My house!

     I really enjoy 3d modeling and I usually try to model something each day or every other day even when i'm not working on a game. It is something that I try to practice and improve daily and get a lot of pleasure out of whenever I see my finished model. A 3d object or character that I created out of pretty much nothing becomes a thing that just exists with many uses. It could be printed as a real world object or used in a game or animation and so on. So for me, creating 3d models feels satisfying and rewarding at the same time. 

     If you have been following my work or this blog then you probably know that I have been 3d modeling for years now and I have probably created thousands of different models at this point. Of course I don't come on here and post a blog about every single 3d model that I make, but every once in a while you make something and it turns out cool and you are just so proud of it so you feel like you just have to share it.

     In this case, I recently created a simple house model which eventually ended up being an entire little environment. Which I will be using for my next game. 

     I was going for that old small American neighborhood type home while at the same time using inspiration from the house models in Silent Hill for the original PlayStation. I know it's just a simple house model and there really isn't anything cool or artsy about it. I have modeled houses many times before also but, I don't know what it is about this one. I just really like how it came out. Also, really proud of the texture work here. I think the textures are what really give it the feel I was looking for. 

Anyway, it started as a simple house, then I started adding more and more to it like bushes, some land, a wooden fence.

   Then I added even more things like some stinky trash cans on the side of the house and made the land the house is sitting on look like someone just cut out that piece of earth and now it's floating in the sky.

     Finished it off by adding a chain fence and exporting it out to use in the Unity engine.

     It came out so cool. Nothing wrong with liking your own work and being proud of what you have created. I think I like it so much because it came out exactly how I envisioned it. This wasn't just a random idea or something created out of boredom. But it was a concept I visually pictured in my head a couple days ago while working on my current game project. I thought about what the scene was missing in the level I was working on and I thought about this. I normally don't think about environments or environment design too much in games so it's unusual for me to create a model like this. One that is a game prop, full of other small props and a full low poly game ready (small) environment. I normally create each item separate and export it out to the Unity engine and then build the levels out of the parts I made. Kind of like legos. But this is all one piece and all the textures are baked to texture maps instead of using multiple individual materials. 

It looks nice, it's low poly, it's optimized, it's game ready. I don't mean to brag, but uh.. I just gotta say, i'm pretty good at 3d art. 

My billboard!

     While I was designing a 3d billboard prop/model to use in my game projects, I got distracted and ended up creating a 3d billboard with my face on it called "A Regular Room". Inspired off of the real-life billboard Tommy Wiseau used to promote his movie "The Room". One of the greatest movies of all time.

blender cycles render.

     I am a big fan of The Room and Tommy Wiseau and not too long ago I watched James Franco's "The Disaster Artist" so, a lot of Tommy Wiseau related stuff is still fresh in my memory. This caused me to easily lose focus and get distracted from my real game project which I am currently developing. Look, I even animated the billboard!

     And posted a very short video on YouTube...

     I spent waaaay more time than I should of on this and I could of done much more important things but I have no regrets at all. It was a fun little art project that was spawned out of boredom and I am very proud of it. Time well spent! And now with that out of my system, I can focus working on my actual game projects again...

Ready for 2018!

     Happy New Year everyone! I wanted to do a quick blog update to talk about some plans I have for the year as well as show that I am still very much active as an independent game developer. And putting out the first blog post of 2018 is the best way to do that! Before I get into the actual update, I just want to say that doing this blog over the years and seeing how much I have evolved as a developer is something that I am personally very proud of. When I said first blog post of 2018, it dawned on me that I started this whole adventure into game design, 3d modeling, animation, keeping a dev blog, etc back years ago. About late 2010-ish. It's crazy to think about how time just flew by. I certainly didn't know if I would still even be doing this after all these years. But i'm still here. I'm still doing what I love doing and still following my dream. It's an amazing feeling and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I would also like to thank all of you who have joined me on this journey and followed my work, visited this blog or checked out some of my games. You all keep me motivated to keep going and I appreciate it so much. From encouraging comments to harsh critiques or just reaching out and saying hello. It all means the world to me. So thank you everyone. You are all awesome.

     I have a lot planned for this year and a lot that I want to get done. I didn't release any new games in 2017 but that is because I have been working hard on multiple new game projects. I said this in my last blog post - Not one new game, but many new games. 

     Putting out lots of new games. That is exactly the plan. I am very excited for 2018, this will be a big one for me personally and I really do have several new games in the works for this year as well as a ton of other ideas that I would like to develop. If you are interested in getting a small glimpse of whats to come, check out my last blog post for more information as well as a ton of screenshots from many of my new and upcoming games. 

     Other then that, I really don't have much to say at this time. Just a quick recap of what I said in the previous post. Mostly, I just wanted to show a sign of life on the blog because I know sometimes there is a long time gap between blog updates and it could sometimes seem like I have abandoned game development. However, that's not the case at all. I'm still here and i'm just getting started. 

I look forward to sharing updates and many new game releases down the road. There is a lot more to come. I wish you all an awesome 2018!