Forza 5 - 2013 Raceday Objects Pt. 2 with wires!

A friend asked me about the wireframes on some of the many props I created for the raceday objects on Forza Motorsport 5. I sadly dont have images with wires from any of the levels out of the game engine. Below are renders from the same scene as the previous post (Forza 5 - 2013 Raceday Objects), and then the same render with the wireframes. All of the props had 3-4 LODs (level of detail models). Shown is the highest level of detail or "LOD0" which still had VERY strict triangle budgets. As I mentioned before, each asset had half to a full day to be modeled, UVd, textured, have LODs made, get imported into the engine and hen have materials made. Crazy! I will try and post wires when they are available.

Batman Arkham Origins - Nov 2012 GPCD, Pioneer Bridge, and Bat Computer

I think working on the multi-platform title, Batman Arkham Origins, was one of the highlights of my work at Valkyrie. Not only was it diverse and fun work, but I learned a lot and it turned out to be an AMAZING game. I did asset creation, environment art, world building, lighting and some material work. I created several assets for the Gotham City Police Station area and helped create various chunks of the Pioneer Bridge and do revisions on other sections of the bridge. I also did a bunch of work on the Bat-Computer. This asset was started by somebody else at another company but was unacceptable and wouldnt work at all in the Arkham build of Unreal Engine 3. I remodeled almost the entire asset, reUVed most of the asset, baked out and retextured all he monitors/screens and cables, built all the lightmap UVs and built all the materials for it (with the exception of the in-game FX). Its always tough to follow somebody else' work and this particular asset was extremely difficult to salvage. In the end, it looks super tight in the game! Thanks to Mitchel for helping with bakes! I imported all my assets into the engine and set up their materials.

My 2 favorite assets I made for the whole game! Donuts and coffee!!!!!! I also made a bunch of other little things for the Gotham City PD

My cop car!

We had to build about 7 vehicles with various skins on some of them. One of my tasks was to build and bake down 2D undercarriages and texture them for all of the vehicles and then also build some 3D versions that could be snapped on if the asset needed to be flipped over in the game world or in a cut scene (cop cars were flipping all the time! hahaha). This first screen is the 2D versions and then a 3D version on the sedan. Some of the high-polys were kitbashed from other models. 

My textured and modeled 3D undercarriage

My 2D undercarriage and texture on Jason Rost's semi-truck

The Pioneer Bridge level. I built some random structural elements for the bridge and optimized a lot of the other artists modular chunks for this. I also fixed a lot of the materials and UVs and lightmap UVs, imported art, and built some of the actual level in the engine

The completed version of the Bat-Computer with all my blood sweat and tears in it (seriously though, thanks again to Mitchel S. He saved my bacon on helping with this one)

In game promo shot

Forza 5 - 2013 Raceday Objects

Somewhere in the middle of production on Forza 5, we were tasked with building a bunch of raceday objects. These were basically the props that would be spread around tracks and would only be present in real life on, you guessed it, RACEDAY! they are used across every single track except the Airfield test track. Our producer was out for several weeks so I got to be team leader on this project. I tracked assets, did all the submissions, reviewed other artists works, assigned assets, did scheduling, and created assets myself. The turnaround on these was crazy! We had basically 4-8 hours on each prop! That included modeling, UVing, texturing, building 4 LODs and materials and making it all look "next-gen". We had close to 200 objects to build between 3 of us. OMG, those were some crazy weeks. Luckily, the other two artist working with me (Jeremy Lanum and Mitchell Stankowicz) were incredibly talented and we developed some awesome shortcuts and techniques to rapidly produce the assets. Below is a handfull of the props I made. I created around 60 total including 9 "pitkits". Its crazy how good some of these look considering we had less than a day for each!

Kinect Star Wars - Summer of 2011 Vehicle, Character, and Level Art

Wow, it seems like it was YEARS ago that I worked on this game! I completely remember the excitement and awe I felt when my boss came into the artist room and told us we would be helping out on the tail end of production on Kinect Star Wars for the Xbox 360! Not only did we get to work with some rad new technology, but we also got to add our love and art to the incredible Star Wars universe! For the majority of the several months we were on this game, I built levels and assets to populate those levels. My team of dudes worked solely on the campaign portion of the game. My team and I built the Kashyyyk (Wookie home planet) speeder bike chase level, the rest of the Kashyyyk level where the characters are on foot, and the Felucia speeder bike level. This included modeling and texturing rocks, trees, alien plants, architecture, Sarlac teeth(!!!), textures for FX and tons of optimization and cleanup of existing assets provided by LucasArts. I also did tons of world building and prop placement inside 3ds Max and inside the Infernal Engine made by Terminal Reality. I helped implement levels, assets and textures into the Engine and organize massive amounts of art. While the team finished up on various other levels and clean up, I switched over to vehicle and character art. This project was also my first time using a source control program like Perforce.

The Republic Cruiser was initially modeled and UV by Microsoft or one of its affiliates. I remodeled sections, built some high poly elements and baked them down and then textured it with 1024 Diffuse, Normal, Spec, Glow, Reflective and Gloss maps. It is featured heavily in many cut scenes. All textures, lighting and renders in these asset images by me.

TC-38 protocol droid is one of the main NPCs in the campaign. The original model is based on the model for C3P0. I modeled high-poly sections for baking, baked him, UVed him and made all the textures.

Below are various screenshots from the Kashyyyk and Felucia levels that we built almost entirely. I spent many days building rad forest scenes and planting giant ferns and tentacle plants. The work on the wookie tree village was pretty sweet also. 

Lost Planet 3 - Summer 2012 more cool screens!

Gotcha some more screens from Lost Planet 3! These were just screen caps directly out of Unreal Engine 3 (WIP shots basically) and then some from the actual retail game (you can sorta see how the post effects were setup and some changes made by Capcom for gameplay purposes). This is one of the 5 multiplayer levels I worked on originally titled "Research Lab". We actually built a portion of it as an art test for them but ended up having to scrap most of it for performance when we began proper production. The map was created by me and Ryan Kuehn. We both did everything including lighting and FX placements as well as world-building and some design elements. Most of the assets were existing ones from the Campaign that we modified. Theres a couple cool little areas I highlighted in these screens. We built this map based on 2 (I think) peices of concept art and ended up having a lot of creative freedom (which is one of the reasons I loved working on this project!)

This shot is from earlier in our process. This is the area VKE had originally done as an art test. We had to replace a lot of the cool art that Cam Klevin had made and then try to get it looking good again. You can see tons of tileable textures and the lighting is crazy bright and doesnt have the right color. Still a pretty shot though! 

Forza - 2013 Bathurst Screens and promo materials

Hola! I spent a decent part of last year working Turn 10/Microsofts  Xbox One launch title: Forza 5! It was an incredible experience and was completely different than anything else I had ever worked on. I helped build 3 tracks from scratch and then polished and redid art for 2 additional tracks. The big one we did was Bathurst Mt. Panorama in Australia. My boss, Joakim, at Valkyrie flew out there and spent a couple days taking color and object reference photos and overseeing laser scanning stuff. Then, me and a couple guys made one of the best looking tracks in Forza Motorsport history! Our Forza team was maybe 7 dudes at its height (working on 3 tracks simultaneously), but we only really ever had like 3 guys on any given track at any time. So our accomplishment is pretty impressive (horn tooted!). We did every element of art on the track except the crowds, lighting and animation stuff. Also, after we handed the track off, there was additional optimizations handled by Turn 10 and Microsoft. Things i spent a lot of time on: powerlines and poles! Fences! Barriers! All the hotels! Terrain! Houses! Materials and textures! Signage! The pit area! Awesome radio antennae you can hardly see! I also did lots of technical stuff that you dont really see but help make the track really pretty. We all had to implement our stuff directly into the proprietary engine and use custom sets of tools and plug in written by the sweet lil fellas at turn 10 (and a couple tools we developed!). The brand new engine that Turn 10 created is awesome and ended up being really easy to use. Anyway, heres videos and art and radness:

This is a video provided by Turn 10 at the release of Forza Motorsport 5. It shows off a lot of the awesome work I did on Bathurst. Probably better to just watch it on youtube in all its HD glory!

Lost Planet 3 - August 2012 some more jams!

Pulling more Lost Planet 3 screens together! Heres some shots from directly out of Unreal of a level called Extraction. The level was built Cam Kleven and myself. We both did lighting and effects placement and we ended up modeling a lot of stuff for this one also (mostly terrain, walls and rocks/ice). Lost Planet 3 by Capcom and Spark is out ow for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC platforms.

I was primarily responsible for building this area and all the mega structures the players get to interact with here. The brief was that it was supposed to be some sort of mining level (hence Extraction) and was the only level that had anything really roughed out past a grey box. It was actually pretty cool because a lot of the large structural areas I designed and built eventually became incorporated into gameplay elements for the various MP modes that were originally just cool stuff I added in for composition, balance, and general radness! First time I saw this map being I was so proud of that! Gameplay! Woot woot!

We had an extremely tight budget for perf, so i had to use only a couple sets of assets throughout the map. Turned out pretty sweet anyway!

Lost Planet 3 - August 2012 Some sweet screen montages!

Chugging away on getting my portfolio stuff together. I pledge now to just do this stuff as I get content. going through 11 games worth of art and bad screenshots and blah is hard! Im finishing up all the Lost Planet 3 screens today. I worked on a team of about 4 dudes including me to create, from the ground up, the 6 multiplayer levels that shipped with Lost Planet 3 for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC platforms! It was for Spark Unlinited/Capcom and it was super fun! We did 2 man teams and i ended up contributing heavily to 5 of the 6 maps. We were also in charge of builds, and getting the maps into good performance ranges on the dev kits. that meant cutting and editing like crazy.

This was the Abandoned Base map. I developed the look and feel of this level for the most part. It came with no description or real direction so I got to really go wild! I did world-building, props, prop placement, textures, fx placement, lighting, etc (all of the stuffs) along with my good friend Ryan Kuehn! These images include edits made by Spark/Capcom.

Alpha Quarry map! Ryan Greene ( I collect Ryans!) and I built this level from grey box. As it has several scenarios, we had to build a lot of custom stuff for it. I did a lot of lighting and tunnel/world building and some effects placement. These images include edits made by Spark/Capcom. 

Lots more images (including stuf from inside the editor) coming soon!

Sorcery - Sept 2011: Monitors come and go. Checking colors.

Post attack! Going through my old work and building a new portfolio is so awesome! But i do have to suffer through having a new monitor and a old monitor. Neither look correct in any possible way. The new one needs to cure. You can set all the settings you want, but big, cheap monitors need to "make some biscuits" before they are even ready to lay down on your desk and accept some adjustments. and any kinfd of chin scratches. Just paw a little. On that note, heres a couple of screens from Sorcery for the Sony PS3. Hot off he heals of working on Star Wars Kinect!I mostly wanna check the color and saturations and such on my tv and my wifes tablet, etc. These are early screens of Endless Stair. I did all the lighting and effects for this section. The screens are from inside the heavily modified Unreal Engine 3 editor with nowhere near a production light bake, heh.

Entering the "lochbarrow" section

This is a WIP shot of Oredale that im kinda fond of. You can see lighting errors (wip wip wip) and a polygon orb that was temp greybox effect. hahahah Most of this modeled by some dear friends and myself  ( I just did flavor props like the fish marke-y stuff and detail areas). I also built this area up, propped it out and completely lit it up ( wip shot, man, i know that purple wall is weird, i was arting!) 

The skeleton battle area... Yes, skeleton battle area. Awesome.