Junkyard home

I have been busy and alot has happend during the past month, I've graduated highschool, been to Dreamhack you know the usual stuff. This piece is located in a post apocalyptic industrial area where a lonesome individual is trying to make a home in a tough environment. I have experimented with some of the rendering options and I've used mental Rey on some of the images. The real purpose of making this was to train on making high poly objects that has the same theme. Rendering and using lights was also one of the main reasons on making this scene 

here you can see all the models in "broad daylight"

Goodbye Papa

I made this painting in honor of my father, who now rests in peace in heaven.

I painted this painting because after what happened I pictured him up in the clouds drinking tea and watching over our family.

I hope you like it papa, love you! 

Friends?

I've been out for while now not posting anything but it is because of other much more important things like studies, job searching and university applications that has to be done and all at the same time, I have manage to paint this lovely thing at least.

I think painting turned out well but i could have worked on it a bit more if i had the time

Technical talk

In this painting i was working on getting the contrasts and colors right and more "naturally" blended colors in. Its much more easier to control the opacity of the brush by using the number keys or the numpad. I was completely oblivious to this until my friend Joel showed me and so i decided to try t out and make something just to try the new learned technique out. I tried other things as well such as using the band aid brush to hide some of the out of place colors and always making a new layer when painting something that I am not sure if it will work out.

Game Jam: Toll Gate

Schools gone for a week and of course my friends and I had another game jam! We made the same routine, looking at videogamena.me  for inspirations. The first game names that came up would be our basis of the game. The game name that we got was:

Adventures of the car invaders
Extreme ghost world cup
Blasphemous Amish smackdown
Radioactive shotgun rave
Professional dessert - 2D impact 

The second and third names were really funny, we came up with some wild stories revolving around the names. We initially  decided that we wanted to make a game which is simple and has no violence in it so we took away the names that suggested violent gameplay so we were left with options 1 and 5. After some discussion we chose name 5.

The gameplay was pretty easy to nail down but deciding the theme of the game turned out to be a much harder thing to do. We initially had a dessert theme but then it would be a game of sorting cakes and pastry it felt so candy crushy, we ditched the dessert theme and came up with another one, junk sorting! But yeah junk sorting did not appeal to our tastes. So we tossed that one too and finally settled down with a sci-fi traffic controller where you are in space controlling the flow of traffic. The theme became a retro sci-fi theme where everything is curvy. 

The concept art and finished models by me

The goal of the game is that you have to let the green ships pass. The blue ships go down the toll gate and you have to fling the red ship away. If you let the red ships pass then you will lose a life. controls are simple, you can use any key to raise the gate and push R to restart the whole game

I learned some more Photoshop techniques from Joel while making this game. I got to concept and design my own ships this was my main task which took alot of my time. Making this game made me realize that there is still a lot of things for me to learn, I still need to train on painting side of 3D as I am not so good at it. I can't wait for the next game jam, I really learn a lot while jamming 

Here is Some screenshots of the game

Did I mention that we have physics in game?

Download the game here

Happy Easter

Happy Easter everyone! I've made a scene just you and for this occasion, I've been working on it for a month now and I am happy that I could finish it in time.

 Can you help the sleepy bunny find all 9 eggs in the scene?

Personal Experience

I have never built a 3D scene from scratch before, but i was prepared. I knew what I wanted to do, I started planing what I was going to make. I started to make sketches on what things i was model and how roughly everything would look like. When I have finished modeling everything and started making the scene I felt that I had no idea how I would do the scene, the sketch that i made was pretty rough and placing things in 3D is much more difficult than just drawing them in paper. Over all it was fun, and positioning different objects to see if they fit aesthetically was a nice experience for me. 

Technical Experience

The whole scene is made in Unity which is a 3D game engine, I'm planing on making the scene again on Maya because there is a rendering tool there; mental ray and it does wonders with the lighting!

I've started using normal mapping using Nvidia's Photoshop plug-in, apparently Unity has its inbuilt normal mapping system, you just need to have a grey scale texture for it to work. I have worked with normal mapping before but I mostly used it on single objects and i did that in Maya. 

Creative Retreat

I was at my parents house this week end and I only had my laptop with me and here are some things that I made while I was there.

Just a random painting i made

A scaffolding thingy i made just for fun

Starbound Fan Art

I've finally finished my Starbound fan art! I've been planing on finishing this for a while now but there was always something that gets in the way but now I had time on my creative retreat at my parents home so I was able to finish it. 

Mannequins and other Updates

I've been practicing how to draw mannequins for a while now 

these are digitally made

While i was practicing I came up with a concept on paper and I have decided to make a 3d model just because I like how this particular one looks.

So here's the progress so far :

Don't worry I haven't forgotten the other project that I'm doing. As of right now it feels like there's alot of things that I need to do first because my school year is almost over.

Things that are still on the queue are:
The Starbound art
The Manananggal
And the game I am making my self

About the game I'm trying to make, at first I tried to make a game in Game Maker but after the GameJam I actually got interested about Unity and so I changed UDK and right now I'm making a game all by my self with a friend who helps me now and then. Actually my group made this last year. It doesn't feel right when I just remake the game in unity and then it's done, so what I'm going to do is to try to improve and also put in some 3D models in the game because last year we only made it in 2D.

24 Hour Home Jam: Trashed Shaft

It was definitely time for another game jam but this time it's just with my friends! It was our third (a first for Takano) game jam but it was a first for me because i was hosting the Jam at my place so i felt like i had to prepare something like a theme of some kind, like they do in Global Game Jams. I had no idea what the theme would be so i asked the people in Twitter for some help. I got a lot of good responses and there was one person who linked us a video game name generator so we used that to decide for us about what game's theme would be.

The team on a bad camera (me, Takano, Leo & Joel)

The Concept 

It was kind of unclear how we would chose a theme but we decided that the first thing that comes up on the generator would be our theme. The first thing that came up on the generator was of course Porn Orbital Station or something in that name and we can't have that! So we generated 5 or 6 names and we systematically crossed out the names that we did not like or that the name doesn't spark any ideas, and so we ended up with Claustrophobic Fencing Rangers.

A lot of ideas came up when deciding on how the game would be like. We had the concept of that it would be a player vs player game and that the players would kill each other by jumping on top of the other one -Mario style- until the player is so small that he/she would disappear entirely.

The Story

All we know that it was going to be somewhere tight so an elevator was a perfect setting but inside an elevator was boring so we moved it to an elevator shaft instead. It was unclear when but somewhere down the line we unanimously agreed that there would be a hobo living in the elevator, and so a story was born!

It was just a normal work day for our busy worker but suddenly she hears a strange noise on top of the elevator so she decides to check it out She finds out that there is a hobo living above the elevator! she tells the hobo that he is not allowed to live on top of the elevator but the hobo ignores her so she decides to take things into her own hands and tries evict the hobo from the elevator. The hobo has nowhere else to go so he is determined to stay. What will happen? play the game and see who wins!

The Execution

We now have a general concept of the game so we started working, but then we realized that the game was to complicated for the time frame that we have so we had to cut down on some features. The game that we have now is that the goal of the players is to push one another of a ledge by shoving the other player of the platform.

Leo was the programmer and SFX guy
Takano was the music composer
Joels was the 3D artist
I was the Character artist and the helper of Leo (sometimes) :) when he had some minor programming problems

My Contribution

I had no idea what I would do in the beginning because Takano was going to make the characters, Joel was going to do the background and other props and Leo was our programmer. I tried to help Leo with the programming but I still had no idea what to work on there plus i only have basic knowlage of the programming language so I wasn't much of a help there. Takano who was going to make the character had not installed Maya on his computer and is trying to download the student version and after 5h it was still downloading and nothing is happening. Given the short time frame that we had I took the liberty of making the characters while Takano was downloading Maya. So i finished the character completely rigged and animated while Takano was still stuck on downloading Maya. Takano gave up and started working on the music instead.

After i had finished working with the characters I started working on particle emitters and those were the fire on the barrel and the small yellow things that you see falling in game

My Hobo character which looks much like Santa!

The Result

I did not get much sleep only three hours in total. Even though it was my house i slept on the floor... on a fluffy purple carpet and it was good. I was afraid if i slept in my bed i would not wake early plus I had to keep the game jam spirit alive! which means no comfortable bed to sleep on. Everything about that game jam was pure awesomeness! I still cant believe that we were able to make a finished and playable prototype in just 24 hours

Here's the download link if you are interested in playing it 

Grimm news

I have news and it is grim, Grave Runner that is. This is going to be an update on my school project

A week ago we were making our game in jmonkey but with every progress we made there was always a brick wall stopping us. For example, our animations didn't work due to the fact that I made the animations in Maya and  jmonkey can't or won't accept the fbx format but I solved that by using blender for animations and exporting it into a .xml file but it worked but  when we tried it on our tablet it didn't work because the tablet can't run an xml file or it just crashes for reasons unknown to me.

Anyways long story short we changed development kit to unity and and everything is going good. Progress with Unity is so much faster that what it was in Jmonkey. But thats what I thought,  I'm just the artist in the group but i have some experience with unity and how its coding works. The fact that our communications in the group is really low makes me wonder what the programmers are doing because I don't see any results on their part of the job. One of the programmer is complaining that unity is crap but then again he's always complaining that every development kit is crap.

But yeah I just feel that I need to get that out of my chest. Sorry about the rant, now on to the eye candy!

I've done a lot of texturing animating and other stuff like implementing all the models into unity and making prefabs (pre fabrication) and here's the result

The player is animated as well as the tree at the back.

This was just a quick set up in Unity and i did not have all the assets with me because i forgot to transfer them from the schools Pc to my USB but pretty much everything is there. Ohh the moon on the background is on a skybox so ive got that going for me.

Right now I am around 75% of all the assets that we need are done. All i need to do is to design a GUI and refine some other stuff   

Valentine Flower

I'm a little late on the date but here's a fresh bouquet of flowers that i made specially for you

Global Game Jam 2014

Wow and amazing!! Thats how I would summarise my GGJ weekend in Stockholm. First of all everyone was very friendly. in the beginning there were some lectures that we could attend and those were fine but not really important or critical for the jam itself but still it was interesting to hear what they were talking about. I was kind of anxious about being at the jam since it seemed that all of the participants were really proficient at what they are doing. Compared to them i looked like a total noob specially when i grouped up with a all pro team. I kinda felt useless in the beginning but they were really friendly and i was tasked on making the background objects for the game. i don't have a lot of pics and the ones i have are bad but i did not actually had time to take pics during the jam everything was kinda hectic and stressful. surprisingly enough I thought that it was a good method to do things because everyone was on 130%! Some did not even sleep the first night!!

all the people in who participated in the GGJ Stockholm around 50 people

Now, to my group's composition and the game that we made. Our team is called Team Disco

Design & Sound:
Alberto Amigo
Programming:
Mark Scheurwater
Michel Paulissen
Art:
Hannes Delbeke
Nils Ruisch
Philip Bretschneider

aaaand heres the link for the game ^^
here's for more info on the game

Jmonkey Animation Trouble

The Story
  So still working on the Grave Runner project, all was going well but then I hit a brick wall. I have made an animation complete with rigged bones and everything. The problem was I should have researched which files I have to export them in. Heed my advice this is a very important thing  to do! trust me because apparently Jmonkey is not compatible on with Maya because maya is not able to export objects or animations into xml files without pro scripting skills.

The Problem
  Yeah apparently Jmonkey only takes in xml files when it comes to animating meshes (simple .obj are ok if you are not going to animate them). I tried to solve the problem with maya for three weeks looking at old outdated forums from 2008, desperately trying to find a solution. The whole class is counting on me to solve the problem and if I can't solve it we would be forced to change our UDK and that would set us back five months in developing time. No one wants to do that!

The Solution
  After hundreds of forums, twenty different downloads and thirty times of backtracking I finally solved the problem! And the solution was... switching to blender and that solved everything mostly everything animation wise. Hello Blender my old friend.

Epilogue
  Now i'm back on track with animating but in Blender this time. the only small problem i ran into was importing the mesh with the Uv mapping intact but the solution was very simple just export the mesh into an .obj. Not .fbx because that's what i did at first

(I added some Ik handles after i took this screen)

As you can see Grim is fully imported in Blender and it is rigged and ready to go (animate that is).

Lonesome Journey

This is the concept that I have made by my self. this is going to be a long one and I will update this now and then with pics and comments until i have finished this project.

Note: Sorry if you I aren't able to see the drawing because i decided to make the background black.

I have polished it a little bit since the last time I worked on it, which was about 2 years ago. I stopped working on it because back then I did not have a digital drawing pad; I only had a mouse to work with.  

Like the last time I am not sure about the hue of the painting but that does not discourage me to try different ways of coloring and experiment with them.

What i did here is that I am trying a technique which is to firstly make a base color then apply in shadows in another layer so that i can easily take edit the shade without morphing the base color. I have the tendency to scratch-paint or sketch-paint what ever it's called i can't maintain a consistent brushstroke, i don't know if that is good or not.

At this point I have shown my painting with some of my friends, they gave me some constructive critique like "ooooh it sucks" or "why are you even trying, you'll never be as awesome as me!". Nahh just kidding but seriously they gave me a lot of nice feedback that i really needed. Joel fixed the brightness and i learnt something new about photoshop. The castle is at a wrong perspective plus it's size is too big. I might increase the size of the mountains in the background to a make the proportions right.

Man this doesn't seem to en but I think i'll have to stop here and move on for now because right now I feel like i am stuck on the same piece and not getting any progress done but i might revisit this one after a while when i get more experience in painting. This was kind of a big project and i have bitten off more than i could chew so i'll leave it for now and chew it off with some other things and then come back some more some other time

Sapling Shooter Concept and Other Things

I've been really busy making a lot of projects for me to do because of my christmas vacation. The painting is a concept art for my own game. I am making it on Game Maker and it's going to be a small game not at all complicated. Other things on my project belt which are unfinished are:

A fanart for starbound

A Mananangal model

And an own original painting that i am working on