Steampunk Gun

Wanted to do a nice hard surface piece... here's a steampunk gun I'm working on for a steampunk female character i plan on doing... it is inpired by a concept by Vinod Rams - i took elements of all his guns and combined them.

Final piece:
2,888 triangles
diffuse/spec/normal maps 1024 (can be shrunk to 512's)

here's the end textured piece w/ a wireframe and the textures... These shots are NOT RENDERS they're just maya screengrabs w/ a black background and 3 lights.






here's the hi-res, the smooth proxy i made before i took the gun into zbrush, and the lo-res cage...

Anatomy study - Arm

wanted to work some anatomy studies while i figure out what to do for my next character. Here's an arm I did to get a better feel for the muscles that work into the elbow and on the inside of the upper arm.

Louis - Beastie Pirate - GameRes - Apr/May '10

This is a game res piece I've been working on. I needed more game res work on my portfolio. I knew I wanted to work from a concept that wasn't my own and I also wanted to play with some fur to see what i could come up with and do. I based this work off a piece by the concept artist Vinod Rams. The actual piece titled Louis can be found here -> Louis concept.

DETAILS:
-created using maya, zbrush, photoshop
-8526 faces (9824 with weapons)
-1 1024 24 bit color/8 bit spec/24 bit normal (main bulk)
-1 512 24 bit color/8 bit spec/24 bit normal (weapons)
-1 256 32 bit color/8 bit spec/24 bit normal (fur and bits w/ alpha)
-duration - 5 weeks (fur had to be redone a few times till i got it right)

here're the maya screengrabs. The first two are NOT RENDERS. They're just maya screengrabs with 3 lights.








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-The images in this post are copyright of Adam Smith
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Gas Harvester - Personal Project Nov 2009 - Jan 2010

--I started this project after i took some time off. For this piece i wanted to just throw myself into the details and the goal was to create something that was fantasty driven but subtle enough to seem as though it could feasibly exist. I wanted to create something wholly from myself without mimicing someone else's concepts. My fiance suggested the theme of alien farmer and it sounded like a fun challenge. I pursued my initial idea of an alien gas harvester. I wanted him to be an older blue collar worker with more common apparel and gear but worn and used. I also knew i wanted to keep fairly human-esque anatomy and proportions so i could also turn it into an anatomy study. I wanted to portray a sense of 'worn determination'. I chose the specific proportions of larger hands and feet to portray more a sense of him working w/ his hands and feet to get his tasks done. I also wanted to portray his mild alien-ness in the form of his evolved Olfactory glands which help him detect subtle molecular changes in the air.

--I built him in such a way that i could have a 'nude' basemesh and gear and clothing as seperate pieces so i could focus on each completely as opposed to using the tricks of game models and only creating what you 'see' and 'need' prior to proxying, mirroring, etc. All of his base mesh was created in maya and then imported into zbrush to sculpt out the details. Initially I wanted to keep it a sculpt but I think I would like to eventually take it to game resolution complete with textures and materials. The final images are renders from zbrush.


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WIP Harvester

I started making the actual harvester he uses in his trade. I thought it would be a fun image for an older blue collar guy to be effortlessly pulling around this behemoth of a machine while going through his daily job routines. So i started w/ some blocky 3d concepts to get a sense of the shape and put a lot more thought into the logistics of such a machine as i was playing with shapes. The core elements i wanted to portray was a typical road tanker crossed w/ these spider like support legs with repulsor lifts and a gyro mounted stabilizing arm to assist in moving it around. I try to make sure everything can be fully articulated if it was a real object, so all the pieces or the legs and gyro arm are setup heirarchally to swivel or bend appropriately. It's still very much a WIP and this is only maybe 20% of the modeling done (about 3 days into the construction of the vehicle itself). I might end up upping the scale of the tanks themselves and I still need to add the extending vacuum arm off the top and the tons of hoses, cables, and details to bring this piece to life.







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-all images in this post are the copyright of Adam Smith
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Female Head Study July 2009

Throughout Infamous i used Mudbox to create my hi-poly sculpts. So, after Infamous was over it was time to pickup zbrush 3.0 and relearn the program. After creating a few random things I created this female head study. It was sculpted and painted entirely in zbrush.



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-the image in this post is the copyright of Adam Smith
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Infamous - Suckerpunch Productions (last quarter 2005 - first quarter 2009)

--The first year of this project i was an Environment artist before moving over to Character art. While working as an environment artist i was responsible for creating prototypes and figuring out pipelines and tech we needed to use for this project (mainly during pre-production). I worked along w/ the other environment artists to create props and build the worlds out as needed for demos. When we were creating assets I was generally given a blocked out area w/ primitives from the designer or lead environment artist or i was handed some mood concept piece (usually very loose ideas of what was wanted w/ a lot of flex in the details). I would then build all the assets from scratch and place them to create the visual cityscapes desired. Each environment artist was generally responsible for a specific area of what was needed. It was still early on in production when i moved into character art, before the environments fully evolved into the pipeline and full construction of the end product.
--As for character art, I switched over in 2006 and was the first 'exclusive' character artist at Suckerpunch. Prior to this they had animators modeling characters and rigging them while texture artists textured them. There was still a long haul from where i jumped on to the end product. Tons of iteration on pipelines, logistics, organization, pedestrian protocal, technology, etc. It wasn't until probably the 1st or 2nd quarter of 2008 that we settled into a set construction rhythm (up to the end we'd continually get features or better scripts or shaders).
--This was a challenging project for me. We had 2 character artists for most of the project and our deadlines were sometimes exceptionally short. Due to the overall scope of the game and Design challenges, we had to be clever about how we reused assets during the construction process. In the end there aren't many pieces i haven't touched in some manner and there aren't many pieces i personally did that weren't also touched by the other character artist. The touchup and iterative process was more a question of who had time to do what and when, as opposed to individual asset ownership.

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I'm only going to show a couple of images here of my favorite pieces from Infamous and a few videos of ingame assets.

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This first image is the second full character i created for infamous complete from start to finish:

Trish - fourth quarter 2007
DETAILS:
-roughly 12k triangles
-2.8 MB texture budget (diffuse/spec/normal/AO + some custom shader masks)
*There are several diffuse maps since each major piece had to essentially
have it's own set of textures for re-usability
-I did not make the shoes
-Programs Used: maya, mudbox, photoshop
-this image is using proprietary shaders in the maya hardware viewport with 1 light
added
-construction time: 4 weeks


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This is the First Sons conduit. He's fed this sort of gas that alters his physical nature and enables him to be a conduit for channeling powers. His body was started from a basemesh created by someone else for an asset that was never used. The proportions are as intended by the concept to portray the conduit's physical distortion from gassing as well as a nice silhouette change to help differentiate him from other characters on screen. I sculpted and textured everything on this character.

First Sons Conduit - fourth quarter 2008
DETAILS:
-roughly 13k triangles
-1 MB texture budget (diffuse/spec/normal/ao + some custom shader masks)
-Programs Used: maya, mudbox, photoshop
-images were done at home w/out the correct proprietary shaders in maya hardware screenshot with 4 lights
- video footage of character in game
-construction time: 4 weeks





here's some in game video, captured from a ps3 using a video camera! it's very hi-tech

VIDEO:


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RANDOM VIDEOS:

Below are some other video captures of a couple other characters I did. Unfortunately because of proprietary rigs and tools i was not able to recover the files at home and show them as stills and wireframes.

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Junk Gang Conduit:

The first video is of the Junk Gang Conduit. He started out being a 3 week project but halfway through there were some design complications. The concept artist rethought the concept and I was able to pull this guy together in time to meet the deadline. I gathered a few pieces from existing models and modified them along with adding new content to come up with what you see. We knew what we were going to do for effects from a previous worked on character (the Trash Golem) so i was able to implement the physical fx pieces for our fx guy to setup. The junk spiders you see coming out of him I created for a later deadline.

VIDEO:


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Trash Golem:

This next video is of the Trash Golem. This piece was a fun collaborative back and forth character to work on. It was initially block concepted out in 3d so the animators could know how it was going to open and close and move. It went through a few iterations of that phase before it was handed off to me where i filled it out and hefted the silhouette a bit while keeping to the functionality and needs of animators and designers. I worked with the character AD, designers and fx guy to coalesce this piece into it's final form. Initial construction was 5 weeks but there were 2-3 weeks long afterwards that were spent wrestling this beast into budget (initially not really known, and after animations/fx/implementation were finally added, we had a good notion of where it needed to be).

the final result is somewhere around 14k triangles w/out physical fx pieces.

VIDEO:


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Alden Trash Monster:

This last video i have from Infamous is of the Alden Trash Monster boss bridge fight. This thing was originally created in first quarter 07 for a proof of concept demo for Sony. It has been tweaked and optimized several times since. The head has had 2 or 3 iterations and this final one was done by the other character artist. After we finalized the look of the trash golem we stabbed at this guy again to match his look more to the Golem itself. I don't remember how much time i spent on this character. It was the longest iterated single character in the game outside of the main character. It's budget was pretty insane too. It was treated as it's own environment area loadout basically so there was a lot of space.

VIDEO:


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-all images, from stills and video, in this post are from Sucker Punch's - Infamous for PS3
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Last Gen Beastie 2006

This guy was made back in 2006 when i wanted to transition from environments into characters. I made it for myself and decided to just do a last gen piece (3k triangles and 1 512 color map). Took me about a full work week. I used 3 lights in maya and just took screenshots from the hardware viewport.

PROGRAMS USED:
-Maya
-Photoshop