playing around

Here's a quick landscape exercise from this morning...nothing fantastic but blobby alien guys floating through the sky is always fun.

The interesting thing is during the course of trying out some techniques, I stumbled onto this effect which is just the threshold filter:

I can think of about 7 jobs this effect would have really been great for...ah well...better late than never.

d'artiste: Character Design now out

and featuring this oldie but goodie.

good ol' zombies...

check it out here!

Just because, that's why...

Landing on Genericus IV

just brushing up on the ol skills

From the archives

Today we have some recently declassified concepts for a project from the good folks at Villian LLC.

Character design for games is always a tricky affair because there's a balance between tech and aesthetics that must always be watched. This becomes even more pronounced when the game is for the iPhone. Fortunately, with a strong AD, as they have in Tim Nice, it's possible to find a middle ground between being shackled by poly counts and joint limitations, and the crazy machinations of the concept artist ( what if we put rocketpacks on their feet and they could jump all over the place??)

some human trooper armor

and some crazy aliens

the tech restrictions really hit the alien designs more because all of the interesting things that would set them apart required more resources..so Tim chose to emphasize the surface material, since the shaders were the one thing that the engine was fairly forgiving in. A bit of that process can be found below:

personally, I'd have gone in a different direction with the heads, but in the end I think we got some pretty interesting designs out of it.

Branching Out

Home at last

So, the last week of February I had the opportunity to teach at a lovely little school called The Animation Workshop, located in a neat little town in Denmark. To say that the atmosphere here is inspiring would be the understatement of the year. The senior class is working on several short film projects which I got to advise on, and let me tell you, these guys really know their onions.

Student studio space, which will prepare them well for the chaos of industry life

some very cool maquette work going on

very cool town that I got to wander around in

some members of the Væsen team

A couple of crazy swedes who somehow wandered onto the premises

All in all, a fantastic experience and a fantastic school...I look forward to returning.

check our their work here!

You say you want a revolution....

well you know, we all want to change the world...

Down Time means

doing whatever stupid ideas come to mind

Social Networking

Exploring the social landscape and broadening one's network, before it was cool.

First post of the year and in a long time due to some long overdue down time. The idea of strangers in a strange land seems appealing to me at the moment as I'll be one myself in short order.

Hopefully more to come soon!