multitasking

This is exciting!
I've been rather busy lately with a new project. A few friends and I have been talking about making an XBLA game for a couple of years now, and one of the "benefits" of us all getting laid off at about the same time is that we can now get together to get things moving. Programmer buddy has been piecing together some engine stuff and setting up a perforce server, and I have been putting together the design docs. Hopefully I will be able to get some posts up here about the progress as we move along.
I haven't forgotten about the subway (I even have a couple of other game models that are done too) but getting the ball rolling on this has been such a long time coming that it has taken second fiddle. I will get some more renders up soon.

A quickie

I've been kinda busy lately and haven't been able to devote as much time to this as I have wanted, but I couldn't go to bed without getting something done. I made a quick texture for the ceiling and did a couple of quick tests to see how they were looking with some lights. I usually work with the ambient way up and no lights, I look at the textures in the viewport and do test renders like that until they feel like they have some depth. I figure that if they pop even a little under those super flat conditions they will be okay once there are some real lights in there. here is the quick texture I made (same rules as before apply) and a few test renders with some omnis just tossed in there. If it rains tomorrow (fingers crossed) I will be able to devote some time to this, after I finish these it'll be spec map time.

test render

No lighting, ambience way up. just to see if the textures were lining up correctly. The train needs to be unwrapped and straightened out too.

textures

Painting textures is a real art, one that I know very little about. But that was the point of this whole exercise. I studied animation in school, computer animation even...alot. However when I was there the focus was on animation, and the focus of the computer animation program was to teach us how to create pixar-like feature animation. This tended to involve lots of procedural shaders and high poly models. I'm unlearning.
Decided to go my own way with the textures mostly. The look is very "xbox brown" these were all created with a mix of photo refs, and painting on top of them. they tile horizontally.

and since I can honestly say that I did my fair share of "borrowing" during my early learning as a digital artist, these all link to the fullsize 1024x1024 images. If you are a student and these help you finish that render in time for finals take 'em. If you are not a student, and you feel that these are good enough to use in whatever project you are working on, PAY ME! I need a job.

WIP

SO I've been working on low poly modeling and painting textures. Here are some test renders of my current doodad. The model is based on concept art from http://www.nuclear-dawn.net/ . As an exercise my roommate (a rather awesome environment artist) grabbed a concept he liked and challenged me to do something with it. This is where I'm at.
model finished:

Getting started...

I signed up for this a while ago, and am trying to make a habit of updating it. I kinda feel wierd because all I can think of is "who really cares what he's up to?" but maybe somebody does, and hopefully they can tell me what I'm doing wrong (or right).