BY DAVE: 3D Stuff

So I just went ahead and copied this over from my cartoon blog, since it contains a good portion of my 3D work.

As fair warning, this will probably be a pretty large post...

I graduated from the Art Institute of Seattle a few years back, with the dream of working as a 3D artist in games. Just as I was starting to get good enough to maybe pull it off, I quit doing it altogether, due to a number of factors. Well, in recent months, I've decided to climb back into the ring. My job in the games group at Microsoft (as a Software Test Engineer) has provided me with a wonderful network of people that, up until about two weeks ago, I had neglected completely to take advantage of. So I sat down with an art director this week, who is an amazing talent, and he has agreed to take me on as a mentee, or apprentice if you will. The way it should work is that I will meet with him weekly and he will provide me with "assignments," which I will then struggle with throughout the week and bring results back to him. At that point, we'll chat over the results and continue the weekly cycle.

To say the least, I'm very excited, but I know that I have a LONG way to go before I meet the bar needed to even be considered for an artist position at MS. I figure I've got a good year of hard work ahead of me, if not two or three, but I'm willing to commit to reach that original dream I had.

So I've been dabbling in Maya over the past week or so and getting used to it again. I was please with how quickly I remembered the controls and most of the functions, and in no time I had modeled a nice little headlight. It wasn't much, but it did the job and made me remember how much I actually enjoyed doing this. I didn't save the headlight, so you won't be seeing it. Frankly it wasn't worth showing. What I will show you is some of my work from my time at the AIS.

Now again, I am 100% aware that my 3D stuff needs a lot of work. However, I still thought I'd share, since (hopefully) you'll being seeing more and more 3D work on this blog in the future.

Oh... and one additional note: You'll see that a lot (if not all) of the images have a 3Dave.com logo on them. Don't go there, as I think it just directs you to this blog. It was a website I used to have in school. I still like the logo though...

Let's begin!

First up is an alley scene that I did. It's funny, because when I was making that little headlight this week, I was racking my brain trying to figure out the best way to put a crack in it, yet on this image, I did exactly that on the window. Just one of the things I forgot.



Here it is again with slightly different textures.



This dimly-lit retro kitchen you see before you was probably the first scene I ever fully modeled using Maya. My three favorite things from this scene are the blender, the sink, and the wallpaper. OBEY THE FIST!



This scene was based on a class assignment. We were told to pick out any image we wanted and turn it into how we thought it would look in a game. While I think it's a decent job and might find a home in a game that was say five or six years old, I don't think it would hold a candle to 99% of the artwork found in games today.



This one is a ship from an amusement park ride. That's supposed to be dried vomit on the side and wing of the ship, though I think I could have done a much better job with that.



By the time I completed the image of the subway below, I really had started to get a strong grasp on the basics of Maya and 3D modeling. I still had a problem with organic objects, but I was getting to the point where I could texture most objects and make them look decent. My lighting still needed a ton of work though.



And finally we have the army truck that I modeled. Note that there isn't really a spec of dirt on this sucker, which I would certainly change if I could do it again. All in all though, it turned out okay, but again would not touch the level of detail found in most games today.



I hope you enjoyed this stroll down memory lane with me, and as I get new 3D stuff to show, I'll post it here, though I wouldn't expect to have the courage to do that (the stuff will probably look pretty rough to start with) until at least a month or two down the road.