It took way longer than it should have…
…but the universe has a way of tossing curve balls at you when you least expect it. …and usually in threes.
The Enchanted Forest Environment Pack is live and available on the Garage Games site.
You can read my post about it and comment Here, or check it out on the product page and pick it up Here.
It has been a busy month. I’m finally catching up on a few things that have sat idle for too long.
Fall has landed on Eugene and even though the sun is warm and shining, the air is crisp and the wind is already beginning to blow the leaves from the trees. I’m no fan of the cold but I am looking forward to some long runs in the cool air, and hikes in the woods among the fallen leaves.
On the art front, I’ve finished up a lot of contract material recently and will post some of that soon, stay tuned.
Also still waiting on the launch of the Enchanted Forest Environment Pack. I’m not going to draw any lines in the sand, but think it will go live this week, now that GDC Austin isn’t filling the publishers attention.
Here’s a landscape painting I just wrapped up. I’ve received a lot of positive feedback on this rendering style and have been putting in some effort to refine the process. This one was about 4.5 hours, not counting the Corona and 15 minutes or so I spent working out the sketch. The creative process aside, I’m aiming to get hands on rendering down to about 2-3 hours for this level of complexity.
This painterly look isn’t appropriate for every subject matter or project, but it is a nice contrast and change of pace from more gritty “core” styles. Being able to work in either of the two pretty much cover the spectrum, and server the purpose of communicating an idea.
The crew down the street at Mad Otter recently acquired the rights to the classic Red Baron games and posted a $1,500 dollar bounty for the original C or C++ source code.
Seems fitting since Chief Executive Otter Damon Syle was a co founder Dynamix, the original developer.
Here’s a pic from one of my projects to commemorate the occasion.
Red Baron brings back some great memories, but I’m talking way back.
I remember being obsessed with the original Red Baron, a vector graphic stand up arcade game from 1979 or 80, I’m dating myself now aren’t I?
For one sweltering hot Virgina summer I would save up my quarters and run across the neighborhood to the “Tiny Giant” convenience store every chance I could get and battle zeppelins and biplanes in the clear blue sky of the green vector world that was Red Baron. …That was before the intertubes took over the world.
Crazy how times flies, and the twist and turns life takes isn’t it?
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite It’s long time in coming, but my latest content pack has finally been sent off to the publisher (Garage Games) for release.
I didn’t end up where I was headed when I started on this content pack, but I arrived more or less where I needed to be.
In fact, I didn’t even start this as a content pack. The Enchanted Forest began as a contract gig to design and create an environment for an online MMO being developed on the Torque Game Engine. I retained the rights to the art in return for a reduced hourly rate on the contract. A good deal for all concerned.
After the contract was wrapped up, the pixels and polys collected virtual dust while I moved on to other things. But eventually I came back around to it and started updating the art with normal maps and reworking a good portion of the content with the intention of releasing it for the Unity Engine and Torque game Engine Advanced.
By the time it began to resemble current gen art content, Garage Games had their shiny new Torque3D engine going strong. Derek Bronson and Brett Seyler of GG eventually persuaded me to steer development toward Torque 3D, which would also give me an opportunity to learn the in’s and out’s of the next generation of torque tech. And I have to admit Torque 3D is pretty damn cool and come along ways since I first started using the Torque engine back around TGE version 1.2 or something like that.
Hopefully the community will enjoy the pack and put it to good use. There’s a dark side to the Enchanted Forest waiting to be packed up and ship along side it, but life is keeping me pretty busy right now, so that will have to wait a while.
It should launch any day now and I will post a link as soon as one is available.
-Todd
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite While waiting for a few lose ends to be tied up, I took the opportunity to finize the logo for the soon to be released Enchanted Forest Environment Pack. Stay tuned, I hope to be announcing the launch very soon.
This is a design for a product logo I’m wrapping up. I’m not one hundred percent sure of the current color scheme for the font, but it’s pretty close. It’s fun subject matter and it would be easy to get carried away with, but as they say, “time is money”.
Special thanks to my friend Ori who gave me the push necessary to rework this into a full color illustration when I was happy enough with my original black and white graphic version.
…Where’s the Corona
Following up my recent post of the Enchanted Forest demo, here’s a promotional video I just recorded that shows off the finished environment running in the Torque 3D game engine. The previous video was recorded in TGEA (Torque Game Engine Advanced), which is the last generation of Torque tech.
The most obvious differences in the video are the changes to lighting and minor global tweaks to the color palette for the environment. And the bitchin’ funky background track I added.
I hadn’t planned on posting this just yet, but things change. So here’s a short video from an environment I’m wrapping up. Enjoy. More info later.
The end of July has rolled around and brought some crazy heat to Eugene.
How hot is it? …it’s so hot, hot water’s coming out of both taps. It’s Africa hot! …”It’s so hot…. Milk was a bad choice.”
..and here’s a little sketch for some props I’m working on.
-Todd
Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite A while back I stumbled across a stack of old illustrations and found copies of a few character concepts I did in 2007 while at Garage Games, they never saw life as game models, so I contacted the studio and got permission to post them. Hope you enjoy.
These are actually a collaborative effort, in that I had everyone on the team brainstorming ideas and contributing to the design process. This approach had several purposes, it would utilize the collective creativity of the team, as you never know where that next great idea may come from, and also provided an opportunity to assess the design skills and habits of the everyone involved, which helped bring me up to speed since I was coming on board as art lead for an already existing crew.
Making everyone get their feet wet, so to speak, was also intended to create a sense of pride and ownership in the project, and hopefully find a direction that the team could rally behind.
The images below are the result of me taking designs everyone on the team contributed to and re rendering them in my own hand so that they had a consistent look, feel, and style. The basic sort of Steam punk/Fantasy style is based off of one of at least a couple hundred concepts that had been done prior to my arrival. The vault of preexisting designs spanned every conceivable theme, so picking one was sort of a game of roulette, or Russian roulette as it turned out to be.
I don’t get to do character design very often these days, and it was a fun throwback to my stint working in comic books. Maybe someday I’ll actually have time to turn them into nice color renders.
