Archer Instinct - Animations

Working on the animations for  Archer Instinct. Still need to work on an environment and then we are off to the game engine to begin the programming process. I don't get to work on this game very often, but I am glad to be making progress on it.

Shot of the first person view.

Still need to work on the UI. The first person shot will help build the UI. I am thinking of possibly using an "x-ray" looking material for the bow so that you can see your cross hairs on the other side. However, I also like the idea of  using a depth of field effect or a focus point as the cross hairs. After all the game is called Archer Instinct.

Shot of what the model actually looks like.

More to come!

Weekly Sketches 02

This weeks sketch was inspired by SZA a singer who is part of the TDE team. Definitely not the greatest sketch of her, but the reason for doing this weekly sketch thing is to improve upon sketching. SZA is a great singer and I am a huge fan of her huge hair. Hopefully she doesn't disappoint like Badu and we find out that it is a wig :) Anyway if you haven't checked out TDE (Top Dawg Entertainment) be sure to do so. If you are a hip hop head you have more than likely heard of the members. They have some excellent music.

Weekly Sketches 01

Only one page, I know, totally weak! I figured I should start posting weekly sketches on here. I rarely have time to sketch, but I think doing this will force me to get at least one page on here a week. hope you enjoy!

Sketch Notes:

Tony Squark is totally what Tony Stark would look like if he were a bird.

I realized cats are a challenge to draw from memory.

Did a little sketch of my son Ruben the soccer player. Go number 3! He begins soccer this week, super stoked.

Takedown Recurve Bow

Working on a design of a Recurve bow that I would like to build. This is a final render of it from Autodesk Fusion 360. I know i know, I'm not using Maya! I wanted to familiarize myself with a program like Autodesk Inventor so that I can build real life objects. I was told that fusion was a great bridge. I must say that so far it has been a pretty easy transition thanks to the help of my colleague Nathan.

I wanted to make a "Takedown" bow so that I could easily carry it in a backpack. Initially I wanted to make a way for the limbs to clip in. However I need to do more research on this. I was able to find that Fred Bear bows have a clip in mechanism which is exactly what I wanted to do. However I figured for my first test I would keep it simple and do the normal bolt in method.

This is the area where the bolt will screw into. As you can see there is a nice little pocket that the limb fits into.

Here is a shot of what the arrow rest will look. Not sure if you can tell from this image but the rest part is not flat it has some curvature so the arrow slides off easily.

Well I guess now all that is left is to actually build the damn thing. Fortunately, I may have access to a CNC Machine so it maybe easier than I though :)

I may play around with some other designs for now I am sticking to this. Hope you enjoy!

Lowpoly Hand Gun - Update 3

I have added a Diffuse, Spec, and Normal map. At this point I feel like I am done with the project, but when is anything really done. Really there is still a lot I would like to do with it but for now I will put it up and maybe use it in an upcoming project or something. It didn't turn out too bad for 1412 polys.

Recently I have been exploring new avenues. I have been working a lot with Autodesk Fusion 360. I wanted to explore a program from which I can manufacture something. I love working in Maya, but sometimes I want to build or machine something and a friend\colleague of mine recommended Fusion 360. Soon I will post what I am working on in there.

Hope you enjoy the hand gun game model! More art to come.

Lowpoly Hand Gun - Update 2

It's getting there! Only a little bit more color work then get a spec map and I will do some renders of it. So far I have done all of the coloring in Mudbox. I will probably do most of the color work in Mudbox and then I was thinking about doing some color variants in Photoshop or something. I would like to see the handle in different colors. Maybe yellow, what!?

Lowpoly Hand Gun - Update 1

Here is the latest model with the Normal. I baked the normal map in Maya 2015 using the Transfer Maps tool. I was going to use Mudbox to do this, but I was getting better results from Maya. I've noticed that with certain things the Transfer Maps does a better job than Mudbox does, it's just a matter of testing.

The model is at 1387 Polygons. Now I to begin creating a diffuse map. I like doing the normal map first and then using it while I paint my diffuse so that I know where the detail will be.

Concept to 3D Hand Gun

A little piece I am working on. The concept I found here Brian Yam is the artist of the concept.

Here is a comparison of the highpoly version next to the lowpoly version with Normal map. Going to get an occlusion map, diffuse, and spec and it should be looking pretty good.

Mexico Coat Of Arms

I recently came across this model that I started a while ago but then got side tracked by another project. For some reason that tends to happen quite a bit. I'm glad I'm getting back to this model. I would like to finish it and send it through a 3D printer.

I am a big fan of the history behind this symbol I actually like it so much that I got a tattoo of it on my arm. Definitely a reminder of where I came from and the struggles endured to get to where my family and I are now.

Archer Instinct - Glove update

Here is an updated glove. I want the style to be more like a comic book so I thought this glove was more fitting. I'm still playing around with the texture design, but I think black and red is going to be the color scheme.

Here is a shot of the arms as a whole. I will need to take some reference images for the texture on the arms. Slowly but surely getting there.

Archer Instinct

First of all had to do a title change to match my game intro screen. Here is an update of the bow with textures and it is also rigged now. I have been running tests of the animations in Unity as I have never setup animations to be taken into Unity. So far from the tests I recommend completely cleaning your scene up. Most of the rig and controls don't translate from Maya into Unity. It's best to bake the animation to the joints and then export that into Unity. I'll update as I run further tests.

Textures are looking pretty nice. The rig is setup so that the red control is used for the bend of the limbs and the yellow control is for the draw of the string giving more control of the appearance. The blue controller is the super mover for rig placement and scaling. Time to work on the textures and rig for the arm more to come...

Instinctive Archer menu screen

Here is what the game screen is looking like so far.

I have finished texturing the bow model which I will post a little later.

Instinctive Archery

Some screen grabs of the bow for the archery game I'm working on. Hard to tell, but the normal map does make a difference.

Here is what it looks like as a whole. I'm currently working on the textures for the body of the bow. I will post more as I progress. So far from this experience I have learned that making even a simple game is quite a bit of work. I'm only in the texturing stage. I feel like the programming side is what will take up most of my time.

With the normal maps I spent a lot of time testing texture baking with Turtle. In the end I used a slightly higher poly mesh and baked the normal map texture in mud box which had excellent results.

Here is a shot of my UV's:

Instinctive Archery

Models for an iOS game I am working on