Dark Horizon Werks

Please Pardon Our Dust

2010-10-18T00:09:00.001-07:00

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

2010-08-11T01:57:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-07T04:07:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-13T15:30:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-21T09:45:00.000-07:00

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

The Unreal Feel

2010-05-20T04:35:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-19T05:40:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-16T20:00:00.000-07:00

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

2010-02-26T18:03:00.000-08:00

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?

2010-02-25T13:20:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-24T14:37:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-11T07:25:00.001-08:00

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

2010-01-02T23:25:00.000-08:00

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!

Joker Post Mortem pt. 2

2009-12-21T20:04:00.000-08:00

I figure I would get the rest of my character texturing trials and tribulations out of the way so I can move onto new things and have a legitimate excuse to say Lando Calrissian. But that's for a different day. At this juncture, it's time not be serious and get my discussion pants on.

Last time I gesticulated about this project, it was about the challenges of pattern making for textures, and now I'm going to move onto something considerably more fun. Normal mapping. Now, I will be honest, learning how to normal map with no prior instruction whatsoever was challenging to say the least, but I feel that the results speak for themselves, shown by our Clown Prince of Crime's lovely face here:

Before the obvious is stated, the lips looking, funky, as it were, is due to inherent problems with the geometry, so we'll gloss over that bit. Now, after I approached the situation from several angles in terms of generating the normal maps, the best solution for me turned out to be making my high-poly mesh inside Mudbox, eporting it, and then importing both the high and low-poly meshes into xNormal and generating the normal maps in there. However, I ended up having to modify the maps inside Photoshop in order to make the maps smoother and to fix some issues with how Maya handles normal maps in general.

From the Desk of the Webmaster

2009-12-12T22:33:00.000-08:00

Greetings, I am writing to tell about the strange eldritch magicks being woven by my roommate/webmaster/code monkey Derek. He is currently carving a strange path through the wilderness that is the Internet so that I may have a sanctuary to call my own. The address is www.dhwerks.com, though it is currently under construction, but should be finished very shortly.

Joker Post Mortem pt. 1

2009-12-06T16:25:00.000-08:00

Greetings once again. I apologise for the late post, (I'm shooting for one a week in case I haven't mentioned that yet) but it is nearing finals and I'm racing to get projects done.

I will be discussing one in particular over the next few posts regarding my first character model. I will not, however, be discussing mesh topology as I am already well aware of the flaws in it, and it's been at least 6 months since I did it, so I can't remember my process all that well.

I'll talk about the challenges I faced in regards to the subsequent steps after the modeling stage, starting with a particular texturing issue: Pattern Making.

My hat goes off to graphic designers, fashion students, and web designers alike who are all far more capable than I in regards to this particular niche of art. This was easily the most mentally difficult part of this model due to the complexity of the patterns involved and my own inexperience at making tileable patterns. So, let's show some pictures, shall we?

This is the clearest reference available to me for the pattern on the Joker's shirt, and, as you can see, there isn't a full sample shown for when the pattern repeats. From my understanding of it, the pattern is very complex due to the inner details of the hexagons. So, after banging my head on the desk for some time, I managed to make a pattern for the shirt to fit on the model.

You'll no doubt notice the discrepancy between the patterns, but that would be me taking "artistic license", so ignore it. I'm fairly satisfied with the result otherwise. It was an experience, to be sure, as I ended up having to place all of my pattern samples by hand rather than having Photoshop put it in automatically for me.

This was also true for the tie as well. More on the project next week.

Introductions

2009-11-24T13:51:00.000-08:00

Greetings, all.
(At least I think so... social interaction is still a fairly foreign concept to me)

At the current stage, I plan on updating this about once a week with my various misadventures involving drawing and/or modeling. Occasionally I might add in some thoughts concerning current video games, but only on a visual level.

I thought I might share first a little about my own process of coming up with a sketch. I'll be using this one for future examples as well.

If I draw something unrelated to an existing project, I generally draw my inspiration from music, dreams, and other bits of visual memory that seem to crop up with some sort of relation to what is currently going through my head at the time.

From there, I try to imagine a perfect snapshot of it. What is the personality? How does it move, what are they thinking of? I then lay out the form and begin to construct it. During construction, I try to think of smaller details involving functionality, whether it be mechanical, biological, or how two pieces of armor interact. That sort of thing. I start to think about materials and then add in some of the smaller drawn details.

That's enough for this week.