at Uni was spent working on a new project. This involves two out of three of our study modules and we've got six weeks to do it, so it's pretty big. Basically we have to pair up and use Maya and UDK to create a level, from scratch, that provides 6-9 minutes of gameplay. Eventually this will result in the most complete "game" we've made thus for on the course. We're also being paired with music students for this project to create a soundtrack which is going to be pretty exciting.

With that said, I don't actually have much to show for it yet because we're still in the idea generation and concept stages. I spent all of Thursday using UDK and learning how to script events. Here's a screencap that I took of a script in which the player has to activate 3 switches to make a door open to give an idea of how complicated this is.....


I also did a bit more work on my vampire hunter concept art that I've been posting for the past couple of weeks. Here's how it's looking now....


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Finally, I also did a bit of music. I've entered a competition to remix a track by Hans Zimmer. The prize is a job as a composer in America, which I don't expect to win of course but it was a lot of fun to do and I learned a bit about composing while I was it. It was originally an orchestral track and I took a few separate instruments from it and added some guitar to make it sound as unique as possible.






Friday 14 February 2014

This Week at Uni - Vampire Hunter development and Tile Texture

Not an awful lot to post this week as I've just been powering on through the projects that I mentioned in last week's post.

Firstly here's the latest version of my Vampire Hunter concept art for my character design module. I've cleaned up the character and reigned in the lines a bit to make it a bit neater. I've also started to further develop smaller areas, like weapons, accessories etc and started to develop lighting effects. A few more hours work and it should be done!


I've also finished the second of my high quality textures, which was pretty rushed but I'm fairly happy with how it's turned out.


That's all for this week!