borderline art

Environment Artist & indie dev. I draw sometimes. All opinions and comments my own.

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I haven't painted in a long time, and it sucks. I have to keep reminding myself that the point isn't to be the best, the point is just to create something. So I just sat down and had fun for a bit.

Just a study from Fury, a film I love that I randomly saw a still of and felt the urge to try and paint. Not perfect, but practice is practice. It always feels like progress when I'm able to self-crit and get a bit closer each time.

Colour relativity still scrambles my brain, I'm getting better at eyeballing colour but the journey is a long one

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I still have so much to learn when it comes to stylised 3D, but I feel like I'm learning huge amounts with each attempt. Just keep trying to learn new techniques, try new styles and workflows, just keep pushing in new directions. It's humbling, stylised is hard, but I'm loving it.

Really happy with how this one turned out honestly, and quite a short project (~1 week).

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Forgot to post this; finished Venice shots.

I started this project late '23, then shelved it for a long time and picked it back up. Honestly, the initial composition wasn't great, and that really hurt it. I think I managed to scrape something out of the mess but it was a pretty strong indication that I'd learned a lot since I started it.

The take away really, if you're going back to an old project, treat nothing as precious! Scrap stuff that isn't working, don't try and salvage it if your gut says it's not going right.

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VERY WIP but. Something I've been working on for a little while. Venice inspired UE5 scene.

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I've been watching Smiling Friends and playing Fallout recently

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Started this on a lunch break at work and finally got around to semi finishing it. It's a study of an US-Vietnam war era M-79 grenade launcher, the ol' bloop tube.

There are a bunch of things wrong with this, but I think for now I'm just gonna call it done and move on. Cleaner bakes this time around, still not perfect though.

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I think I completely forgot to share the Mystery Shack! The most recent environment I've done in my spare time; I don't do many as I just don't have the time and energy atm.

I chipped away at this for a long time, before eventually sorta being comfortable leaving it where it was. I love Gravity Falls and recently rewatched it, so I felt this giant draw to model the shack as a homage!

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I did do some more work on it last year, and it was starting to come together. it's a project I'm going to go back to soon and try to finish, because I really enjoy the idea now that I've found a new angle that feels more unique and fresh. more on that later, though!

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this is old stuff now but fun to document anyway; for a time I was making a little prototype helicopter game in a PS1 style. It was a huge learning exercise, and a humbling one. I thought it'd be an easy little project but nothing is really easy in dev!

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taking a little break from 3D for a few posts, here are some sketches I've done over hte past.. couple years? man I need to draw more

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last one for today; most reacent weapon I've done. I did start rigging and animating it but, I got frustrated with the animation (the timings weren't working, it felt janky and I couldn't figure out what I needed to change) and put it down

I did get some final renders done, though. I want to add more material definition to the grip, but apart from that I'm really happy with how it turned out overall

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might as well dump the weapons while I'm at it; here's a Thompson SMG I made a while back while learning Blender

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to be honest I'd forgotten I made a low poly MP5 before, so here's that original one (MP5A4 iirc?) next to a more recent attempt (MP5SD). this was for a prototype, so it needed fully modelled sights, leading to it being higher budget.

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okay let's wrap up the tank stuff for now as it is old and on hiatus.

I only had experience with Unreal before I started this project, so doing environments in Unity was difficult. Different rules, different settings etc. I got somewhere with a potential first setting though:

If you're interested in seeing where I got with that back in the day, you should be able to see this playlist of old dev videos:

Parabellum Dev Log Videos

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2019; early art for a basic enemy type, an (automated) anti-tank gun. this was fully working in the prototype, which was fun. the front armour plate could deflect shots at the right angles, and the ammo box hanging underneath (green+yellow) would destroy the turret in a single hit if shot

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2019; at a certain point I moved away from an alt-history WWII setting into something closer to mid Cold War, and the main vehicle changed to reflect that. I was still experimenting with a two-tone shader at this point too

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2019; for a little while I worked on a Unity prototype for a tank game (that I still want to go back to). I was trying to figure out what style to do the assets in, this was an early test for a playable vehicle that I believe was trying to go more graphic novel-y