The Steely Stare

Been very busy working overtime at work, and then working when I get home. One of my items was "launched" into the Steam Store. It's got over 500 positive votes and a lot of great comments, so I'm pretty happy about that! Bay Raitt even commented with some ideas, which I thought was awesome! :)

link to the item in the Steam Workshop

My partner did the concept and texture painting and I did the model, UVs, and "tech work" of getting it in game and getting the glow working.

Just Another Little Update

Contuining work on my TF2 models. Not too much new content because I've been wrestling with Source trying to get the weapons in game and scaled properly. Made a hat and misc item (both incomplete)

A few updates on the wrangler replacement:

Builder's Blueprints

My blueprints got into Team Fortress 2! Builder's Blueprints - "Never bring a knife to a blueprint fight." They're up it the MannCo Store for $7.49 and people seem to like them so far.

Not too much else going on right now, just continuing work on all my personal projects.

More Engineer Stuff!

I've been busy working on my latest project, modeling a new pack for Team Fortress 2. I am working with a great concept/texture artist, so this time around I will only be doing the models and setting up all the maps. 

The sentry is just the top part on the red line - the bottom part is all done by Valve. I deleted the "rocket box" on top of the sentry and replaced it with the model I created. Link to the original concept.

Still a work in progress here, but here's the Energizer. A lot of changes will be made before this is done, but I'm putting it up here anyway!

And the roughest of the bunch right now... a wrangler replacement

The UDK scene has been put on hold for a little while, I was having a lot of trouble with lighting. I think the next step for me is going to be to get the trees and textures finalized, and then talk to a UDK savant named Andre Parker about the problems I'm having.

Also, my Engineer Blueprints might be getting into the game! A schema update was released that included the item "Engineer Blueprint".... nobody knows what they are, so I can't wait for the update to hit!

Working Lady

Well, I've been extremely busy since my last post. It's been about a month - I graduated, and a week later I had 2 job offers. I'm currently working at 38 Studios as a contract QA Tester, which is an absolutely amazing experience. Obviously I would prefer to be doing art, but working in the industry and meeting so many amazing people is awesome. Can't complain about the work either, it's really fun!

As for my art... I'm still working on it outside of company time. I found out that there's weekly figure drawing across the street. I went for the first time in months, and it didn't go horribly. This was a longer pose, I think I'm starting to get anatomy down, but my line weights/shading really throw everything off.

Portrait that looks nothing like the model (and also very manly)

Now that things are calming down a bit, I've started working on setting up a scene in UDK. It's got a lot of materials editing and special lighting, so it's proving to be a challenge. Also, a lot of water, but I'm just going to have to fudge that a bit.  I also started using SpeedTree, since that's what I'll be creating the trees in the scene with... It was a lot harder than I expected. There is basically 0 documentation. Here's my first test tree as proof. It's far from beautiful, but it's got everything I could ever want on a tree; roots, branches, knots, and leaves. Oh, and growth..magnet.. things.

I Graduated!

Well, I finally graduated. The project I've been working on can be found here: http://alfredasmith.com/crow.php

It didn't reach the level of polish we were hoping for, but it was a huge challenge to complete and we're all very proud of the result.

Looking forward to finding a job and (hopefully) having some time after work to spend more time art-ing. I really want to start making progress on my lighthouse again.

Source Is Hard

But I managed to get my schematics in game! I learned some Blender AND got the item prototype successfully in game, attached to the right bone, with team colors! Looks like I actually need to tweak the colors, the ao map darked them up quite a bit. 

Go me! Also, Source is one of the most confusing engines I've ever used. Here's the preliminary test in the model viewer (a huge milestone for me):