In the Future……The world as we know it is in a state of little progress. People are hooked into their entertainment systems, Stimupods, and couldn’t be happier. The Computer is responsible for your safety and well being, food and entertainment. One such person is unsatisfied with this existence and reaches out for something more.

You are Adam B4-72

This is your story……

BlinkMan is a side scroller created in UDK. The main mechanic is blinking, a “power” given to you by the computer upon leaving the your typical bounds. I was responsible for rigging and animation for the main character, Adam B4-72, the security robot featured in the Vault, the turret in the vault, the drill featured in the Under City and the animation for the screens opening.

Animations:

Adam B4-72 uses a 63 joint bone system, which not only allows him to do your typical motions of running, jumping etc. It also includes the ability to curl his fingers, breathe controls for the chest and lower abdomen, and his sash moving and bouncing with him.

In game he has 5 featured animations: Running, Backwards Running, Idle, Jump and Falling. All of these were set up by me and the help of fellow designers using UDK’s animation blending in the Animation Tree.

I also created a custom physics asset for Adam which is used in game for the rag doll effect upon death.

The Robot uses a 3 bone system and features 5 animations in game: Idle, Thrust Left, Thrust Right, Thrust Left Idle and Thrust Right Idle. It is used as a means to activate a defense grid to impede the process of intruders into the vault.

The Turret is a 6 bone system featuring 1 animation in game: Unlocking. This mesh is used for the typical defense grid in the vault and the boss grid at the end of the Vault.

The Drill is a 21 bone system featuring 1 animation in game: Drilling. This mesh is used within the Under City as a means of the computer cleaning up the old world.

The Screen consists of 11 bones with 1 animation in game: Opening. This is used to deliver the narrative and the source of communication between the computer and you

Assets:

The Power Cell and Connector are used in game as an activator for several puzzles in game. You find these power cells in the level and then kick them into the connector to activate and unlock a piece of the puzzle.

The Mesh is 1500 tris for the connector and 1600 tries for the power cell. There are several unique textures for the two, i created two of them, one for the power cell vertical emissive lines and 1 for the generator texture on the connector. Custom collision mesh created in maya for the connector.

A set of assets for grunging up the Under City, the old world of humans that has been at rest for thousands of years. The set consists of a broken door, a desk, chair, light, broken table, file cabinet and rubble pile. The whole set is 9500 tris.

Here is the trailer for BlinkMan, courtesy of Ray Ortgiesen.

BlinkMan Trailer

Zard Overlord is a turn based strategy game made for the iPhone. We really wanted to create a fun top down game that integrated with the touch screen capabilities of many devices nowadays, especially the iPhone. For our production class, we launched the game in Flash for demonstration purposes.

You have 5 types of units to select, the Snooter: a ranged class, the Snark: an assassin class, the Magor: the spellcaster class, the Grok: your shield wall, base unit and the mighty Krakish: a tank class the takes quite a beating. Each class was designed with several types of abilities in mind and this influenced the way our Lead Artist, Joshua Terry, created the concept art and how this led to modeling decisions made by Josh and myself.

Grok

Snark

Krakish

Magor

Snooter

I was responsible for modeling of the Snooter, Snark and Magor based off the concept drawing from Josh Terry. Each mesh contained about 2200-2800 tris. These meshes were then rendered out of Maya using an 8 camera rig for each 3/4 view, into 2D sprites. These sprites were then organized into sprite sheets to be used in Flash.

I then took all the characters and rigged them up with a bipedal skeleton system consisting of about 30-38 bones depending on the character. The rig contains basic IK for the legs and a simple FK setup for the arms, eyes and tail.

Each character has between 5 to 7 animations including attack, run, special attacks and death animations.

I was also responsible for the spell effects in game, minus the spike wall mesh which was done by Josh Terry. They were created using the same render rig as the character sprites and utilizing Maya’s fire custom fire dynamics with some “tricksy” constraints to control the effect.

Below is a sample gameplay video demonstrating all of the mechanics and art. Video provided by Joshua Terry

Zard GamePlay

The Cliff Temple was a concept I was inspired to do after going to Universal Studios and seeing the Poseidon Experience Ride. I wanted to create an environment that had a sense of mystery, delving deep into a cave near the coast.

Coastal Areas are heavily influenced by materials such as sandstone and very rough surfaces so I knew I had to get some textures down to portray this dry feeling. I also had to mesh this well with a damp cave when the player entered the space, and accomplished this mostly through lighting.

Sample Materials (Diffuse):

Sand

Sandstone

Cliff Face

In terms of the models, I needed rough cut samples that could have easily been shaped by their makers long ago and established.  Arches, pillars stacked together and sandstone brick walls.

Reference

In-Game

Reference

In-Game

To round things out, I needed to create some decals for the ancient power residing and some grime masks to break up the space.

Reference

Final Rune Decals

Sample Material Editor: Grime Mask

Breakaway is a game, in association with the Emergent Media Center, the UNFPA and the Population Media Center, to add to the ongoing effort of preventing violence against women around the world. It starts with presenting players with a world where they get to see the benefits and repercussions of their actions in a familiar setting of a soccer team. Getting them to feel this personal connection with the team will get them thinking more about who they are as a person and letting them forge their path instead of societal norms that have pushed forward an old school of thought.

On this project I was responsible for all the animations in the soccer mini games and soccer games the player gets to experience through the season. I was also responsible, past Episode 2, for an average of 30-80 frames out of the narrative screens  for each episode. I worked on a team ranging from 4 to 8 artists and we had to keep within constant communication in order to streamline the process of handling several models into a scene.

We worked heavily on getting  positions that make sense for the character roles and evoking their archetype, lighting the scene to provide greater contrast between the players and matching up characters to photo references we took as a team.

I am also experienced in the rendering process used for the project. The process requires two passes of each scene, one for base vector colors and one for shadow passes. These are then combined into swfs for use in the engine.

Check out the game at : http://breakawaygame.com/play.php?lang=EN

Visualize Burlington 3D is one of the many projects within the walls of the Emergent Media Center (EMC) and is in association with the City of Burlington. The goal of the project with the EMC was to model the buildings on a block in Burlington into 3D. The block that this project was focusing on exists on South Willard, Main, South Union and Maple streets.

The program that was used for this project is Google SketchUp which is a 3D modeling program designed to be used with GoogleEarth to display 3D models on GoogleEarth’s snapshots of the Earth. The program is very architectural and makes it possible to model the building with very accurate depictions of its foundation. The program has a library available with many textures to use but the beauty of the program is that you can add custom made textures which made it possible for this project to make an even more accurate depiction of our buildings.

One of the issues facing the project was loading models on GoogleEarth. Many people in the world who would be viewing our archive of buildings on GoogleEarth would not be able to load our buildings if they were too large a file size. With that in mind a restriction was put forth to have the buildings be around 1 MB in file size and to have each foot of the building be represented by 10 pixels! To put out a comparison, many building models you see nowadays in video games work off a texture of a face being scaled to 1024×768 pixels whilst the same face would would come out on this building model as a scaling of 300×100 pixels. So in this project we were working with strict optimization guidelines.

One of the ways this project is to be implemented with along with being a visual for GoogleEarth is to be used by the Zoning Department for the City of Burlington. This way the city can have building plans maked out and at the same time model the building and put it into GoogleEarth where they were thinking of putting it. So not only will there be footprints and landscaping plans, the city can also have a 3D aid to compare with rest of the city and the surrounding area. This way, they can tell right off the bat whether the spot is alright to build on or if that is not going to work in relation with the surrounding area.

Check it out on Google Earth! Go to Burlington, VT and turn on 3D layers on the side bar to the left.