Shop interior design

Some older work, I made these about a year ago as a testcase assignment to apply for a job. I hadn’t posted these earlier because they were somewhat of a frustrating memory for me. The company requested me to do a testcase scenario, these renders are the result of that. They asked me to model and render the interior of a modern shop. They provided an empty room model for me to go crazy with.

The frustrating part is that they were very happy with the results and offered me a job, except that they couldn’t pay me a salary for quite some months because they were a starting company and instead offered me share-options or some such. I felt rather cheated and thought I had wasted two weeks working on this testcase. I declined and and banned all of it from memory and didn’t even consider these renders for my portfolio. That is, until I was cleaning up some stuff a few days ago and ran into them again. I felt they still held up pretty well so I decided to post them after all.

It’s the first time I ever made something resembling architectural modeling. Aside from it looking maybe a little too much like a space age hypershop, I like the result. All of it was made in 3dsMax by my own design, and like I mentioned before, it took me about 2 weeks.

Inca Priestess

I just finished this 3d character. I tried to make her look like an Inca or Mayan priestess. I think she turned out quite okay although I still feel like there are things to improve. Maybe I’ll get back to it later but for now I feel like I spent too long already.
You are looking at a composition of renders of the high poly model posed in Zbrush. A low poly model doesn’t exist yet, for this character I just wanted to learn Zbrush and create some nice renders.
This is my first serious sculpt in Zbrush. I already got acquainted with it’s compeditor, Mudbox, while working on the Turtletank. Now that I’ve spent some serious time with both tools I can safely say I much prefer Zbrush over Mudbox, despite it’s quirky interface.

Anyways, I really hope you like this latest character. Drop me a line to let me know what you think.

For some more images from different angles please continue reading.
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Cute little bird Promo

Time for something different! A cute little birdie :-) If you want to have a better look at the model, click the “HD” button in the player, follow the link to Vimeo.com and play it in full-screen over there.

This is a small promotional video (no sound) I made for a project i’m working on along with some other folks. The bird character was designed and modelled by me. The animations are as well but don’t pay too much attention to those. Like I mentioned many times before, animating isn’t as much a passion of me as modelling is. I don’t even really enjoy doing it, I just hope that doesn’t show too well in the animations.

Anyhow, this is intended to give an impression of the mechanics of a simple game we’re making. Basically you’re supposed to throw a breadcrumb and the bird follows it and eats it. Thats it :-) So yeah, it’s not really a game, more of a simple interaction.

The exiting part however, is that this is being created in Alternativa 3d, a 3d engine for flash with support for hardware rendering. It’s just going to be a simple interactive demonstration but in real-time 3d in your browser. With it, we will hopefully be able to convince potential customers to let us create cool real-time 3d interactive features for them.

More TurtleTank stuff

The image above is my second attempt at putting my TurtleTank character in an interesting environment. I posted my original render on polycount.com, a digital art community forum, and got a lot of great feedback from the very helpful people over there. If this new version is any better than I have those people to thank for it.

Now, to finally be done with this character and be able to move on to new grounds, I got the Turtle into the Unreal 3 engine. Specifically, the awesome (and freely available) Unreal Development Kit. Check it out below!

The TurtleTank

Finally! My Turtletank project is finished. It’s taken many many nights of fidgeting, tweaking and solving but now it’s done and I’m pretty happy with the result. This project has been a first in many ways. It’s been the first time I ever had to spend more than a month on a single character, the first time I modeled a creature completely by my own design and the first serious sculpting project I ever did. Given these circumstances, I think the end result is pretty sweet.
It’s a fully rigged, animate-able, game ready End Boss model. I think it would be pretty cool fighting this guy in a first person shooter or something similar.

For more renders and information, please continue reading.

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Fairytale Fights 3d models showcase

Here it is then, my little showcase film to show of some of the cooler models I did for Fairytale Fights. I think it turned out pretty well so please take a look. The movie is 720p HD so you could check it out in full screen.

This was the first time I really tried to make a map in U3 and it was good fun. It took me quite some time to create the movie as I bumped into a lot a technical issues but I managed to figure everything out in the end.
I can’t take full credit for everything you see in the movie. To really complete the clips I did have to take some content like particle effects, music and some animations that I didn’t make myself. Everything you see is from Fairytale Fights though.

I was involved with all of the models in the movie. I can’t take credit for the designs, it’s all made from concept drawings. Most 3d models were made by myself although some were done by either the outsourcing studio who did 3d content for our game and others by 3d artists in the team I coordinated. In those cases I did often perform some optimizing or polishing tweaks or was otherwise closely involved by giving advice and guidance.  An example is the Snowqueen character which is shown in the movie. Most of the modeling was done by Lorenzo Bahadur who did an excellent job. I just helped out with technical issues and making sure the model closely matched the concept, which was especially tricky for this character.

Anyhow, I hope you liked the video. I certainly enjoyed making it as well as the models themselves.

And to close with, here are some stills from the video:

Fairytale Fights Prototype Map: Mineshaft

The video above shows “Mineshaft”, a map for Fairytale Fights for which I made most of the 3d models. The map wasn’t in the game however and never will be, it was made as a test. It was made by just me, two colleagues and an intern within a single month. The movie is 720p HD, so please watch it in full screen.

We were assigned to create a small map to try and improve workflow and dependencies. It was made by Marco Fritsche (Level decoration), Rob van der Sloot (level design) and an intern: Freek Hoekstra (level design, modeling) with some additional modeling help from Chris McEntee. It was all done within a single month so the map obviously has some rough edges as we didn’t have any time to polish anything. We didn’t get to put much time into the level design either as we had to start creating the thing pretty much right away. Other things such as animation, special FX, sound effects, music or anything else really, weren’t really flushed out. However! Despite the very limited time frame and manpower, I still feel we created something pretty impressive. If you’re familiar with Fairytale Fights, you might notice that it looks quite different from the original game. The reason for this is because we didn’t get any art direction so I guess this is what the game would’ve looked like if it we’re up to just the modelers and level decorators. Personally I really like this look as it seems a bit more atmospheric and less over-saturated.
For this map, I made most of the visible assets, level geometry, textures and shaders. I also argued a lot with Marco about the lighting, all in good fun though.

Portfolio map

The image above is a screenshot of a small Unreal 3 map I’ve been building in the past days. I will use it to showcase models I made, or was responsible for, during development of Fairytale Fights. The map is entirely made out of objects created by myself and the team of 3d modelers I was coordinating.

PLGF Fairytale Fights leader movie

Together with with Frank Post, Robin Keijzer (concept) and Jonathan vd Wijngaarden (audio), I created a leader movie for Playlogic’s game Fairytale Fights. I did all the modeling, texturing, rigging and rendering. Frank did the animations and editing.

The demon deer in action!

Alright, as promised in my recent Dead Demonic Deer post, I made a render of the character in an action pose. Creating the render took me two evenings of work, one creating the pose and environment and another creating the lighting and atmospherics. It’s a 3ds Max Mental Ray render with basic GI and Final Illumination settings. The Depth of Field effect was made in Photoshop based on a Z-depth render pass. Except for some color tweaks, the whole thing looks the way it came out of the renderer, which took about half an hour.

Going to bed now, it’s 3:50 and I have to go to work tomorrow morning :-P