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. 

League of Legends - 2011 Alistar Unchained Skin High-Poly Sculpt and Poly Paint

More League of Legends stuff I made for Riot Games!!!! Almost done with the LOL portion of my portfolio revamp! This is the first skin I made for Riot. And it shows (j/k, this guy is rad!). I was still in school full time, working at Valkyrie 3-4 days a week, working at a bar called The Redwood 2 nights a week and doing my radio show. It was a stressful couple months and I loved every minute of it! I was transitioning from being a student and wrangling my portfolio together to getting paid to make awesome game art, preparing to leave the service industry forever and my radio show was really taking off!
You can see that the Alistar here is VERY different from the one I delivered. When they saw how wicked this one looked, they had me change his  color to blue and modify some proportions to make him more cartoony. This version is my favorite though, as I love the demon look to him. I think this sculpt and polypaint took me around 3-4 days and then another 3 or 4 to get the low, bakes and textures set up and get him into maya where he could have a rig pasted into him. He will always be my favorite!

League of Legends - 2011 Karthus Pentakill Skin High-Poly Sculpt and Poly Paint

This was the second or third skin I made for Riot Games crazy popular game League of Legends  (32 million players a month!). this was sculpted and painted in Zbrush initially. I took this sculpt and polypaint all the way to in-game model using 3D coat for the retopo, and xNormal for the bakes then PS for texturing. I think my turnaround for this dude was 6 days. He has a bunch of chainmail in some of the areas that may look a little bland, but I decided to do those in 2d insteads of 3d to save time. I really enjoyed working on the metalhead version of this character and tried to channel Eddie The Head (Iron Maiden mascot) as much as possible! Heres some cool little BPRs outta Zbrush:

League of Legends - 2011 Pantheon Skin High-Poly Sculpt and Poly Paint

I think this may have been one of the last characters I created for League of Legends while working at Valkyrie (I did some environment stuff for the updated Twisted Treeline map after this at some point). This character is called Pantheon and has a couple different looks. I sculpted and polypainted a high-poly version of him in zBrush based on some concept art provided by Riot Games. I made a low poly and UVed him in 3dCoat. Then baked out all his maps. Drew Gamble ended up finishing off the texturing and delivering him as I was outta town on a vacation (I think?). Decided to get some nice BPR renders of my high poly work (characters and hero environment assets) from League of Legends! So heres the first one!