SMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASH!!!!!!

Heya folks! How's everyone doing? Good? That's good. I've been working real hard as of late, making some pretty art. The Earthbound Winters level is all laid out, and I just got done Zbrushing all the assets that needed it. Unfortunately, I'll have less time to spend on this thing for awhile. However, the reason for this is awesome. Two weeks ago, I started up again at NetherRealm. It'll be another 9 month stint like last time, which means it'll last me until July-ish. Employment is gooooooooood. Anyway, on to the art stuff:

Drug Store Tiling Brick- A fairly simple tiling texture. I wanted it to have that almost globby painted over feel to it, with a bit of wear and tear. I exaggerated a lot of the details as I usually do. Baking a high-poly mesh down to a normal map sometimes washes out the details you need, so it's best to dial them up a bit to compensate. There's also a more plain, undamaged brick texture I'm using as well. It's not as interesting to look at on its own, so no need to show it just yet....
 

Brick Road Wood Planks- There are seven pieces in total that make up the entrance to the dungeon created by "Brick Road", a man who well, makes dungeons for a living. These are just a sampling of them. It's a makeshift entrance made up of these things, all hastily boarded together with nails and painted on. The overall final result isn't ready for show yet, but I'm confident it'll look just as quirky as the sprite from the original Earthbound version. It's a pretty good exercise to look at real life references and make stylized versions. Essentially, that's what I'm doing with all of these sculpts. I think a lot of the struggle comes from getting rid of / preventing high frequency detail from getting into your models. This is especially tricky when you use alphas, as they cause a lot tiny bumps to show up, which can be a huge pain to smooth out all around the entire model. It's worth it in the end though, when you achieve something that looks believable yet interesting and not just another photo realistic prop.

Cliff Face Detail Setup- I was banging my head for awhile on this one. I went through 3 revisions of the cliff face design and finally decided on this one. It's actually pretty simple and is used quite a bit in landscapes. You make a piece that has its own unique UV's, and then you make a tiling detail map that overlays on top of it. That way, you get nice close up detail while also getting the larger details that look good from a distance. It was tricky to get this mesh to fit into the existing terrain. I had to make a variant that bends around corners, two that are essentially the mesh cut in half, and one that houses a cave opening.

Shore Boulder- This is actually the second revision of the cliff face above. It turned out that I could use it after all on the shoreline. They made a great fit for this, and the fact that it's designed to be rotated all around gives me a lot of bang for my buck. Amazing how much mileage you can get from one prop when clever scaling and rotation is applied. :)

Stonehenge Pillars- These guys took awhile, but it was worth it. 6 pieces total. I tried to make each side look completely different so that the overall composition of stones has enough variation of shapes and detail. It's really interesting to see how different rocks look when they've been around for ages. It gives them a completely different texture then you're used to. I'm debating whether or not the moss will stay. It doesn't make sense to stay on in the middle of Winter, but maybe it'll still look good. Who knows.

Tree Trunk- This was my warm up model. It had been awhile since I last picked up Zbrush, but I was surprised with how much I knowledge I retained. It turned out really well though, and literally took forever to detail. No alpha maps here. Just good ol' fashioned sculpting. It was tricky nailing down which type of pine bark I wanted, and I must say that getting good quality reference for it off of Google is much harder than you'd expect.

And finally, some screens of the final layout. Seeing it all come together like this is what usually gives me that final push to finish a project. That feeling of "Oh my god, I might ACTUALLY get this done!". Wonderful feeling indeed. Not much to say really, it matches the layout of the original. I haven't made such a huge sprawling exterior since the Desert Straggler environment, and I'm happy to say that this dwarfs that in both quality and scale. So from here on, it's texturing (the big one, obviously), lighting tweaks, effects (new territory for me), and overall polish. You know, no big deal.

Many Happenings

Hello there, my peoples. Lots of new stuff going down this update. I'll begin.

1) The new website is up! As always, it's at www.ryansanderson.com. Once again, my excellent web designer girlfriend Jennifer A. Vacanti did all the web work. She's awesome. :) It's got new work and an updated resume. Speaking of that new work:

2) The stuff I did on the Man of Steel IOS app is up there in a brand spanking new gallery. I used Marmoset to pretty everything up. It's an excellent program used to present portfolio  pieces. MUCH more flexible than my previous method, which is the static mesh viewer in Unreal. The website is here if any of you are interested: http://www.marmoset.co/

3) The splash page is now my Injustice demo reel. Got it uploaded to youtube with surprising quality. MUCH better than my attempts with past projects. And there are new images in the stills gallery as well. I must say, I'm feeling pretty good about all the work I compiled from good ol' NetherRealm. It was a big jump in quality from my previous work. I suppose actual industry experience will do that.

4) Yes, I'm still working on the Earthbound Winters level. I'm currently sculpting the terrain for it. There will be an update once it's in place. The project got pushed to the back burner when I realized I needed to get my Man of Steel stuff together. But now, along with other things, it's on the forefront of things for me to do. Those other things:

5) The last bit of news is sad. My time at Phosphor is done. The contract is over now, so I'm looking for work. I'll miss working with all my good pals there. 'Twas an excellent experience for me. But at the same time, I'm excited.

 Excited for things. FUTURE things.

Models, For the Kids.

Yes, that's right. Models for all the boys and girls. But mostly the boys. And the girls.

So now I'm done with phase one, which is modeling all of the man-made props. The main thing I was keeping in the back of my head the whole time was to try to stay true to the original setting, while also adding in some shiny new design aspects to make them pop more in 3D. Plus, it's nice to add that personal touch. You know, sort of make it my own. You look:

1) Dr. Andonuts' lab was pretty straight forward. I changed how the lights looked, added a back garage area, and also put in an opening hangar in the top. More on that later. 2) Stonehenge was also pretty straight forward. Making it look exactly like the sprites would be extremely boring, so I'm making the arrangement of stones a bit more like its real world counterpart. There are 6 pieces in all, made to look realistic at first. But then I went in and exaggerated the shapes to give them that cartoony look. 3) The same goes with the entrance to Brick Road's dungeon (the entrance with a bunch of wooden boards nailed together). I chose to give it that messy makeshift look, because the character Brick Road is a bit disheveled himself.

 
 In the sprite it's a lot cleaner looking, due to graphical limitations I'm sure. 4) The pencil statue is of course a hallmark for the game, couldn't leave that one out. It's a pretty simple prop to model, though I added some detail where I could. 5) The tents are fun and they look a lot like the sprites. I still need to make two variations: one with its flap open, and the other with it closed.6) The gate is another example of a simple prop that I added some detail into for visual interest. I'll have some alpha planes in it to add some fancy detail elements as well. 7) The walls surrounding it have snow piled on top, yet another opportunity for exaggeration by modeling in big lumps of snow for personality' sake. 8) Last but not least is the drugstore that sits outside of the dormitory. It also has that signature snow, and is pretty simplistic. The size of the windows are multiplied for exaggeration (Word of the day) like yes you guessed it, in the 2D sprite.

So now I'll start digging into making the organic props. Trees, grass, caves, and the terrain itself. Speaking of which, I've done some research and decided that the best route to take is to do the flat areas using UDK'S terrain, and then add in custom static meshes for the cliffs. This is mainly due to the fact that making holes in UDK's terrain is next to impossible, and custom, zbrushed meshes will look nicer anyway. The snow and grass areas will be nicely blended, with custom materials and grass meshes. I'll make 2 or 3 variations on the trees which coupled with rotation and scaling, should do the job in selling variety. I reckon that the next update will be after all of the above are completed. It's kind of weird because there are actually people that are genuinely excited about this project, so I feel a little extra pressure to get things just right. Can't go ruining the Mother name now, can I?  :)

I'm also (possibly) finishing up on my contract at Phosphor in a week, so I'm sure part of my time will also go into polishing up some of the work I did there, and throwing it into the portfolio site.

Also, it looks like someone has (sort of) already done a 3D take on Winters. Though it's not true 3D, it's still pretty neato: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q99Z9pp1ASQ      

PSI Rockin'

Man it's been a loooooooooong time! Even more so than usual. Much ground to cover.

First off, my contract with NetherRealm ended in late February. I was just a week short of hitting my maximum nine months, so that was pretty fortunate considering that there are many that don't even make it halfway. I enjoyed my time there a lot, and I hope to make it back at some time in the future. Injustice: Gods Among Us is looking like it's gonna be insanely good. I'm pretty stoked for it to come out.

Fortunately though, I just signed a contract with the fine folks at Phosphor Games! I'll be on until the end of April, working on an unannounced title. I start Friday. Their site: www.phosphorgames.com

And oh yeah, the new website is up! You'll see some of the fun stuff I made for Injustice in there, thanks to my awesome web designer girlfriend, Jen Vacanti. By far the best stuff I've done. Her site is: www.jennifervacanti.com.

So as for my personal work,  I've literally had no time at all for anything except for the NR contract. Lots of long hours worked, to get Injustice out the door. But now, I finally have time to get back into that arena. And so, my next project:

I'm doing a re-imagination of the Winters area from Earthbound, a.k.a. Mother 2. I played through it for the 4th or 5th time recently. It's definitely one of my top 5 favorite games of all time. If you haven't played it, grab an emulator and dig in. It's one of, if not the best SNES titles out there. I'm also playing through Mothers 1 and 3 right now. 1 definitely has not aged well, but 3 has been excellent so far. As you can tell, big fan of the series. Anyway, this is the original map of Winters:

EDIT: Here's a link to a version of the image that will let you get zoomed in nice and good. images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080803013402/earthbound/images/0/04/Winters.png

I chose it because it's not ridiculously involved with the amount of stuff it has, but I'm confident that if I give it enough love, it'll look great. I've already modeled about 1/8 of it, so there's quite a bit left.

As always, I'm going to try to dabble with some new features that UDK has picked up since I left it last.

1)Advanced Environment Color- Basically, it's a way for UDK to not only give only one env. color that mimics the sky, but it also allows another color to influence the ambient lighting given to the environment. Specifically, the color of the sun.

2)Unreal Landscape- This is the big one. If any of you remember the Desert Straggler project, it used the old terrain system. Which was garbage. It looked nice, but I couldn't get a decent framerate out of it. It was SO bad in fact, that Epic scrapped it and remade it into this current version. I still don't know how it exactly works, which it will affect how I go about making the terrain.

3)Simplygon- A new tool that allows you to combine static meshes and automatically create LOD models for better optimization, right inside the engine. Should be handy.

4)There's a new suggested modeling workflow that should make mesh normals look better when they're rendered. I'm curious to see how much of an improvement it is.

5)Effects- Another big one. I'll need to learn how to dabble in effects work to get give certain elements that "WOW!" factor. I'll need steam coming from the lake, rain drops above Rainy Circle (lonely-looking puddle north of Stonehenge), and perhaps some snow and floating leaves added in. The trees might move slightly, but that's more of a material editor sort of thing.

I will also be trying out NDO, a spiffy new program made by the folks at Quixel. It makes normal map creation a lot faster, with more control. They also have a new one called DDO, which handles faster texture map creation. Still don't know how I feel about it. Almost makes texture creation seem redundant. At any rate, I don't think it fits this project anyway.

It's all going to be done in a more cartoon-y style rather than realism. I want to treat it like it's how Nintendo might do it, if there was a remake. Good points of reference would be Team Fortress 2 and Pixar films.

As always, expect to see progress posts. I won't be hitting any crunch for awhile it seems, so progress on this should be fairly smooth. On top of this though is a project I'm working on with my Concept Artist friend, Max Hudetz. He's doing a tasty fantasy themed concept painting, which is coming along nicely. You can see it on his blog:  maxhudetz.blogspot.com

Laters!