Hello all,
So yesterday was the last day of the semester. With all of the finals completed everyone can take this upcoming week to relax and take a nice break from classes. This semester that just finished was my 7th semester. I'll be graduating at the end of the summer semester. Exciting right?! Around this time is when I get to work on finishing my portfolio and start submitting applications for internships and jobs for when I'm done. If you have read one of my blogs before, the "There and Back Again: What I Learned at GDC", you may be familiar with one of the places I am looking to apply to. This is a very exciting time because I get to knuckle down and focus on doing the things I love and create a portfolio that will. I have a couple classes next semester that should really help me out with this. I'm taking Advanced Environment creation, which is a class that the professor doesn't necessarily teach. We are given two assignments throughout the semester, the midterm and the final, that are supposed to be completed environments implemented into a game engine. This is great because there are no restrictions, no limits, and I can choose whatever style I want. I already know what I want to do for one of the environments but I'm a little iffy on the last one. My first one I want to do is a Jak and Daxter Themed race track. I have started this environment in my beginning Environment and FX class, and now I want to finish it. I want to expand upon my original concept that you see below and make the environment much larger and have a lot more smaller detailed assets like the game Jak X.
Now I have already modeled out this island but to make it bigger I will have to add a lot more. I also need to texture this as well. I want to show on my portfolio the start to finish, or from concept art to in game playable level. This is going to be a lot of work but you can see below I already have a good start on it so far. With a couple other classes I am taking next semester such as Intro to Programming and Lighting, Materials and Shaders I feel pretty confident in getting this done.
To make this look more like a Jak and Daxter game the modeling has to be very simple. The textures in the Jak and Daxter series is what makes it look the way it does. As you can see below this is a nice and simple style to match. I want to go a bit more detailed than what they did because Game Engines now allow much more to be done detail wise.
[su_youtube url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmaIcDEQD0M"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi7KPDi_yQI&feature=youtu.be[/su_youtube]
As for the other environment I am going to do, I am debating between two different styles. I want to do a dinning room or a living room scene in the style of either The Walking Dead or a more fantasy stylized (like Dota 2 or World of Warcraft) room. When I go into the industry I am looking to do hard surface modeling. Creating a living room scene like this can greatly show off my skills in this field. As you can see below these two styles are very different from each other and require a great amount of detail in them.
If you're looking for inspiration then I recommend going to either SketchFab, or ArtStation. These two websites are for artists to post their work. They both can be used as portfolio website. These are fairly popular websites that have a lot of great work in them. I really just recommend that you go through these website just to look and see what some other artist are doing. It can be really inspiring.
That's all for today!
Karina
