3D Programs

I started out with 3DSMax but the university I went to was all about Maya so I had to learn that too. Eventually I came to prefer it. Mostly because I ended up putting more hours into it so I knew it better.Then I looked into sculpting tools and I tried mudbox. It was great and really easy to learn but later I found out that the school used Zbrush so I learned that as well. In that case I still prefer mudbox. There's a lot of great stuff in Zbrush that I use frequently but I just don't feel as comfortable with the interface.

Here's a bunch of stuff I did with all these programs. Some of it is pretty old. Most of it are just tests I made for fun and don't belong to any particular project, some like the face and the guitar were school assignments.

2D Digital Paintings 2003

I want to try to keep these posts relatively in chronological order to give a better sense of progress and I forgot to start off with some work I did prior to Twin Paradox.

I used to sketch a lot on paper back then but painting was never really my thing. I'd try it occasionally but I didn't have the habit of following tutorials as I do today so It'd take a lot of work to figure things out on my own. When I was starting to get the hang of it I found 3D so I ended up making very few actual paintings.

I'm only going to post a couple of examples here. The Halo 2 one has an interesting story behind it. I was a huge Bungie fan back then and I used to make a ton of Halo related fan work that I'd submit to fan sites. Bungie saw this art and decided to include it as an easter egg on the making of DVD of the limited edition Halo 2. I only found this out months after release of the game.

The other one is a robot.

I  like robots.

Twin Paradox 2005

A long time ago, a friend of mine and I decided that videogames were cool, and that maybe we should make one. He had some programming skills and I knew my way around photoshop.
We found a neat little game engine called Adventure Game Studio and we got to work. At first we had pretty crummy graphics so I made up for it by writing the most epic science fiction story I could think of. It was called Twin Paradox and it was about teleportation and alien planets.

I was digitally hand drawing everything but that was taking up too much time. Getting perspective right was one of the issues I thought I could speed up if I used some sort of 3d application to layout some blocks and draw over them. So I got a free trial of 3D Studio Max and I read a couple of tutorials. Soon enough I saw a lot of new potential and I got addicted to this new 3D stuff.

I remade the 2D backgrounds in 3D in a fraction of the time, things were looking up for our project. The story kept getting bigger and I kept getting better at 3D so I would remake old backgrounds pretty often to keep them at a consistent quality level. Months went by and we had done a lot of work, but we were still very far away from completing it. The end was so far off and we kept coming up with more ambitious ideas. Some of those ideas just couldn't be accomplished in the point and click adventure format, we'd need a full real time 3D engine to make it happen. We had no clue how those worked and even if we did there were no free engines back then like UDK or CryEngine for us to experiment. Eventually school got in the way and the project was indefinitely postponed.

Still, this project not only taught me what I wanted to do with my life, it also put me on the path of learning the necessary skills to achieve that goal. The work you see here was all produced from early 2005 to 2006.

First post

Right now I'm looking to get an internship somewhere. I need a place to dump my stuff so people can see it. I think the blog format will do nicely.