James' 3D Work Diary

I am a student at Teesside University, Middlesbrough, England studying BA (Hons) Computer Games Art. I dabble in a number of areas including 3D Modeling, Graphic Design, Website Development and Photography. I have worked as a freelance Graphic Designer and Website Developer for a number of years but have now put that aside to focus more on my studies at University. Photography is something I enjoy doing on the side and I prefer to photograph nightclubs and live bands due to the energy and excitement involved rather than traditional photography. My asspiration is to become a 3D modeller within the Computer Games industry. At the momement my strong areas are hard surface asset modeling and texture creation. I am expanding my knowledge of the next gen game workflow at the moment. You can expect to see a range of all these fields of work on this blog with the focus being on 3D Modeling. Feel free to follow and check out my portfolio at www.invinciblefx.com

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Current WIP: Character Model

Over the summer I hope to build up a decent portfolio and put together a reasonably strong portfolio in order to apply for a third year internship. I have started work on a basic character mesh which I plan to eventually use as a learning experience in either Mudbox or Zbrush, probably Zbrush because there are more tutorials out there for it but I can get Mudbox for free for being a student and Zbrush is around £300. Anyway, here's the basic mesh, there's a few problems with it but I'm going to fix them and make hands and a head soon.

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Animation isn't my strong point and it's not what I want to do but my course made sure everyone was fundementally secure with most aspects of game development before progressing to the second year so we had a module in animation.

The module was a project done in pairs where we had to animate a clip around 30 seconds using provided character meshes and sound clips. Me and my partner chose this scene from Back to the Future and I animated the small guy.

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AK47 Kalshnikov Assault Rifle 3D Model

Anther old one I thought I'd show off here, made this around the end of 2010. This project was to familiarise myself with the workflow between creating a highpoly model, baking a normal map and converting to low poly.

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Photography portfolio & Intro Festival

Since buying a camera and starting photography in January this year I've successfully made a few connections in the local entertainment and nightlife industry and become fairly proficient with my camera. This has lead to a fair few jobs photographing live bands and club nights around Middlesbrough including work for Ten Feet Tall at the Middlesbrough Empire.

I am currently developing a photography portfolio as a subsection to my exsiting portfolio and will be publishing it in the coming weeks. This Sunday, June 5th I will be photographing bands at Middlesbroughs Intro Festival with acts including Feeder, Example, Wretch 32, We are the Ocean, Trash Talk and Deaf Havana. I will update with some of these photos after the event. For now here's a peek of the portfolio in progress.

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Just thought I'd open with some finished work I have completed during my first year studying Computer Games Art at Teesside University.