Quick Model - Toolau

After having no internet and no personal computer for a week (moving -- it was all packed), I sat down this afternoon and impulsively started a new model I knew would be quick, easy, and fun. The end result is this doll character named Toolau.
A bit of history about him: Toolau is a character from an old online role-play. He was created by the user "Horn", and was a magical voodoo doll whose origins are never fully explained. He follows around a euro-medieval ninja with the unenviable name of Chyaltze. Toolau is basically your typical wise-cracking sidekick, and becomes the object of affection for another bizarre character early-on. Nobody in the story really finds him unusual or odd, which begs the question: just how many magical talking dolls are walking around?

Took all of 3 hours to make. Despite the simplicity, he pretty much looks exactly as he should. I will likely end up rigging this one since his rig will be similarly simple (no fingers to manage!) and fun to play around with.

Just a Drawing

Whoa, an update two days in a row! Just felt like posting a picture I did a few days ago. This is a character named Normandie Sardigna, from the same story as the axe-wielding guy sitting down I posted previously. Enjoy.

Character - Ivan

Perhaps it's time I detailed a little more about my fantasy game idea...

It's one I've been reworking for some time. It's a fantasy/sci-fi turn-based RPG (whoa originality!) with Dmitri (the previous character I worked on) leading an excursion to find a legendary creature. This particular creature's properties are such that it's both magical and technological, two opposed forces. There's way more to it than that, of course, but in the beginning Dmitri leads a party of four to hunt for it.

This guy, Ivan... is not one of those four. :P

He's a down-on-his-luck shepherd living in the highlands of the world's largest nation, and like his jutted jaw and sharp features would indicate, he's a gruff, large guy. He's also got a Scottish accent.

Though it is but a distant twinkle in my eye, I do enjoy modeling these characters. Ivan's profile was very different from what I'm used to. His bottom-heavy head shape and ears that stick out make for an interesting silhouette. I imagine modeling his top-heavy, almost apelike body will be a fun challenge, as well.

Back to Work

Finally, I have decided to pull myself out of this apathetic (also pathetic) slump to continue work on the Dmitri model. Or rather, the textures, starting with the eyes and hair and other small touches.

Finally, he's got actual eyes instead of two vacant black dots. It's amazing what an iris and some fake shine can do to make a character seem more alive. The hair is another matter, however. I believe I mentioned how slapdash the UV map for it was before, so I've really just been layering a ton of different things on it to try to make it look good and hide seams. It's worked, for the most part, and I think I can say I'm satisfied with it now.

Other things I did were, obviously, that "stubble" on the chin, and added a bit of noise to the skin. The latter is hardly noticeable, though. The former... looks okay, I suppose. I can already see the comments from my friends: "It looks like dirt." Which is true enough, I suppose, but it'll do for the time being.

I'm beginning to doubt I'll have the will to rig this one. Rigging is a pain for me and I'll avoid doing it if I can, even if it would be nice to have this guy fully poseable. I guess we'll see.

Oh, and one more treat...


















AAAAAAAAAGH!!!

Vacation Over

And I have nothing to show for it. Well, except some art. Maybe it will tide you over until I get off my butt and do something more substantial. This drawing, save for the initial pencil sketch, was done entirely with my drawing tablet. Consensus: TOO PAINFUL. Seriously it took like 3 hours longer than normal and my hand cramped up something fierce. It does look nice, but I think I'll stick to inking by hand for now.

When You Stare Into the Abyss...

... the Abyss stares right back. There's some pretty bad problems with that face, not the least of which is the texture. His lips are darker than the rest of his flesh tone, which, when looking at it here, looks REALLY odd, so that's gotta change. I've been having troubles figuring out how to make the eyes function properly, since they aren't spheres right now. I figure a good solution is to actually make them spheres and change the face to accomodate. Currently, his eyes are unmoving nearly-flat domes with separate circle pupils. This could potentially work, but I imagine in practice it would be easier to do the former than try to animate the latter.

As for the rest of the texture, well... I'm not UNhappy with it. The gloves are a big pain point since nothing seems to fit well with them, and texturing fingers and toes is a royal pain. I am pretty happy with the overall ensemble, though. And the hair turned out okay.

Maybe it all just looks off because of that vacant, soul-crushing stare. It's like the toys from Toy Story when people are around, except not nearly as endearing.

Progress

The model's texture isn't yet complete, but then I've had a pretty busy, exciting week. Last Friday I was supposed to have a job interview for a teacher assistant position at a small, local media academy. Turns out there was a mis-scheduling or something, so the interview didn't happen, but I did have a nice little chat with the assistant director and we rescheduled for next week. While it's not a game development job per se, it most certainly is an opportunity to work with what knowledge of game design I do possess, particularly modeling and animation.

Anyway, back to the issue of the texture. I must not have adequate memory on my PC, because Maya will slow to a chuggy crawl if I begin editing the UV map now that some textures are applied to the model. It looks okay so far. No highlights or blemishes on the skin (it's still all that flat colour), or the hair (same), but the clothes are looking pretty good.

Oh, right. I promised a drawing today.



I do fancy myself a bit of a writer, and this here is a villainous guy called Ash Wordos. His name is a play on the demon name Asmodeus, and he's one of seven assassins in the story. Ash is the only one of them who isn't actually human, but rather a construct of magic. He can easily change his shape as a result.

Colours

The model took WAY longer to UV map than I had originally planned for. Maya crashed twice during the proceedings. Fortunately, not much was lost since I was saving often. The second crash was due to Maya using up so much memory it wouldn't let me save out the UV map. Whee, fun times.

Obviously, this is not nearly close to being fully textured yet, but there are some basic colours and a little bit of texturing on it. I mainly wanted to see how my colour choices would look, and overall it's pretty good, I guess. Originally his shorts were to be red, but I decided to change them to blue to keep closer to his earlier designs (his original had him wearing nothing BUT blue. He also had blue hair. Ah, to be 16 again...).

I've noticed I haven't put up very many drawings save for the front and side view of this model when I started. Next update I'll throw up a few sketches of other characters.

Character Model - Dmitri Hesker

Well, here he is, mostly, kinda, sorta done. At least where modeling is concerned.

Total time spent on it is hard to measure, since I didn't work on it every day and never kept track of time when I did, so we'll highball it and say it was 35 hours or so. He's close to 12,000 triangles, so about 6,000 polygons.

And yeah, his name is Dmitri Hesker. It's been the same name for years and I have no intention of changing THAT about him. Mind you, this model is the result of his seventh or so redesign.

Arms may seem a bit long, but that's entirely on purpose since his hands are so large. I tried balancing it off by giving him wide feet.

As for what's left to model, all he really needs is "straps" which go over the gaps in his shirt. When textured, those will be the large cross-stitches holding the sleeves onto the rest of the shirt. And a few tweaks here and there, of course. I plan to fully texture this model and rig it, but I'm not too sure about animation yet. Rigging will just be for posing it out.

What do you think? Comment and let me know if you think anything needs changing.

Stumped

The title of this post is just for the pun of it. As you can see, the mesh is coming along alright. Some areas need better defining, like the pectoral muscles (they look awful square, don't they?). What you can't see here is that the shoulders have geometry that comes off the pecs, just like actual musculature. College wasn't completely pointless, after all!

I was worried about the neck, since it was so high-poly that it wouldn't fit on the lower-poly body, but fortunately it looks fine, even with a few of the lines merging together right at the base of the neck.

One thing that always bothers me when modeling is the proportions, and if I should follow the drawing or use my intuition to make it look right. The legs were a lot fatter before I toyed with them to get them to look more like the drawing, but then it might seem like he's got toothpick ankles once I get the feet in there. Hopefully they won't be too short, either.

The loosen shirt he wears will be an issue, though. I'm still deciding how to include it on the mesh. Those detached sleeves won't be too much trouble if I plan it right.

Character Head

I started on this yesterday, and have thus far spent around 6 or 7 hours on it. My, how time flies when you're having fun. Or maybe I'm just slow at this.

I used the "side outline" method to model the head, at least at first. It's where you make a polygon outline of the head's side view, and then extrude piece by piece. I find it makes it easy to keep edge loops in check and is more manageable than starting from a cube. The eye sockets, ears, and hair were started much the same way.

Speaking of the hair, it's all attached to the head. It may come back to bite me later, but looking at it now, I can't help but just be relieved I won't have to worry about stupid transparency issues! The eyebrows and eyeballs are the only separate pieces on the mesh so far.

I'm much happier with this mesh overall than my last character attempt, which was supposed to be a shot at realism. I think I like the nose most here. It came out really well, and is more "realistic" than the nose on my realistic female model. On the female, she lacks creases around her nose because I left that until last and couldn't get it to look right. This time, I put the creases in as I went, and the result is much nice.

I would say this character's chin is a little small, but it matches the artwork almost perfectly so I'm gonna roll with it.

Catching Up

Settling back into things has proven somewhat difficult.

I moved back out to British Columbia to be with my parents for the summer, and I shipped my computer over here via courier. I just received it this past Friday, and the weekend has been more or less a drain on my psyche, fixing computer issues and spending gratuitous amounts of money.

I have tried to use Unreal, but the all-too-familiar freezing reared its ugly head, so I'm thinking I'll put the level on a temporary hold for now. I can't use Unreal for more than 20 minutes before it freezes my entire machine.

That hasn't stopped me from modeling stuff though. Even if it's just trees and stuff like that. With Unreal being so difficult, my personal drive to make stuff has been dampened somewhat.

I'll continue to post here, however. If not actual content as least some means of progress reports. The character design I showcased some time ago would be a prime project to get started on now.

First Forest Mill Shot

Yeah, it ain't much right now, but I wanted to at least show I've been making some actual progress on the level. This is just a small lake, and there will probably be a lot more to it once I'm finished. For example, I plan to include a building and a water wheel nearby, and the cliffs around the level will most certainly get a different texture. Some grass here and there would be good, as well.

Also, it occurs to me that I haven't posted a direct link to my demo reel here yet. While it is posted on this blog, the video is tiny.

Here is the url to a larger version. Note you'll need Quicktime or something else that plays .mov files:
http://www.rphaven.org/thalzon/Docs/DemoReel_CoreyHallberg.mov

Foresty Goodness

You may be wondering what that odd, green, umbrella-shaped thing is next to this post. Well, you would if you lived in, like, the desert or the antarctic, maybe.

This post was originally planned to have a nice little shot of the level as it stands now, but my computer was especially vile and cranky today and crashed twice on me. So screw it, we'll see how it goes tomorrow.

I've noticed I've become somewhat more efficient since I started on this project, able to make things easier for me down the road. For example, when UV mapping, I used to just use RoadKill, cut it up, organize, and texture it... And that rarely went well unless the mesh was simple. Now I know better, and use the scaling tool to make all the points line up in neat and tidy right angles.

I realize the above mentioned technique is probably incredibly obvious to many. I spent three years in game design school and never once thought of it. I must be a slow learner.

Small Stuff

By far and away some of the easiest things to model and texture are cylindrical things like pipes and pillars. In fact, it's often so quick and easy it often feels like cheating to not attempt to go the extra mile, especially if you'll have lots of them in your environments for whatever reason.



These are pipes that will be placed throughout the Forest Mill. No rust or leak spots yet, since the exact locations of all these pipes haven't been thought-out yet, and if my last level is any indication, sticking in rust before that just makes the rust look like orange, splotchy paint.

It feels a little silly to be focusing on something so minor, since these pipes will likely be in places the player won't necessarily look, like ceilings. In fact, before I wrote this blog entry, I was content to say these pipes were as good as done, but now actually writing it up has made me think harder on it.

Anyways, yeah. Woo, pipes. Maybe I'll show off an awesome BOX or something tomorrow. You never know!

Forest Mill

The level is coming along slowly but surely. Nothing's remotely presentable yet, but I have been putting in meshes such as trees and bridges, as well as one small building so far. Right now I'm just playing around with things to see what works well and what doesn't, both aesthetically and gameplay-wise. Though I admit I'm less concerned about the latter than the former for this particular piece...

The plan is to have several small buildings and one or two medium-sized buildings that a player makes their way through as they explore the surrounding forest. We'll see how that pans out, especially with my computer being relentlessly cranky.

Character Concept

In addition to the forest area I'm planning, I'm also constructing a new character. He's done in a more cartoonish style, with larger eyes and hands, a slimmer waist, and brighter colours planned. He's got a whole history mapped out and I've been redesigning him for a number of years.

This is actually my favourite style of character. Stuff like Team Fortress 2, or Pixar's characters, are incredibly expressive. Though I realize my design looks somewhere between that and some really generic anime.

While I do love more cartoonish styles, I made the female character in my reel because realism sells better than a cartoony character to many studios. But I figure I need to make this one character before I get hired and tied onto a project that will devour me whole.

Current Reel and Work

Currently I am working towards making a new environment for my demo reel. This new environment idea is a forest, growing around an old mill of sorts, with ruined houses and a graveyard. It'll probably be a while before it gets done, but I'm confident I can make it work. And unlike the first level in my reel (the mechanical prison), this one doesn't require gameplay elements; it just needs to look good.

Below is my current demo reel, which contains mostly characters. There's also the aforementioned mechanical prison environment, and a few sketches I made before modeling the demon eye monster. I do enjoy drawing, so I hope to put more in my reel soon, but I also want to avoid going too far over the 2-minute mark.

The level displayed in this video may be really, really grainy due to the video being compressed. Regardless I hope you enjoy it.

Greetings!

My name is Corey Hallberg, and I have started this blog to share my works in 3D modeling, game development, and drawing. I graduated from Durham College's game development course this past year, and as such I am looking for work! I currently live in London, Ontario, Canada (do not let the email address fool you! I am a Canadian citizen.), but plan to move back out to British Columbia pretty soon. I'm a huge videogame nerd, and also enjoy drawing a great deal. I hope I'll have lots of great work to share here.