C-C-C-C-C-C-Combo Post!

Well, it appears that there's been yet another lull in posts. That's okay, because life has been good at the ol' Iron Galaxy. We've been working extra hard over the past year to get Killer Instinct: Season 2 out to the masses, month by month. I've really enjoyed my time there, as they've been extremely welcoming to me. But now, it looks like it's time for us to part ways. My contract ends in a week. So over the past month I've gotten back into portfolio mode and started polishing my best stuff for the internet's eyeballs. I could have gone balls to the wall and posted a TON of stuff, as there's plenty that I'm proud of. But, I have a lot of other stuff I want to work on. So I went for just a few of my favorite pieces. The props shown individually are 100% me, but the environments aren't, as you'll see. They are the combined efforts of several talented artists, and it was a blast to work with them. And now, without further adieu:

As always, you can also view them along with my other stuff at www.ryansanderson.com

So now, it's time for a job search! I've got some potential leads lined up, and I'll know where I'm gonna end up pretty soon. While that's going on, I'll be polishing up my work on Mortal Kombat X and posting it here eventually. After that, I would really like to get my feet wet with Unreal Engine 4. Sooooooooo pretty....

On a side note, I've been getting some pretty sweet love on the Earthbound project. Many encouraging words in the Youtube comments, including people wanting me to do another level from the game. It's very tempting, but I kind of have the itch to do something grounded in realism right now. Anyway, you can check it out here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07vrPZKF8hY It's got over 3,000 views! Nothing amazing obviously, but it's a start. :)

Well, that's all I've got for now. Next time you hear from me will probably be during the summer. Hopefully, with more stuff to show off.......

Ketchup

Hey errrrbody!

It's been a little while, hasn't it? I've been taking an extended break from doing work outside of my 40 hour work week. That's gonna change pretty soon, as I'm gonna get back to doing personal/portfolio prep work in my free time. A lot of it is stuff that I can't show yet, so I'm not sure how soon I'll be posting it. Speaking of which, lots of cool stuff has been happening for me that's pretty awesome.

1) Two games that I've been working on have been announced, so I can finally talk about them. The first is Mortal Kombat X.

NetherRealm officially announced it slightly before E3, and then showed its first gameplay footage at the event. I did a pretty decent amount of prop work, and even a couple creatures (GASP!) while I was there. To be honest, I'm not sure how much they'll change my stuff since it's coming out in 2015, so I guess we'll just see. I'll be coating on some polish to my own versions over the next few months, regardless. When you'll see any of it depends on the order in which they reveal certain characters and story elements. Basically, if they've shown it, it's safe for me to post. But at the very least, you'll get everything all at once when the game releases. In one convenient shitstorm.


2) The second bit of news is that I've got a new job! At a pretty swell place known as Iron Galaxy Studios.

http://www.irongalaxystudios.com/  

The Earthbound project paid off in spades. My awesome friend Joe Grant showed it to the art team there, and they dug it. So I got brought on to work on an extremely exciting project, as a contract artist. Which is the second game I've been working on that was recently announced:

Killer Instinct : Season Two. They announced it last March, which was on the same day that I got hired on. Coincidence? I think not. :P  And we just did our announcement for TJ Combo at E3.

We worked our asses off on getting TJ and his level done in time for E3. I of course, helped with the background. I was responsible for the crane, wrecking ball, broken brick walls, and train tracks. Now we've already revealed this, so I'll probably throw some of it up on this blog and my website fairly soon.

And just yesterday actually, we revealed our next character, Maya. The pic above gives a nice preview of the new env. for her that we're really excited about. All in all, I really enjoy working at IG. They treat their people extremely well.


3) And finally, there's an independent project I'm getting involved with. And that's all I can say. I have no idea when it's going to be announced, but I'll post it up here when that's the case. It's something that I have a HUGE passion for.

So that's what's been happening. I certainly won't be as lazy as I have been recently, but there will be small updates here and there. I would also like to do something in Unreal Engine 4 if I can squeeze it in. Physical-based shaders are pretty  (O_O)

I Cannot Grasp the True Form of This Final Earthbound Post!

Yup. It's done.

Whew, it feels so excellent to have this finally done. It took about a year to accomplish, though it was on and off at times. But towards the end, I really hit my stride and got it in the can. The last week of production was basically setting up all of the camera work and events in kismet, and doing all sorts of tweaks. It was maddening. I would build my lighting with production quality (which takes about an hour and a half to do) and then as I scrubbed through the render of the camera fly-through, I would notice small things wrong here and there. And as my fellow Unreal users know, you have to completely rebuild your lighting whenever you move anything around. This happened 3 or 4 times. Setting up Kismet was a new experience for me. This is basically what you have to do when you want cool things to happen. In this case, it's for making the snow wind blow, moving the skyrunner, and making material effects fade in and out. The icicles were giving me some really bad flickering, so animating their shininess to fade in only at a close proximity was necessary. I did the same thing with the snow wind. I had a panning translucent wind texture fade in and out on top of triggering some wind-blowing particle effects. Overall, it's a nice effect and adds some life to the scene. Hell, I can say that for the whole scene. Compared with my old projects it feels more alive with moving effects like steam, fire, and wind, and rain. Also, I had to do some LOD work with the icicles. They were really thin, and the aliasing I was getting at a distance was really distracting. So to remedy this, I made a new model fade in as you get further away. It's one that has thicker individual pieces. Anyway, once that was done, I put the footage into Adobe Premiere and had to remind myself how to edit videos. o_0  Once I rendered out a spiffy new Quicktime, I took high resolution screenshots of my best angles. Then, I took them into Photoshop and touched them up a bit. Fortunately for me, I was really picky with the initial quality of the level, so cleanup was minimal. I also took the time do take my models into Marmoset and make some nifty wireframe shots. God bless that program. I used to have to take UV snapshots of the wireframe texture on each individual model and then render them out in UDK's static mesh viewer. And even after that, I would have to touch up the wireframe lines in Photoshop. Now with Marmoset, I can just load in the models with no texture needed, and do a high res screenshot. No cleanup needed. Amazing. And then I decided that I would show off some of the actual textures I did, namely the tiling rock, skydome, and tree textures. I had to do a bit of touch up for presentation purposes, but nothing too bad. So yeah, that's about it. Oh, and for anyone coming here from EBCentral or Starmen.net, welcome! I realize that you may be late to the party in terms of the "behind the scenes" aspect of this project. If you're interested in seeing how it came about, here's a link to the first entry:
http://www.3dryan.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2013-04-24T19:57:00-07:00&max-results=7

ALL DONE. Now for two weeks I become extremely lazy, because I've clearly earned it. Then, I'll get back into something new. I actually already have an idea of what that is, but I have to do some research first.

"That's my real job you know...I'm a billboard guy."

Reeeeeal quick update. It's getting so close...... :)

I'm thinking this whole thing will be done by next weekend. I'm not going to bother posting any progress pics, because I want there to be more of a surprise when it hits. Basically, I just finished the effects work for it, and did another lighting pass. There's steam, and smoke, and flame, and rain, and snow, and all sorts of cool stuff for the children. 

The main changes for the lighting pass were with overall color scheme. For both the day and nighttime scenes, they were looking a little boring. Just plain ol" white lights with just a tad of orange thrown in. So I exaggerated warm and cool colors when I needed to get a more specific emotion or reaction from the viewer. And lastly, I toned down how dark the non-lit areas are in the night scene. So just an extra day to get the lighting to a better level. I mainly played Ocarina of Time while I waited for my lighting bakes, so it was actually quite relaxing. :D 

And now, I get all of the functionality for the camera fly-through working. Animating cameras, spawning/killing particles, moving objects, all kinds of fun.

The final to do list!

1) Scene setup for camera fly through, and capturing video.

2)Editing video and taking screen grabs.

3) Getting it all up on my website. (forgot to mention this before, but it goes without saying. Oh girlfriend web designer, don't fail me now!)

"Aiiiiieeeeeeeeee! I screamed 'cause I didn't know what to do."

Pumpin' out updates like a fool!

The night time lighting for the scene is done. Was tricky in some spots, but I'm happy with the quality. This is the first time I've done a lighting setup that isn't just one directional light representing the sun in an outdoor scene. Which is strange when I think about it. But alas, Here she be.

It seems that getting night time exterior lighting in UDK is a bit tricky unless you know how to tweak the right settings in the world properties. Just making your dominant directional light (the sun) be extremely dim isn't enough. But once I had it down and tweaked the distance fog settings to be just right, the initial setup was good. Then it was a matter of adding in the spotlights and point lights, tweaking material settings, and adding in some subtle glow cards around the lights themselves. There were some times where I would actually need to use two light actors to get just the right look for a given light. An example would be the spotlights on the side of the dorm building. Obviously, the spotlights are shining light onto the snow below. But I couldn't get them to light up the actual sides of the buildings. So I had to add in an additional light for each that would be tilted at a steeper angle to radiate light onto the bricks. Lighting in UDK isn't 100% perfect yet, so this is what lighting artists have to do sometimes. Of course, I added in a new skydome and the actual models for the lights. I was teetering back and forth about how subtle the skydome should be. It has a borealis northern lights feel to it, which feels right for an arctic scene. I was concerned that it might be too distracting, but decided that it added a nice touch. So I kept it in. Maybe one of you thinks it's too distracting? Let me know if you do. I'd be interested to hear.

Anyway, short but sweet post. As it stands now:

1) Effects

2) Camera and kismet setup

3) Scene recording, screenshot taking  

4) Post production: editing video, screen grabs

Stay safe.

I'm A Photographic Genius, If I Do Say So Myself.

Greetings! This happened quite quickly, but texturing is complete! It seems that the only good thing this ridiculously cold weather has brought me is more time to stay inside and work on this stuff. I even got a three day weekend to burn through it since it was far too cold to go in to work. And here it is:

Everything here was pretty straightforward for the most part. The concrete got a little extra loving through the use of a node in its material called "World Position Offset". What it basically does is take the details (grunge, grime, etc) and changes them around based on where the object is in the world. It has a multitude of uses with other things. But in this case, it helped offset the dirt details on the concrete pillars so they didn't end up looking the same right next to each other. Adding piled up snow to the roof and gate pillars was a no-brainer. Not sure why I didn't catch it before. It doesn't look very believable when certain objects have a ton of snow and others don't, so fixing it was essential. The icicles were a last minute idea, as I wasn't sure how they would look. But the shader I threw together for them worked perfectly. I made three different types of icicle "cluster" meshes. One with barely any at all, and two others with icicles of varying lengths. It isn't in the original game, but I think it adds something that was missing after translating it to 3D.  

The shop had its challenges. Getting the subtle grit on the bricks to look good was tricky. I was going to use vertex painting to achieve it, but for reasons I still can't understand, UDK wouldn't let me paint on the mesh. It does this crap sometimes. Just comes with using Unreal. :/ So I used a plane with translucency on it, and overlayed the dirt that way. The windows have reflections as well as parallax (the illusion that makes it look like there's shifting space behind the window frames.) Getting both to work well together is a but tricky and requires a lot of parameter tweaking. Also, I included a subtle reference to one of the game's characters for fun. I'll buy a drink for the first one to guess it. :P

Not a whole lot to talk about here. Just some tents. I added in a more subtle snow piling effect to them. As if they were just set up a day or so ago, and only have caught snow drifting in the air so far. The normal bake I did for them didn't get me the best results, so I had to do a lot of fixing to get it to not look weird. It's always good practice though, as manipulating normal maps takes a bit of skill.

EB fans will like this (I hope). Brick Road always seems to be a favorite among us, so I really worked hard on the entrance to make it look cool. The original sprite doesn't give you a lot to work with, so I had to make up the idea of using nailed together boards as a makeshift sign. That, combined with the sloppily painted letters sells the "hastily thrown together" look. It was especially tricky to make the wood pieces look different enough, but not too different as to look funny. The other sign to the right of it has the same feel, with it basically being a markered piece of paper that was taped on top of a pre-existing billboard. And of course, who can forget the pencil statue? Such a weird prop to make, but fairly easy enough. Just a metal base with reflection thrown in for good measure. Fun!

Stonehenge wasn't tough at all. Luckily, the ambient occlusion on the rocks from the high res sculpt and piled up snow does most of the work. I just added in some color variation on top of that and it looked quite nice. The ladder was another last minute ordeal that added a nice touch. I wasn't entirely sure what to do with the entrance to the underground base for awhile, originally thinking it would be this hole in the ground that glows the same shifting colors that the interior has. But the fact that the characters use a ladder to ascend down made more sense. You don't see it in the original level's exterior, but I'm thinking it was probably due to graphical limitations on the SNES or something.  

And finally, we have Dr. Andonuts' lab. This ended up being harder than I anticipated. The main trouble was figuring out what to do with the main green metal. Having it be flat like in the original seemed too boring. So I ended up adding in a tiling sheet metal design to break it up a bit. Which makes sense in the real world, because that's how it would be built. Not that this project is about realism, but it helps to make sense of things when you need it. The roof needed something as well, as it is also just a flat green in the original EarthBound sprite. And so it got a proper corrugated metal design. The sign display above the door is essentially an effect, so it isn't in there yet. I added in some vents to the sides of the roof just to give more visual interest. They'll shoot out steam as well as the rest of the building having a more subtle rising steam effect. Which would explain why there isn't piled snow anywhere to be found. A creative choice I made to have it stick out from the dorm and shop, which are both plastered with it. The idea is that the lab is brimming with so much energy inside that it heats up the exterior as well.  Lastly, the Skyrunner. I wanted it to have the same clean feel that the pencil statue had, so it was just a matter of using the same reflective metal.

So that's that. I'm really feeling like this project's end is within reach. Such a nice feeling. Hopefully, I'll have it done within a month. Updated progress list:

1) Do a night lighting pass
2) Effects (steam for lab building and lake, rain, lab sign display, skyrunner rocket flames and antenna signal, and leaves blowing in the wind)
3) Camera and kismet setup
4) Taking screenshots
5)Video editing and screenshot fixing up

Oh, what a life.

The Fuzzy Pickles Post

I have no idea why it's called that. Well, it's an Earthbound reference.

Greetings, and most importantly, Happy New Year! I'm posting because I just hit a pretty special milestone on the Earthbound(EB)Winters project. Which is, having all of the "natural" elements completed. All of the things found in nature, nothing man made. This also excludes effects, such as smoke, rain, etc. Of course nothing is truly finished until it's in the can and ready to go, as always. Incidentally, I glanced at the last post I made and realized it's been since October, and I literally had NO texturing on this bad boy. So seeing the progress on it makes me happy. I'm proud that I was able to get so much done considering the holidays just happened, especially with me being home in Wooster for a week, not working on anything. Being lazy. Which is what we all need sometimes, right? Hell, NetherRealm gave us TWO WEEKS off. TWO. Which seems like overkill to me, but hey. Most normal, well adjusted people would think "Oh goody! I can you know, NOT work for awhile. Sit on my ass and watch tv or something." Or whatever it is that they do. I have no idea. Me? I use the opportunity to work some more. In all fairness though, about half of the time it doesn't seem like work. That's a luxury I'm afforded with my profession. Anyway, on to the stuff.

First thing is, trees. The trees were quite a bit of work. I ended up not putting as much time into the actual trunk as I thought I would. With the way the shadows fall off of the leaves, you just don't see it well enough. All the detail is ZBrushed in, which I wouldn't even begin to know how to get otherwise. The style I chose is pretty unique, so even if I resorted to using CGTextures on this project, it wouldn't look right. The big struggle was mainly in making sure that the leaves (or fronds, or whatever you would call them) look believable, but don't have too much high frequency detail. I also found that having too many holes where the pine needles show through gave it too much of a uniform spotted feel. So I steered away from that and added more general piled snow.    

The amount of snow itself was something I came more and more to grips with as I went along. At first, I wanted some large patches of grass to show through, giving the environment sort of a "It just snowed a bunch, but now it's thawing out a bit" feel. But even with a UDK terrain that has such high tessellation like mine, painting the grass in still didn't give me enough resolution to look good. So I stuck with just having some blades sticking out here and there. It's actually more true to the original EB art, and I don't think it would be possible to get the terrain to a higher resolution if I tried (and get it to actually run in real-time). Plus, it would negate a month's worth of work. All in all, I'm happy with the overall look.  

It was a pretty big challenge to get enough bushes, trees, tall grass, etc. to make it look believable. In the original sprites, there's not much to be had. That doesn't translate well to 3D, so I took more creative liberty with that than probably anything else. I started with the tall grass, bushes, and small grass blades. Once I had those, it seemed like something was missing. So I added in a "trail" of footsteps mimicking the player's path. It's the sort of detail that only EB fans could appreciate, I'm sure. ;) Finally, it started to seem weird to me that the only kinds of trees in the level were pines. Which is accurate to EB, but again, didn't look good in my case. And so I duplicated and scaled up some of the bushes, which surprisingly made really nice looking trees. It's great when you can get such mileage out of your assets. I was debating making full 3D trees, but the polygon hit I would take from it would be too great in order to get something decent looking. And it's pretty hard to tell except at a very close distance that they're just intersecting geometry cards anyway.  

The water wasn't too hard. I used the same setup I had in the desert project I did awhile back, and tweaked it. I changed the image used for the reflection to match this project's skydome, and manipulated the size and speed of the waves. The only real challenge was making it look good where the water meets the shoreline. I adjusted the depth biased alpha node to make it so the water fades out near it, and you start to see the details beneath.

Lighting was a B-I-T-C-H. Well, at least for the foliage. I messed with a lot of lightmass values, and tweaked the intensity of the light. Which doesn't sound like much to a non-lighting artist, but one could tell you that it's a long, drawn out process. Sometimes you have to do a full lighting bake after messing with just one setting, and there are literally hundreds of them. And when your baking time takes at least twenty minutes, it adds up. If I were still using my old machine, it would take at least forty five to an hour. So then, with the foliage. I. Hate. Lighting. Foliage. In UDK. Really, it's the worst. I kept getting that problem when some of your geo planes look dark and some light. I messed with tons of settings, journeyed through message boards, banging my head against my desk only to find that my problem was really simple and completely unnecessary. I had to make my plants NOT be two-sided materials. Yup. The main thing you have to do to make vegetation look good in games. I had to settle for making more geo planes facing in all directions to still maintain that full, lush feel. It increased my poly count quite a bit, but I had to do it to make it look good. Also, I'm not crazy with the shadows they cast. They aren't how real plants shadows look, as real ones are more defined, and not so blurry. This is due to having such a huge terrain, and upping the shadow map resolution for it would crash my lighting builds. So I'm stuck with having it the way it is or having no shadows at all, which looks even weirder. Lastly, I've decided to do a nighttime lighting pass as well. It's fairly easy to set up daytime exterior lighting, and I have always done it that way. So having to add in additional lights to make the scene have visual interest at night would be a good exercise. Not to mention that in EB, you start out at night and see the environment change to day. Another potential cool reference.          

The skydome was pretty straightforward to make. I have one 1024x2048 texture. In the RGB channels lies the background with the main blue hues, and smaller, more subtle clouds. In the alpha of that texture are more pronounced cumulus clouds that sit on top of the background. Then I plug it all into a shader that pans both the background and clouds at different speeds. It's a simple, but spiffy effect. And oh yeah, the sky is completely hand-painted just as everything else is. I'm really proud of that fact, knowing how much I've improved with my painting skills over the past year. That's the one moment in this post I'm taking to gloat. :P

And by far the most time-consuming of all things, the terrain. I did more iterations on this than anything else. The mountains started out looking too flat, so I added in those rock meshes that I originally thought didn't fit. Turns out that when scaled up a bit, and with different texture scaling, they added an extra umph to the cliffs that I needed. The piled up snow effect got some more tweaking as well. I was able to get more detail out of the piled snow by using the height map of the rocks instead of the vertices to determine how it piles on. For the smaller "mini" cliffs in the walk-able area, I had to take a different approach. No matter how much I messed with the settings, I couldn't get the amount of snow to allow for just a little bit of exposed rock at the bottom, due to the scale compared to the cliffs. The rocks would always look completely snow covered. So the solution was to instead paint on the snow manually with vertex colors. Using the height map once again for the mask allowed for enough control to get what I needed. Making the caves look right was also tricky. They're unique meshes on their own and required that I do a lot of trickery with hiding parts of the terrain and adding in some meshes to cover it up.

So yay! That's what I got. Still a pretty decent amount of stuff to do left. I'm gonna try to make as much use of my last 3 days off as I can to chip away at some of it. I just bought a crap ton of games during the Steam Holiday Sale, which attempts to distract me, but I think I'll hold out just fine. As it stands, this is what I got:

1) Texturing man-made assets
2) Effects (Rain, steam, leaves, flames)
3) Nighttime lighting pass
4) Animation
5) Camera setup and recording
6) Taking screenshots
7) Post production (making final images, fly-through movie)

As always, stay classy!