Environments « RocketTree Art

Environments

Saturday, May 12th, 2012

Demo Reel

Demo Reel 2012 from Spencer Boomhower on Vimeo.

A sampling of work in motion. Demo reel contents:

1. Character design, modeling, texturing, rigging, and animation for a work in progress shepherdess character. Base mesh in 3ds Max, sculpted and hand-painted in ZBrush, rigged in Max and exported to Unity3d. Video captured from within a Unity3D web player.

2. Character design, modeling, texturing, rigging, and animation for Emoko, a virtual social space and web browser for the PC. (Background environment, tank top, and jacket bump map by Matthew Nolan, and hair sheen effect by Weston Tracy.)

3. Waves and surf Environment FX via textures and animated shaders for The Suffering, an action game by Surreal Software, for PS2 and PC. (Character creation and animation by Surreal Software artists.)

4. Environment design, modeling, texturing and animation for Yourself!Fitness, an exercise game for the XBox, PC, and PS2. (Character and animation by PBdigital and Kevin McMahon.)

5. Rigging and animation for Greysoul, an indie RPG for PC. (Character modeling by Project Greysoul artists.)

6. Character design, modeling, texturing, shaders, rigging, and animation for a work-in-progress freelance project on bike safety.

7. Character design, model, textures, rigging, and facial animation for Quin, a work-in-progress personal project. I used FaceFX for the lip-sync animation.

8. Environment design, modeling, texturing, and animation (of trees) for Intel technical demo Horsepower. (Horses and horse animation by Jason Baskin.)

Music by Air France ”Collapsing at Your Doorstep”

Tags: character, character animation, character modeling, character rigging, character shaders, character textures, engine, game, game engine, garagegames, Horsepower, Intel, modeling, models, Ogre3D, rigging, shaders, textures, texturing, torque
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Monday, March 2nd, 2009

Smoke and Horsepower for Intel

Intel created the tech demos Smoke and Horsepower to show off the power of multi-core processing for games. In these demos flocks of swifts and herds of horses (animated by Jason Baskin) are dynamically generated, and their numbers are expanded to push processing power to its limits.

Here’s a clip from my demo reel of Horsepower in action:

I designed, modeled, and textured the environments for these demos. In Horsepower I rigged and animated the custom-built trees to sway in the breeze, and animated the skydome clouds to give the vast space more life. All the different pieces came together via the Ogre3D open source game engine.

Here’s the lightmap I created for the terrain after sculpting it in Mudbox:

A shot from my Horsepower environment (and one from Yourself!Fitness) ended up being featured pretty prominently in the June ’09 issue of 3D World, in which I was interviewed about working as a freelancer:

In Smoke (below) I did everything except the fire and trees – which were generated procedurally – and the birds, which are by artist Jason Baskin.

Tags: demo, game, game engine, Horsepower, Intel, modeling, Ogre3D, shaders, texturing
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Thursday, January 1st, 2009

Touchpets for the iPhone

Environments and props for iPhone game Touch Pets: Dogs by Portland, Oregon game company Stumptown Game Machine (which got bought out by mobile game giant ngmoco).

I constructed many of these environments by directly converting artist Bill Muldron‘s excellent concept images into low-poly levels. Many of the detail textures in these levels originated as layers within Bill’s concept images.

These levels are extremely low-poly, enough so they can run smoothly on the iPhone, even with multiple dogs, items and props on-screen.

And here’s a few of the props I constructed:

Touch Pets Dogs Launch Trailer on YouTube:

Tags: environment, environment modeling, environment texturing, game, game engine, iphone, low poly, modeling, textures, texturing, touchpets
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Friday, February 25th, 2005

Destroy the Castle

An Intel demo that demonstrates the power of multicore processing by letting the player destroy a castle via physics-simulated cannon balls.

The graphics engine was ultra-simple, but I made the most of the limited technology.

I also created the creepy-crawly “Bull Maggots” that inhabit the later versions of the demo:

Tags: demo, game demo, Intel, physics, tech demo
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Thursday, January 13th, 2005

Yourself!Fitness

Environment design and construction for Yourself!Fitness for the XBox, PC, and PS2, by Portland developer ResponDesign.

ResponDesign helped pioneer “exergaming,” which uses game technology to whip users into shape. Yourself!Fitness features a virtual personal trainer who guides the user through workouts that adjust to the user’s fitness level.

With the exception of this dojo level:

…which was based on a design Portland art house PBDigital created for the game’s cinematics, I designed all the environments myself. And the dojo is vastly different than the scene I started with: I opened up the doors, let the sun in, and did a bunch of decorating.

I built the environments in Maya, lit and lightmapped them with Mental Ray, and exported them to Renderware.

Polycounts were somewhat restrained to make room for character detail and a variety of platforms. And shaders were pretty basic. Notice the reflective floor in the image above; it uses the same fake-reflection trick I utilized in the game Touchpets, i.e. there’s actually an inverted world beneath the floor:

Posted in Archive, Environment Construction, Environment Design, Environments | Post your Thoughts →

Friday, September 17th, 2004

Paintball Net

Concept art, characters, and level design for Paintball Net, a Torque Engine game by David Michael, author of the Indie Game Development Survival Guide. We took as inspiration for the art style the toon rendering techniques seen in games like XIII and Jet Grind Radio.

I particularly enjoyed creating this place that was obviously cartoony, but also had the seedy, real-world-ish setting of an all-American backwoods trailer park that had seen better days, but which was now slowly sliding into a ravine.

The whole point of course being to come up with fun gameplay that could result from such a scenario!

Concept art:

Posted in Characters, Environments, Gameplay and Level Design | Post your Thoughts →

Monday, January 26th, 2004

Ultima X: Odyssey

A church from Ultima X: Odyssey. I was contracted to do this and other models through the art house Liquid Development here in Portland.

Posted in Environment Construction, Environments | Post your Thoughts →

Wednesday, September 17th, 2003

Surreal Software – The Suffering

Surreal Software developed this survival horror game for the PS2 and XBox. The Suffering features beautiful yet terrifying environments. I contributed dynamic and layered elements like skies, backdrops, and water to the game.

The water made use of animated UVs to appear to swirl, and the skies had multiple animated layers to give a sense of depth and movement. In the following video, even the lighthouse and its beam are components of the skybox. The lighthouse is a simple cutout (which helped spare the PS2′s limited texture budget), and its beam is a semi-transparent texture on a flat polygon disc. UV animation causes the beam to rotate.

Tags: clouds, game engine, skies, surreal, water
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Tuesday, September 17th, 2002

Level Design – Drakan and Fellowship of the Rings

Drakan: the Ancients’ Gates was Seattle company Surreal Software’s PS2 sequel to its popular PC game Drakan: Order of the Flame. I was brought onto the game toward the end of the project to overhaul the level design for the final level of the game. Drakan: TAG got good reviews and was loads of fun.

Surreal’s talented artists provided the art for the game objects and characters you see here. I then arranged those objects on heightmap terrain I sculpted, textured, and lit. I also painted and animated the layered skies.

You can see the level in action in this play-through:

After Drakan, I moved on to a partial port of the game The Fellowship of the Rings, which was based on the book itself. I did level design, gameplay design, and some sky textures for this game.

As with Drakan, Surreal’s artists provided the art for things like the trees, plants, structures and characters you see in these shots. Then I arranged those objects on terrain I sculpted, textured and lit, and I set up dynamic effects like particles and skies.

I also set up gameplay scenarios in which Hobbits or other members of the Fellowship did things like follow the player-controlled Aragorn, and help defend against enemy attacks.

Here’s a clip showing gameplay in Weathertop:

That clip culminates in a scenario based on one from the book, in which Aragorn has to defend an injured Frodo from attacking Nazgûl:

Using Surreal’s powerful Riot Engine, I set up the character behaviors, making the unconscious Frodo an attack target of the Nazgûl, and making the Nazgûl run away when they reach a certain threshold of damage. After they retreated for a certain amount of time they would come back for another attempt.