Portfolio Blog

First post in ages - Flick knife

2011-05-15T01:29:00.001+01:00

I've not been doing any work recently. Trying to find a job has taken up all of my time. But here's something I just did. It's a flick knife. Quite high poly.

Footballer

2010-10-02T01:56:00.004+01:00

I've started to model a footballer for no particular reason. It's going to be relatively low poly, with most of the detail in the cloth done through normal maps made in Mudbox.

Here's a WIP

Update: Hands have been done. They've sort of come off as a bit of a caricature style, so I think I'll stick with that theme.

Honda Civic Type-R

2010-10-01T16:35:00.003+01:00

I started to model another car. I've not done much on it so far, but it's taking shape nicely.

Concorde

2010-08-11T01:04:00.003+01:00

Just got done modelling and texturing a Concorde.

Actual Portfolio Work

2010-06-08T17:41:00.009+01:00

Now that I'm out of university, I have begun work on an actual portfolio project.

For this project I will be designing and creating a lot of 3D game assets for an original game idea, which will all be imported into the Unreal 3 Engine and put into custom maps. The end product should be several maps in Unreal that are truly custom maps with little to no pre-made assets. This includes things such as terrain textures and skybox textures.

I began modelling some things last Friday, here are some progress pictures:

The first level for the game is set on Mercury, where a very small colony of humans live.

Top left: A small waste silo
Top right: A very large power station/terraform plant
Middle left: Three different size solar panels
Middle right: An outside hangar for vehicles
Bottom left: A large hangar ~300m long
Bottom right: A large waste silo

Bored... feeling my inner nerd welling up inside me.

2010-04-30T15:29:00.004+01:00

For jollies I've made a vid of me with a lightsabre in After Effects. Quality is poor because it's from my phone camera LOL

I've turned to the darkside

Cutscene nearly finished

2010-04-04T16:58:00.004+01:00

Bugfixes and better keyframing, then it's done!

Matinee!

2010-03-22T15:51:00.006Z

Oh how I've missed you, Matinee!

To be quite honest, I'm enjoying it a lot.

Update: Some screens of it running in game WIP

Motion Capture in Unreal Editor

2010-03-19T14:43:00.002Z

All animations are in Unreal in a custom package.

Motion Capture on Unreal Rig

2010-03-18T21:10:00.003Z

After a ceaseless day of toil, I managed to get my raw .c3d files into Motionbuilder, cleaned up and onto the Unreal rig.

The motions were performed by me at my University's motion capture studio. This is just one motion where a character is talking to another character.

Mercenary for hire

2010-01-26T00:14:00.013Z

Another character creation module. Advanced modelling for games engines this time and we have to make a character that can be imported into UT3 and used as a player character.

My character is a modern day mercenary.

I've begun to model his flak jacket. After this, will probably come his arms, then his legs and finally his head.

Update:

Upper arms and undershirt done

Update:

Added the proper muscle definition to his upper arms and begun to model his forearms.

Update: Arms down to wrist, legs, boots and knife

Update: Hands done.

Update: Head done and rigged to the UT skeleton. His shoulders are a bit wider than hey should be to fit he UT rig, which is a bit naff.

Update: Began texturing today. Major drag.

Update: Began texturing the torso and arms today. I started using Mudbox's photoshop exporter, but figured that wasn't great for doing the hands, so I created the texture map in Photoshop the bog standard way.

Update: Sculpted, textured, needs specular.

Gotham Model Sheet

2009-12-08T15:06:00.001Z

I needed one, so I made one.

Handheld final model sheets

2009-12-07T16:54:00.004Z

I've modelled, textured and rigged my characters and made a model sheet for each.

Update:

I've just done a quick mock up of both characters in game situations on a PSP

I love Igor.

Gotham: Done

2009-11-15T22:53:00.003Z

I've finished all the texturing and object placement, finally. Now it's time to get it into an engine!

Gotham Environment Update

2009-11-13T22:32:00.003Z

I began texturing the first of the three buildings today. I've managed to complete it before the day was out, which was nice.

I find texturing to be eminently more fun when working from reference pictures, as my artistic talent is incredibly lacking.

Angry Rugby player

2009-11-12T17:53:00.003Z

Another handheld character. This time it's a positively fuming rugby player. Kit is a vague representation of the Warrington Wolves kit.

Update: The face is god awful, so I changed it to a cartoony face.

Another update: Changed the model so it's sleeveless. Much better.

More University Work: Project Gotham Environment

2009-10-28T19:21:00.004Z

This is the second task given to us for Advanced Modeling. I chose to do the environment challenge where we have to create a small row of buildings from reference pictures to go beside a street course in a racing game. These buildings have already been featured in Project Gotham Racing 3 so it's a good way of comparing my work to professional work.

Apparently it took the artist 5 days to complete the buildings. Luckily I have about 6 weeks.

This is what I have so far. Approximately 2,000 triangles from a limit of 10,000.

Update: another building added, and some street objects. Roughly 2,500 triangles now.

Igor, have you watered the brains today?

2009-10-22T15:47:00.004+01:00

Low polygon model for a handheld game of the mad scientist's loyal servant, IGOR!

UPDATE:

Igor has a texture!

912 Triangles
256 x 256 8-bit texture

Aston Martin DBR9: Diffuse Texture

2009-10-13T17:14:00.004+01:00

The DBR9 with a really awful diffuse texture on it. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go put my hands in some warm water to stave off frostbite.

Update: Specular map applied, fancy model sheet:

Update: Aston Martin DBR9

2009-10-07T17:57:00.006+01:00

I've finished the model, it's at 1498 polys including the wheels and spoiler. There was misunderstanding about polys/tris and it turns out I had 1500 polys rather than tris to work with.

Now to unwrapping...

Low poly work for handheld gaming

2009-10-03T16:54:00.003+01:00

Another of my modules is modelling for handheld games. Our first weeks task was to create a desk and stool in under 750 tri's and then texture it. The catch being that we couldn't use reference images for the textures, they had to be all hand made... on a computer.

As you can see, it's god damn awesome.

The second task was to create a metallic owl from a reference picture in under 500 tri's.

Not too shabby, but just slightly over the tri limit

Very Low Poly Aston Martin DBR9

2009-10-03T16:47:00.003+01:00

Back at uni, YAY!

Or maybe NOOOO! In any case, I have a module called Advanced Modelling Portfolio, which tasks us with advanced modelling techniques.

The first task I chose was to model an entire Aston martin DBR9 racing car in under 1500 tri's. Currently I'm failing miserably, but it's not looking too bad

It's leveling out at 3000 tri's, which is double my limit. Also, it's looking a bit weird as it doesn't have any headlights yet.

Forgotten University Work - Grand Piano

2008-12-21T21:32:00.004Z

If you check in the archives, you'll see my animation of a pianist playing a piano. You don't really see said piano in great detail because of the quality of the video, so here's a render of the piano in all it's glory!

I regard this as one of my best models to date. It was fun, challenging and it turned out great.

As a side note, here are some pictures of some other forgotten models:

These are: a 1950's fire extinguisher for my team's Half Life 2 Modification, an MP3008 also for the mod, a pair of German hand grenades and just for fun, a Guitar Hero Xplorer guitar controller.

Farcry 2 Map

2008-10-29T16:33:00.004Z

Addition: This map is now officially dead. Many thanks to Vista for that.

WIP - Aston Martin DB5

2008-09-19T19:21:00.003+01:00

My current project is still a WIP, and it's an Aston Martin DB5.

That is so totally Phil.

Update:

I've not been working on it much, but here's how it looks so far:

Just need to do the silver bumpers, but they're fiddly.

Epitome of Epic - More Than A Feeling

2008-09-04T15:00:00.007+01:00

Rock Band is awesome. Some nights I go to my mates house to play it in band quickplay and we usually do well. Both of us are able to score high nineties percent-wise. This time was different. We chose the awesome song More Than A Feeling by Boston and rocked out on expert.

Double 100%, yeah! With my mate on singing, no less.

Another Map - Our House, in the middle of our street

2008-08-30T16:54:00.005+01:00

Another map project, this time a recreation of my village. It's going to be a zombie survival map to be played co-operatively over the internet with up to 4 people (probably through Garry's Mod or something).

It's quite a large map, probably about 1/3 of a mile square. These preview pictures are only of the street I live on.

Obviously set at night, the map should be creepy and full of zombies. Think of it as a very poor man's Left 4 Dead.

Portal's Edge - Mirror's Edge E3 Demo recreated in Portal

2008-08-30T16:19:00.003+01:00

I saw the E3 demo level for Mirror's Edge and I was blown away by it. I thought it would be a fun idea to try and recreate the level in Hammer using the Portal configuration.

I got about halfway finished with it and posted a video of it on Youtube:

Much to my surprise it got featured on Kotaku, which then helped it spread to other games websites. A week after posting the video it had about 200 views. As soon as Kotaku picked it up, it went up by 60,000 views in a couple of days.

This new-found popularity spurred me to complete the first section of the map, which I duly did and posted another video to Youtube:

This one's not as popular, but still good to have it there. The video says stage 1/3 which is wrong, there will only be two stages.

Small Arms for the 1980's - Sounds like a fashion statement

2008-08-07T19:14:00.004+01:00

Another weapon post. This time it's a slightly more recent weapon. It's the quite, quite sexy L85A2, which is part of the SA80 family.

My head's stuck in the 40's - More WWII models

2008-08-06T22:57:00.004+01:00

WWII was an extremely interesting period in history, which brought about many great machines. One such machine was the Spitfire. An icon of aviation which helped win the Battle of Britain for the Allies, huzzah!

Well, I thought it would be fun to model this gorgeous aeroplane in 3D Studio Max.

Holy quick texture Batman!

Anyway, with this model I was aiming for a low poly version and it ended up at around the 3000 poly mark, which isn't too bad.

Work in Progress - Chicago Piano

2008-08-06T22:37:00.007+01:00

The Thompson submachine gun is on of my favourite weapons and a sexy one at that.

I've not modelled a gun since I made some for a mod for Half Life 2 called Decay that I worked on with some guys from my University (more info on that in a later post). Anyway, for that mod I had to make a few World War II era weapons, so I thought "why not continue with this trend?".

Well I started this weapon and promptly finished a few hours later. Time sure does fly when you're modelling.

A texture is inbound, hence the WIP title.

3D Computer Animation - Looks like we just had our glitch for this mission

2008-08-05T16:22:00.000+01:00

I love space. I love space travel. So when I was told I would have to animate something using 3D Studio Max I chose the greatest venture ever undertaken by mankind. Putting a man on the moon.

After I realised that I didn't have enough time to recreate the entire mission, I decided that the launch would be sufficient.

Criteria for this module included using kinematics and particle effects.

There are a couple of mishaps in the video. The first is that the second stage of the Saturn V rocket actually had 5 engines, not 4. The other is I forgot to chop the end off the scene where the first stage is ejected and it goes on for far too long. So long in fact that you can see the Earth stops rotating in the background (whoops).

3D Character Animation - Walk like an Egyptian

2008-08-05T03:23:00.000+01:00

Call this little spat a YouTube dump because I'm getting all these out of the way early.

Here's another Uni module, which called for us to animate a character in any scene of our choice. I chose a piano recital, but one with a twist. You'll see what happens in this video:

As you can see the character fails miserably (as I did trying to animate walking, eh). I'm no animator as you can plainly tell, but what I am proud of is that Grand Piano. Genuinely fun to model and texture, which is surprising.

Also, the music is "Truman Sleeps" by Philip Glass and it's a beautiful piece.

3D Facial Modelling - My face nearly broke the monitor

2008-08-05T03:09:00.000+01:00

Another Uni module for me was 3D Facial Modelling. Simply make a 3D model of your own face and texture it using ZBrush.

My video this time, here's how it turned out. Overall I think the face part of the model is good, but the hair is abysmal. It looks like it's made of wood, heh. That was before my hair was long enough to tie back, which is why it's floppy like that.

Made using 3D Studio Max 7 (lousy "we're not updating because we suck blah blah" Uni), textured using ZBrush and Photoshop.

Optical Motion Capture - Most fun you'll have dressed in Lycra

2008-08-05T02:51:00.000+01:00

Uni work is usually a bitch, but sometimes you get a module that is fun throughout. One such module is Optical Motion Capture using the Vicon 8 system set up at the University by RARE. Yes that RARE.

Tip o' the flying barrel to my teammate Binnsy01 for the video.

For the module we were given two keywords that gave us our inspiration. We got "Anxious" and "Donkey Kong". Not the best combination but we went with it. What we decided on in the end was our good friend Donkey throwing a barrel, going to throw another and have it explode above him. The next time he goes for a barrel he's anxious in case it explodes like the last one. Simple right?

Anyway, I chose to be the actor and donned the Lycra. It has to be one of the strangest and most fun moments of my Uni course. Seeing myself as white dots on a monitor moving in real time was awesome.

After recording all the takes it was time to clean the data. This was a bitch, but after getting the hang of it I couldn't stop. We divided the takes up between the three of us but I ended up cleaning all of them just for jollies and that's how it ended up. I think it looks pretty good.

What do you think?

New Blog!

2008-08-05T02:43:00.000+01:00

Damn, I think I might have made the smart choice in saving myself £35.

Sod having all that "Welcome to my blog :P" nonsense. You're here and you'll probably be gone soon.

What this blog IS for is to showcase some of my work in the 3D modelling, mapping and modding fields. Anyway, a bit about me:

My name is Phil Goddard, I'm 21 years of age and I am currently on a year out from Staffordshire University where I am studying BSc (Hons) Computer Game Design. What you'll see in this profile is various work I have done for the course and other works I have done or am in the process of doing in my spare time.

Well that's what it's for.

PS: Welcome to my blog :P