Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy Student Blog
I created this blog to keep track of my progress when I was studying to become a Technical Artist at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (FIEA). Even though it's been a while since I graduated, I'll keep some of the entries in the blog around since they offer a little bit of insight into the development of the pieces. Hopefully it might help others as they tackle their own student pieces.
Click on any of the slideshow images to visit that blog entry. The final results for some of these pieces are posted below. |
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Mesh Controller Creator
This tool allows the rigger to create animation controls in the style of Pixar's Presto software: geometry that is a duplicate of the skinned mesh, and that deforms as such. This creates a more intuitive interface and controllers become much easier to select than traditional NURBS curves. However, this does not mean that the NURBS curves are lost. One can switch the visibility of them and the new controllers through the tool's UI as well as change how the mesh controllers are displayed (color and opacity). Textures on the male character were made by Meagan Glennon and Patrick Tran. Everything else (models, rigs, and textures on the female character) by me.
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Focal Length - Civilian Creator
Tool's functionality demonstration
Documentation of UX process. Published with written permission from the usability testers
After 5 intensive weeks of development, the Civilian Creator for the FIEA Cohort X Capstone game Focal Length was finally ready to be used. The tool was designed to allow members of the Focal Length team to create human skeletal meshes ready to be implemented in Unreal Engine 4. These characters will make up the crowds running away from aliens in the futuristic Boston where the game's fiction takes place. They needed to respect a certain polygon budget and had to be different enough that they felt natural in the world and yet similar enough that they appeared to have been made by the same person. I was responsible for everything except the hair meshes and the textures. Christina Equels modeled and textured the hairs, Jarrod Pope painted the skins, and the two of them together with Monica Alvarez created the clothing textures.
In addition to the features that are showcased in the video above, a big focus for this project was UX (User Experience) design. While working on the tool itself, I also researched about UX methodologies and tried to follow them as I planned both the functionality and the User Interface. I tested the tool with my 'customers' as often as possible and many of the features and the overall UI design shown above was dictated by my observations from those tests and the direct feedback from the users. To read more about this process, click here. |
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Hit - Cast of characters' revision
Hit was one of the Capstone games developed at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (FIEA) during 2014. As General Character Lead for all the capstone games, my tasks included helping other artists polish their character models by giving them feedback as they built the models or by tweaking said models to better match the concept art. For this spy-themed shooter in particular, I did the retopology of the Debutante model, originally built by Kim Nguyen, and remade the Big Game Hunter and Spy characters, originally Marc Schaffer's, as well as the Doctor (original model by Meagan Glennon). All of these characters are based on concept art by Meagan Glennon.
Rotten Fruit - Pineapple Guard
Rotten Fruit was a thesis video game proposal. In this world inhabited by anthropomorphous fruit, you play as a parasitic earthworm with plans of world domination. I was appointed as Art Lead for the team in charge of building a demo for this idea but in spite of the great work done by everyone involved, the game did not make into a Capstone project.This character was part of the Visual Target we presented. Original concept art by Christina Equels and Andrea Sandoval.
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