School Talks

A while back I did an animation talk for my friends sister who teaches at a primary school for kids with blurry faces. Very fulfilling teaching interested kids how to draw and amazing how much they understood about animation! Especially in this industry we're going to have to sprint to keep up with the new generation who have always had the internet, mind-blowing CGI and computer knowledge!

Charity Art Auction

Charity Art Auction

Here is a scan of a painting I did (with shiny acrylic paint!) of an elderly woman using off colours to hint at different ethnicities and colours of the world as the auction was based around 'World Art'.

The auction was to raise money for sexual health help overseas.

Mythological Creature: Birdtroll

 This project was to create a mythological creature. For inspiration I started with a quick sketch as I decided to do a kind of snow troll. I drew half of it and flipped it, then by accident I noticed new shapes at different stages of intersecting the two images and made a few varying concepts with these new shapes.

For example, this image is the same as the top one just the two halves are crossing over at different points. This seemed to create a kind of banshee/troll face with huge eyebrows. I love creating creatures from the game 'scribble' so this actually came in handy.

I altered the design by adding in a proper body. For some reason the 'Chupacabra' came to mind so I kept this in mind when thinking about textures. 

 This is how the model looked in 3DS max

This is before I subdivided the model in Zbrush to export and gain an understanding of normal maps...

This is the high poly model (seperate from the wings) with a lovely material on it I just thought looked cool. Making this beast slightly odd in the texture became attractive at this point.

I decided to paint the creature in Zbrush inspired by Mexican Pinata.

The Normals maps didn't work so well because of the over altered shape in comparrison to the final design. However I didnt have much knowlege of Zbrush in relation to Max at this point.

Zbrush wing. The normals taken from this showed up a hell of a lot more than the main creature because of the fine bumpy texture.

Final model in 3DS Max. I learnt a lot from my mistakes in this project but even today I have much to learn about the practical applications of Zbrush tools. However this did ignite a love for the Zbrush software...

Vehicle Design: Desert Fox

Quick thumbs for a vehicle project. I decided to go for a vehicle for traveling on sand...

I played with the idea of using drill mechanisms for movement.

I personally liked this vehicle the most, based on a desert beetle, however it needs a few tweaks for practicality...

The top design came out on top in a vote so I decided to develop it further. My lecturer suggested I add treads to the front but this started me racking my brains thinking about the practicality.

Here is the final design for what I called 'The Desert Fox'
The design changed a lot from the schematics after I experimented with wheel placement and practical tweaks in 3D with a few mockups.
Overall I am very happy with this and learnt a lot about rendering in the process.
I used Vray to achieve this and I completely love it, I also used ambient occlusion which makes a hell of a difference!

Character Design

'The Adventures of 'Buck Lao'

This is a game about a boy from a city in the clouds and was great fun playing with the idea and designing levels. I drew him on flash for ease of animation and easy vector drawing. I drew him wearing blue clothes as a prophecy to him returning to the sky and golden hair to represent the sun and the gold his city was made from.

Here are two levels I designed with a Blue/Purple theme to differentiate the atmosphere from other levels and give them an identity. these two levels would be played in the order they appear and would be in the 'Descent' section...

This was a game I did an absolute ton of work for, but as it turns out my game engineer didn't start putting the game together until the day before it had to be handed in, so yeah...it didn't work and didn't even have 1 level. Kind of put me off working in a team altogether, or at least relying on anyone but myself.

These are some thumbnails for my low poly character model, all pretty varied. From feedback I concluded that the top left was most well received. I love drawing with white on a black background, I find it so easy to build shapes with highlights.

Here is a turnaround of the same character, however I had to get rid of the spikes on his boots after feedback from my lecturer about practicality, although I still think they wouldn't really be a hindrance...
I also needed to adjust the sizes of certain areas like the head.

Here is the my first final 3D character in 3DS Max. I rigged this character and took a few renders in different positions. Nowadays I would obviously do a better job with textures particularly in the armour with specular maps and materials.

Environment Design

'Chippy Lane' in Cardiff, this took me a full day!
I'm not 100% sure but I much prefer realising character in artwork rather than just replicating structures. However it did get me thinking about how I can add character to a building in my designs and the theory behind it, like how I would make a building seem intimidating or quaint.

Here are a few thumbnails to get some Ideas on paper (or photoshop?)

I thought it would be interesting to create a world where the sun had become a red giant, but Earth had the technology to survive with the use of a global forcefield and towers mounting ‘Graviton cannons’ all over the Earths’ crust which enabled space travel free of orbit. 

This would mean the earth would be a very different place relying on renewable oxygen supply facilities and colonies. From research into this idea it soon became obvious to have a theme based on spheres because of planetary travel.

I decided to create an interior 'Graviton command centre'. However this was a bit over ambitious with my technical limitations. The place was absolutely huge aswell!

I thought up the idea based on the machine from 'Event Horizon', one of my favorite films. It fired graviton particles and created a black hole in which the spaceship could pass through to succeed in faster than light travel through space.

I got a book detailing the artwork behind the film 'Dark Crystal' and it had an observatory which inspired me to create some sort of engine room/command centre.

College Showreel

A collection of many projects I did throughout my 2 years at college studying Interactive Media with Game Design.

I got a D*, D,D so very happy with that, and it came at a time I needed the confidence...
Those are Distinctions by the way not the whole ABCD grading system...and one of them has a star on it...yeah boy!