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.

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.

These are renders from different angles as well as uncolored renders to show the sculpt in better detail.

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.

In addition to that, my second TurtleTank environment render got admitted to the CGSociety 3d Stills Showcase Gallery! This gallery only shows art that meets the quality standards of a team of judges. So yeah, I’m really proud :-D

Update: My second environment render made it to the frontpage of ItsArtMag.com. Artwork posted on ItsArtMag can get votes from their users, with enough votes you can end up on the front page. And I made it, woohooo!
Proof:

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!

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.

The TurtleTank character was inspired by the excellent vehicle designs by Keith Thompson. Some of his drawings depict cyborg creatures re purposed as vehicles of war. I have always found this to be intriguing concept so I decided to give it a go myself. I went with a turtle because it lends itself well as some sort of tank, seeing as it already had the shell and retractable limbs.
I went through a couple of iterations during the concept phase and eventually chose for the tank to be unmanned. I figured the creature would be smart enough to attack only enemies and learn some basic strategic principles. Of course they would also have installed implants to take care of any unwanted behavioral anomalies.
The turtle might also be controlled remotely, giving commands by sending electric shocks to it’s brain. The creature would be in constant pain, due in no small part to the cybernetic modifications as well. This seems cruel but it turns out to fuel the creatures furiousness during combat, making the TurtleTank a force to be reckoned with.

Process

Modeling

The TurtleTank was modeled from scratch in 3d Studio Max 2011. This was a pretty straight forward process although I had a lot of things to figure out along the way. One of the most difficult things was to predict the best way to create the scales on the legs. I knew I wanted them to show up well in the silhouette but I wasn’t sure what the best approach was, especially keeping in mind that all of the scales needed some detailing in the sculpting phase. I settled on creating some simple geometric shapes placed along the front of the legs, scaled down towards the back. I hoped the transition from geometric scales to textured scales wouldn’t be too obvious but it worked out pretty nice eventually. The rest of the modeling wasn’t too difficult, the shell is completely rigid in animations so I didn’t have to worry too much about preparing the topology for animations. Only the base of the cannon and the places where the legs come together with the shell required some extra consideration but nothing too fancy.

When you glance at the stat sheet (image above), you may notice the tri-count of 29164. I realize this is pretty steep for an in-game 3d model but it was intended as a big character. He has a lot of separate elements and I wanted him to look good form all possible angles. There isn’t any geometry that doesn’t contribute to the silhouette so I think it’s still reasonable. I knew from the start that I wanted many details to be geometric rather than just textures. This makes a model a lot more interesting to me, especially the way it catches the light and how it adds to the contours. If the requirements for the model would’ve been more restrictive, I probably wouldn’t have modeled the separate scales on the shell, the impact craters and the little shield on the sides.

Rigging and Skinning

I chose to get this step out of the way as early in the process as possible. Experience has taught me that the geometry isn’t done until the rig is done. So often do you need to change the topology of the mesh to have the rig and skin work properly. I made a simple FK rig to make sure the limbs would cooperate nicely and to see if the topology would work. I didn’t have to change too many things but it’s an excellent way to check if you’re still on the right track.
Eventually I created IK links for the feet and made sure the head of the turtle could retract towards the shell. The most complicated part of the rig would be that of the cannon. I created a system that
allows you to animate a single bone to raise, lower and aim the cannon and have the support geometry at the front of the cannon move along with it correctly. Check out the vid below!

Sculpting

Once the rigging and UV mapping was done I knew I was happy with the topology of the mesh so I could start the sculpting process. I chose to use Mudbox as it has an easy to learn interface and some nice features I wished to take advantage of. The sculpting process ended up being a lot of work because in my enthusiasm I went a little bit overboard the smallest details. The next time around I might opt for doing the smallest details such as pores and small wrinkles in Photoshop instead. A custom heightmap converted to a normal map can give very quick and nice results. Anyhow, what’s done is done. Other than it being a lot of work, the sculpting was just plain fun. I don’t know why I never gave it a fair shot before.

One thing I realized while already deep into the sculpting process is the importance of evenly distributed edgeloops. Once you start subdividing your mesh it can be quite annoying if the amount of detail on your mesh is irregular. I might have saved a few millions of triangles if I fixed this beforehand. I learned that the other Sculpting tool: Zbrush offers the possibility to automatically take care of this for you. I was working in so Mudbox however so I didn’t have this option. Mudbox is a cool program to work with but once you get familiar with it, there are a lot of things that could be improved. My main gripe with it is the serious lack of proper tools to organize your scene. It also felt a little unstable and sluggish at times. The next time around I’ll probably give Zbrush a go.

Texturing

Now this part is always my favorite. You’re never really sure how your model is going to end up before the texturing part. I love seeing the model come to life this way. It’s also a very crucial part as it can really make or break the character. Before I could unleash myself in Photoshop I had to create the normal maps. Mudbox offers the possibility to generate these based on the difference between two subdivision levels. I played around with it before but I never really could get the results to look the way I wanted them to. Also, because my low poly model wasn’t exactly the same as the one I had loaded in Mudbox I chose to generate the normal maps in 3dsMax itself. For this to work I had to export the high detail meshes from Mudbox into 3dsMax. There’s no neat way to do this unfortunately, 3dsMax isn’t exactly good with handling ridiculous amounts of triangles. The only way I could get it to work is by optimizing the High detail meshes before getting them into 3dsMax. I did this using Mootools Polygon Cruncher. I was able to shave off about 50% of the trianglecount while still keeping all the details. This turned out to be enough to be able to work with it in 3dsMax. The normal maps I created were almost perfect. Barely any artifacts had to be fixed, I was very happy with the result.

Once all that was done, I was able to start with the funnest part. Creating shadow maps, using photographic material to composite a diffuse texture, tweaking specular values and whatever else is there. I love getting up close and personal with the smallest details and really bringing the character to life. I used a lot of photographic material from the awesome free online texture library: www.cgtextures.com.
One thing Mudbox really helped out great with was painting the base diffuse colors directly on to the model. There are other applications that allow you to do this such as Bodypaint, Photoshop and nowadays even 3dsMax as well, but none of them work as well as Mudbox. One of the coolest features it offers is the dry brush, this allows you to only paint on bulges, or crevices if you use the invert mode. This is great for painting dust in wrinkles or wear and tear on bulges.

Finishing up

The last steps are always the hardest. There were some difficult parts left to polish and fix, but thats all history now. I decided I wanted a cool environment to pose the character in, which you can see at the top of this post. This image cost me about two days or so to make. I also imported the character into the Unreal 3 engine. I’ll post a movie of that soon. All in all, the character turned out nice I think. It took a lot of work and effort but I also learned a lot. If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I love to get in touch with anyone who’s interested in my work.

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:

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.

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.