Please Pardon Our Dust

Welcome visitors.

I have just hacked together an update to the "Reel" section of my website.
However, I have not uploaded the new demo reel for download, so if you download, it will download a reel about a year old.

Currently the fix is a tad glitchy, as the box is not quite big enough to accommodate all elements. However, if you point your cursor to the lower right, you should be able to hit the "Full Screen" button no problem.

I am currently working with my web designer to make an overhaul to the website to make web-design illiterate people like myself easier to keep updated.

-Chris

Low Poly Character

Latest progress on my low-poly character, Moon-Eye.
The shown character is 856 triangles, textures for the weapons are on the way, with the weapons will put him at 1196 triangles. The texture sheet is a single 1k .png texture, and he should run on an iPhone with little trouble. The textures are a mix of handpainting and photo textures. I handpainted all of the detail and tone, then added photo textures to make the different materials, and then painted over with some highlights.

Production Team works

Some of the texturing work I've done for the current Ai Production team.
We're currently in the process of revisiting all current assets, but that just means more practice.

Maya Viewport render

Marmoset Engine render

Summer Vacation Sketches

Sketches from my trip to Idaho.

I approached each one as minimalistic as possible and let each drawing grow organically to its final iteration.






These were drawn while my plane back to Portland was delayed for an hour.

Turn-in of Spektre

The still of my latest 3D project. Modeled in Maya, then sculpted in zBrush. Rendered (poorly) with Mental Ray and HDRI lighting. The alpha channels were a mess in Mental Ray, so this render utilizes "head in the sand" sensibilities.

Spektre Revamp

Redesign of an old character of mine for a 3D project.

The Unreal Feel

Aside from my title being taken from a sale that happens occasionally on Steam, this is likely also one of my last *aherm* criticism posts before I devote this blog space exclusively to posting my recent work.

Now that the segue is out of the way, I'd like to talk about Unreal. Specifically, Epic Game's ever-increasingly popular engine, the Unreal 3 engine. I will be one of the first in line to say that the engine is a fairly masterful piece of technology, as it is responsible for powering a good chunk of the blockbuster titles of 2008-2010 (thus far). That being said, the one glaring issue I have with the game is similar to the issue many people have with Bethesda's titles running on Gamebryo, in that when I plug in a game that runs on Unreal 3, I can blatantly tell that it runs on Unreal 3.

I'm not exactly sure what is going on with the developers to make a game look so similar in the minor details to another, but when scenes from the utterly mind-blowing Batman: Arkham Asylum look like they've come straight out of Gears of War, I feel that we have a problem.

To this end, I have scoured the internet to provide screenshots from 5 titles, each of which I own and adore to varying degrees, excepting for the as of yet unreleased Mechwarrior reboot which I wait with frothing anticipation.

I'll post the baseline first- a screenshot from Gears of War 2, and then subsequent screenshots in order of similarity to Gears of War in terms of "feel"

Mechwarrior

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Mass Effect 2


Now, as you can see, the first two in terms of similarity share several common aspects in terms of how each frame was rendered: Saturation level, Light bloom, Light color, Specular highlights, Texture Style, Depth of field, and to some degree, the color palette. Each of these factors are shared between Unreal 3 games to some degree of "severity" or another. Mass Effect is a little bit of an aberration in that it has a nice degree of saturation to the overall image, and a high degree of clarity, where other Unreal games often have the feel of a blurry photo from the 1970's where the color mostly resides in saturation "hot spots". Mass Effect also does not suffer from the near fetishistic application of blown-out colored specularity on the textures and too many saturated colored lights. It does, however, have it's moments where it's plainly obvious the game is in the Unreal engine, such as on Omega, and anyplace where there is fire.

I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I feel that too many people fall into the trap of what could be called "same-ey rendering styles" with the Unreal 3 engine in particular. A perfect example: the difference between Splinter Cell iterations 4 and 5 are night and day.
Splinter Cell: Conviction powered by Unreal 3

Splinter Cell: Double Agent powered by a modified Unreal 2.5


For me personally, it felt like the graphics took a step backward between iterations, as Double Agent (aside from some UV issues and other bugs) is one of the most visually solid games I have played for this generation of games. Textures were absolutely beautiful, each material was given it's due, and Sam Fisher's textures in particular were given an amount of love I've never seen elsewhere. Everything was individually cared for, right down to the subtle specular sweat on his skin.

Conviction, on the other hand, while the environments were very solid, and didn't have an utterly ridiculous amount of specularity applied to everything (the character models had almost not specularity to speak of), still suffered from the Unreal thumb-print in the series' most crucial asset of individuality, the lighting. There is an insane amount of light bloom from the light sources, and most of the lights are an extremely saturated color, making everything look, well, strange, for lack of a better word.

While I seem to have written myself into a hole without a clean way to wrap this up, I'd still like to offer some advice to be taken for what it's worth: Unreal is a solid engine, and it's popularity isn't an accident. But, take the development time to give your textures some love, tone down the light saturation if it looks like you're in a room full of chemical glow-sticks when you're in a room of incandescent bulbs, and pay attention to how your game looks compared to others in the same engine. If games continue to have the "Unreal Feel", you could be shooting yourself in the foot by not having your game set itself apart visually.

Man of Conviction

So, it's been a week since Conviction launched, and I've avoided saying anything to anyone to give them time to experience Conviction for themselves, but this perfect metaphor is keeping me from a few precious hours of sleep, so here goes.

I want you to first imagine that Splinter Cell is a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. This cake is my favorite cake of all the other cakes out there (not really but for simplicity's sake it is). I love this cake so much that I've had all four kinds of each cake several times, no less than 30 times for the third cake, and I loved the fourth cake so much I own four copies of that cake, and have had that cake about 50 times. So, that's a damn good cake, right?

So, Ubisoft says 3 years ago that they are baking a fifth cake. Now, based upon the above statement, you can imagine how I felt about that. So, over the course of the next three years, they show the new cake for awhile, then they said that they didn't like how that cake was turning out and that they were remaking the cake. Now, I imagined that meant that they were going to make this cake a veritable magnum opus of epic proportions. This cake was going to be the cake that after enjoying, I would be able to die happy.

More time passes, and as cake day approaches, I put myself on a cake information lent, promising not to look at any of that cake until cake day was nigh upon me.

Then, a kind old lady at the Ubisoft grocery store asks me if I would like to sample the upcoming cake. Barely containing my saliva, I accepted. However, this is one o those samples that just isn't enough, you are salivating even more, but the nice sample lady says you can sample this piece of the cake as much as you like until the cake comes out. So I did.

Now I noticed there was something different about the cake, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. This was more of a spoon cake, where the last four cakes were a fork cake. But it's still chocolate cake with that delicious chocolate frosting.

A month rolls by and by Sam Fisher's goddamn goggles it's Cake Day. First, I ate the complimentary co-op cupcake that came with it. It's shorter than the cake, but is the precursor to the cake so should be ingested first. This was the most glorious cupcake I have ever had in my entire life.

Then... the cake. Anticipation roiled through me. Flashbacks of Johnny Cash and visual representations of the cake swam through me.

It was almost upon me.

That glorious chocolate cake with the chocolate frosting so close I could taste it.

And then, just as I had gotten to the last slice of cake, it hit me.

This was yellow cake with chocolate frosting.

It's still cake, and it's still delicious, and it still has the chocolate frosting, but it wasn't the same. It wasn't the chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.

Whether or not that's a bad thing I've still yet to decide.

Giger-Post Mortem

It's been an interesting process working on a conceptual design designed to fit an artist's style, and I'm most pleased not in the final product so mush as the knowledge I gained in the process, of both myself and H.R. Giger. I've got to say, I'm stoked to do more paintings in the future.

I'm presenting each stage of the work as follows:
Initial Photoshop sketch after the concept design phase


Finalized tonal rendering of the frame and body of the bike


Final Paint

The Terrible Old Man

Today's hour painting: The Terrible Old Man by H.P. Lovecraft. I've been reading through a collection of his stories ("Waking Up Screaming") and have been absolutely loving it. Lovecraft's writing is incredibly juicy and plump, dare I say voluptuous in it's rich visual imagery, and has provided ample inspiration for making pictures.

An hour a day to keep Batman at bay?

Gonna try to work in an hour or so of Photoshop painting a day, schedule permitting.

Today, I did a quick environmental sketch of a statue of "The Hermit" for the Dark Lands world I'm currently designing.

Independent Study project: Giger Bike

First pass on my latest Independent Study project,
I mainly explored the basic forms and interactions of the larger segments, and will adjust the perspective and tire ratios as I continue to work on it.

A Letter to Infinity Ward

Dear Infinity Ward,

I wanted to let you know that despite the ridiculous 60 dollar price tag to purchase the PC version of Modern Warfare 2, I gave in and purchased the game, and as I am thoroughly ashamed to admit, enjoyed it very much.

That being said, I have a concern about the game that I would first like to portray using a visual aid.



As you can plainly see here by this scientific diagram, there seems to be an issue with the difficulty settings of the game. Allow me to show the same diagram with the same criteria on a different game series: Splinter Cell.



As you can see, as the difficulty of Splinter Cell increases, the happy face increases proportionally until it reaches it's apex at the awesome face.

Now, while I heavily favor the stealth action genre, incidentally due it's sheer majority over my favored series, I've played plenty of first person shooters, most relevantly Call of Duty 2 (finished on Veteran) and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (finished on Hardened, Prologue complete on Veteran). I managed to complete Modern Warfare 2 on Veteran, and while the increased damage and sheer pants wetting intensity of the hardest difficulty mode, one thing stood in my way of thoroughly enjoying myself: The game's AI. You see, while it is still slightly fantastic (root word: fantasy), the Call of Duty series is renowned for its attention to detail and overall realism of the storytelling and gameplay elements. Or at least, that's what I'm led to believe. In any case, when a series is noted for such things, one goes into the next installment expecting certain things. One being consistent controls (I want my lean buttons back dammit) and the other being realistic Artificial Intelligence. Unfortunately, Infinity Ward, the enemy AI is more on par with Cryengine AI, or colloquially known as bullshit AI.

At this point, I would like to make a list of things that ruin the realism aspect of the game in terms of the artificial intelligence on Veteran difficulty.
1) The enemy magically knows where every square inch of my supple arse is at any given moment in time.
2) The enemy magically has the ability to hit said supple arse while running, shooting from the hip, or my favorite, shooting from the hip while being pointed 90 degrees the wrong way.
3) The enemy has telescopic x-ray vision and can hit you from 250 yards, while you are over 70% covered by an obstacle. Not only that, the enemy can also put a bullet through a 6 inch opening and into your spleen at 100 yards...while they are laying down in high grass. In case your playtesters haven't noted this, you can see two things while prone in tall grass on a level field. Jack Squat, and your mum.
4) And finally my favorite, the ever realistic "I shot you, no you didn't" argument of the hit boxes. I cannot tell you how many times I have saturated an area roughly the size of an enemy soldier's character model and they run off without so much as a scratch. This is not S.T.A.L.K.E.R., gentlemen. This is a standard FPS with standard ballistics. In laymen's terms, I point my cursor at it, and I know exactly where my bullets are going. In addition, I would humbly suggest that the development team do a little more research on what happens when bullets enter juicy torsos. Yes, the Russians are wearing flak jackets, but I highly doubt they can afford Dragonskin body armor for all of their troops. Getting shot hurts. Getting shot anywhere on the rib cage area will most likely put you into shock.

Now, while I've ragged on what I didn't like about the difficulty, I am however, not without suggestions for possible solutions.

1)Make the enemy tougher-Now this may seem contradictory, but when I say tougher, I mean physically. Keep the awareness and tactics at the Regular setting, they are good there. But, perhaps give them improved body armor, and make the headshot/killshot boxes smaller.

2)Limit player resources- I don't know if any of the development team has ever tried to carry 600 .223 rounds, but one thing should be kept in mind: Ammo. Is. HEAVY. Like, really heavy. A box of ammo approx 1'x 2'x 8" carrying 7.62 rounds easily weighs 70 pounds. Now, imagine carrying that, plus your gun, which weighs about 8 pounds, give or take, plus your sidearm and it's ammo, and whatever secondary equipment, and your looking at a character loaded down with around 110 pounds of equipment. Not exactly realistic. So, limit the resources. 10 clips of ammo is a lot to carry, but if you're on hard mode, 240 rounds should last a long time.

3)More realistic cover mechanics- Put simply, as a bullet goes through anything, it's gonna veer off course. However, bullets can penetrate a lot of shite. So make more materials more permeable to fire, and make it less likely to hit exactly where it was pointed. This should inspire a more tactic oriented mindset and encourage more player creativity to win.

4)Give me back my goddamn lean buttons. If you're going to make AI that can target a supple arse, move, aim while moving, and shoot it off in a space of .35 seconds, give players the ability to minimize how much of it they expose. This also gives the player to quickly assess the situation without possibly getting their arse shot off in less time than could be called reasonably human.

Send Captains MacTavish and Price my love.

Sketch Dump 1

What with the holidays abounding, I took a trip to Boise for the weekend and incidentally have not updated anything for a while. However, that doesn't mean I've stopped working... in fact quite the opposite. With nothing to distract me on my bus commute to work, I've been drawing like a fiend, and here I present to you, some drawings. Nothing is scanned, unfortunately as my scanner is ready to give up the ghost. They are photos instead, but they get the point across. Much of it is for project: Wasteland, which, unfortunately, remains a somewhat nebulous idea. But, without further ado... pictures!