Realistic Environment

We had our final critique on our realistic environment assignment today. It was a pretty good critique as all of our teachers, the head of the department and visiting artist Vincent Proce were all there. I was nervous but it went really well and my group and I got great feedback.

I worked in a group of 4 on this. Our concept was a post war tree house inhabited by children trying to survive on their own. The tree is the only thing left in their world that is living and thriving. It is surrounded by ruin and waste as a result of nuclear war.

Here are the final screenshots, contact sheets and video deliverables from the project that were due today. We are going to go back and do a smooth camera move as well because the walk through didn't turn out as well as we had hoped. The reason we chose to do a walk through was to highlight the physics assets so that was successful at least.

(click to enlarge)

My favorite shot

Hero Bridge!!!!

Inside one of the rooms

Realistic Environment from Elizabeth Landis on Vimeo.

I'm feeling pretty good about myself and my work right now. Granted, I hardly feel human anymore, but I think I'm on the right path to becoming what I want and who I was meant to be. It's like everything finally clicked and fell into place for me. I learned a lot of things from this project about group dynamics, UDK, and most importantly about myself. Luckilly, the things I learned about myself made me feel confident that I can do anything if I stay focused. My peers seem to have a lot more confidence in me too.

All the hard work I put into this has bestowed its reward. Now we wait for the grade.

A Preview of Things to Come

Pure Creation

This is my first finished drawing for game art assignment. The one in the bottom right corner is the inspiration for my next assignment, the fantastic environment (gotta finish the realistic environment first, updates on that later). Besides that one, the butterfly monster is probably my favorite. I always wanted an attack butterfly at my disposal.

Here is some of the process that went in to creating these, doodles, textures, and silhouette variations:

Camera Move

M.C. Escher Inspired Modular Construction Kit by E. Landis from Elizabeth Landis on Vimeo.

And a better Screenshot

Escher Modular Construction Kit DONE

Ain't no rest for the wicked (awesome).

I would say more about this, maybe after I recuperate from this past long laboring weekend, but its hard to form words right now. I made a camera move vid too, but it needs to be tweaked a bit so I'll drop that on here later.

This one is a WIP shot before I did lighting and stuff, but I like it

a chance to breathe

So this first week was extremely intense, but getting back to work feels wonderful.

Today I got to eat, sleep and drink so I feel a little more human again and decided to update my blog.

Here is some of what I've been working on. For 3D we are creating modular construction kits, I chose to use the theme of Escher architecture so that I could use my ascending/descending staircase, which has evolved a lot from being just bsp in udk to a nice clean model in maya :). I just got to the texturing stage which is exciting because I'm doing something pretty new for me and making it stylized rather than realistic. The goal is to make it look drawn/sketchy, but still architectural.

texture progress in udk, still needs work

other assets in maya:

Dome

fence (this is actually four pieces put together

stairs, they can either be in the base or be two sided for more of that escher style

four sided building piece

arches, showing old and new topology

some of the assets put together with the stairs

Our teacher is giving us the long weekend to complete the assignment so the next update will hopefully be awesome finished assets.

idea generation tool: silhouettes