Welcome to 2020!

Portfolio Updates

New Site, New Skills

Logo & Branding Updates Inbound

CV Updates

DiRT 5 is Official

That's all for now. See you soon.

A Quick Update

Joining Codemasters as a Junior UI Artist is an amazing opportunity for me to hone my skills and work in the games industry. It is a dream first job and I feel really lucky to be working here, working alongside some true professionals and amazing people.

So what does this mean for this blog and my portfolio? Inevitably, there will be less activity on both my blog and portfolio as I am working to help create the user interface in an unannounced game. There will be updates to my blog when certain announcements are made about this game, along with smaller personal projects being added to my portfolio every so often.

So, for now that's all. See you soon.

It's time for an update...

In Short

So I haven't really been posting for a while, what have I been doing? I have been progressing through my two main projects and making sure they will be ready for the upcoming deadlines. I have also been working on a couple of other things one of which I can talk about and one I am going to be pretty vague about just in case. Anyway, there's more like what's happening with the game jams? So continue reading to find out more.

Tic Tac Shooter (Working Title)

Game Jams

First things first where is the post about March's game jam game? The simple answer is that the game was never finished by our coders, so no playable game. But, there is something that came out of this because of what my role was for this game (UI Artist) I have the assets needed to show you what the game would have looked like. Below is an image of in-game along with a link to the project page where you can find out more about this game.

An update on this months game jam now. There isn't one. The society I am part of is not hosting one this month and as of writing, I am not sure about next month as it is deadline season at university at the moment so this may be for the best.

Project Update

Speaking about university, let's just take a quick look over what I've been doing.

So I have been looking to make my environment outside of my scene a little more believable than just a flat landscape. Using World Machine I have created a terrain a lot more dynamic and will be adding in extra assets like foliage natural to the area my environment is based around. I have also been working on various different GUI's for this project and will be looking to implement them soon. Along with these, I have also been spending these last two weeks creating a HUD & Interface design (not for this project) but something I have really enjoyed doing and will hopefully be crucial for my career in this industry. I can't really talk too much about this and I am not sure whether this work will ever make it to my site. But I can't wait to get feedback on this work.

Moving onto my robot animation, as you can see above. Everything is now set up for rendering out the final animation and moving into After Effects to add the final touches ready for my hand in next week.

As mentioned above deadlines are approaching so this may be the last post for a while until I have finished my final year mid-May. Then it's onto lots of new and exciting projects. There is still more to come.

That's all for now. 

In short

Okay, this week I have been busy updating quite a few things. So let's get to it. In this blog post we will be talking about:

• My latest game jam - still waiting on the final compiled game from the coders
• A new collaboration - M4 in use with updates to come at a later date
• My journey with Tumblr has now come to an end
• Update to CV - Yet again I have updated my CV

Want to know more? Why have I needed to update my CV again? Keep reading.

Progress update

I'm going to be honest, I haven't done too much this week in terms of my main two projects. That is not yet anyway.

So what have I done? I have completed my robot models along with occupying models and will be looking to texture these within Substance Painter and animate them this week ready for rendering in V-Ray.

As for my military environment, I have decided to use World Machine and remade the base height map and increased the overall scale for my environment surrounding the main base. I will be quickly implementing this new approach into my Unreal scene soon, I feel that using this way gives my environment a more believable looking when compared to the base Unreal landscape tools.

Speaking of the military. I am now collaborating with a coder from a past game jam on a shooter featuring my M4 Carbine model found here. How does a Zombie first-person shooter sound?

It's been and gone. Over the weekend I was taking part in what are now monthly game jams. The theme for this one was "The Easter Bunny", you know because Easter is here. Anyway someone from our group decided, why not make a dating simulator?

We agreed on our roles and got on with it. For this game I was in charge of UI UX, creating all the different screens for the game. Its a shame I can't really show you too much in terms of gameplay but I will drop this image here. Don't look into it too much though. This game isn't as cute as it looks.

Gameplay to come next week... hopefully.

A new focus - UI / UX in games

Onto the main topic I want to cover in this post. If you haven't seen already I have been making a few changes around different areas of my brand this week. Starting with my blogging time on Tumblr coming to an end. I was already thinking about switching to Blogger as mentioned before but I wasn't thinking it was going to be as soon as this. One thing that changed my mind, that fact that when viewing my Tumblr page, you could no longer see my posts. Why? There was just white space where they should be. This wasn't just a one-off either, I couldn't even see my posts when it came to trying to edit them, let alone view them on my site. This was the final nail in the coffin, so I am now using Blogger to create my posts. You can view my Blogger page but all posts will still be on my hub website, ArtStation.

Next, I have chosen to move my specialisation away from 3D prop art and animation & more towards UI. I feel this has been coming for a while but I just haven't decided to take the plunge until now. Don't worry, if you love my 3d work it's not disappearing anytime soon and I will still be adding new pieces every now and again as I realise UI/ UX design within games is quite niche, so it may need to be more of a side endeavour. Never the less it is safe to say that a lot more of what I do will be designed to improve my UI UX art.

Leading me to my CV update, you can now find an updated version on my CV both on LinkedIn and ArtStation to reflect this change in career path and specialisation. Why not take a look? Here. And this leads me on nicely to my next and final announcement for this blog post...

New UI/ UX Project added to ArtStation!

You should all know by now that I have been completing a career mentoring scheme over the past five months. Through this, I managed to gain some work experience. You can now see what I have been working on. This project is part of a brief I was helping work towards for a company (name redacted, can't be publically named yet). It features me creating a mobile interface based on the website concept already created by my career mentor. You can find out more on ArtStation.

That's all for now. See you next week.

In short

Over this last week, I have been creating various different animations for my projects through the use of motion capture, I was lucky enough to have got to use a studio for this and is something I am really excited to see the end result of. Also, game jams are back! Want to know more? Keep reading.

Progress update

Like mentioned in the intro, over this last week I have been working with motion capture to bring a more realistic side to my character animations within my two projects. Plus its something really cool to get the chance to do. Below is a quick video of want I got up to. Let's just say a little imagination is needed.

Anyway, now we have all had a laugh. I want to explain the ideas behind some of the animations. A lot are your basic running and walking but feature props like a brush or bottle. I used these as a replacement to a 3d model that would be used in the final animations. For example, the brush translates to a rifle and the bottle a football.

That's not all I've been doing though, as usual, I have been working on my two projects. First off I have started the creation of my final 3d models for my military scene along with working on other materials. This time back in Substance Designer. One of the main materials I have been working on is the mesh featured within fencing and the military gabion boxes. you can see renders of my materials below.

Over this coming week, I will be looking to be finishing up the animation for my visual effects project and continue working on creating a playable prototype for my military base level.

Game Jams are back!

Okay, so for some of you that may have been following me for a while now, you may know that towards the end of last year I started to take part in game jams with one of the societies within university. We took a break for a while over the festive period and holidays. Now they're back but with a change, they will only be happening once a month and will be featured on Itch.io here.

Here you will be able to see the games we make for this upcoming game jam on 23 - 24 March. I will also be posting an update on this after it has finished as usual. So stay tuned for that and much more on my blog and website.

That's all for now. See you next week.

In short

This week I have moved in Unreal with my Military Base project and started setting everything up in order to build up my environment. Not much has changed for my other project but one this that has... I am now on Blogger and over the next couple of weeks will be using this platform to write all my posts. For more information keep reading.

Progress update

You can see, I have also started work on creating materials for this project and gone about setting up a master material within Unreal, in which all my material instances will be based off. This will allow me to edit and customise my materials easier. Below you can see a material I have created within Quixel Mixer. These past two weeks I learnt that the beta for Mixer was now free to use (beta available for free here). So I thought I would give it a try. Surprisingly it is pretty intuitive and easy to learn, only having access to four default materials though was quite annoying. Anyway learning this software and using it was something really fun, especially seeing the results. One of which is the dry desert dirt I made after doing quite a bit of customising and "mixing" pun intended, different materials together to create a really believable and realistic looking texture for my ground plane.

New blog location

On to the blog update. I am now using Blogger to create my blog posts and will be experimenting with Google's blog hosting platform over the coming weeks. I will still be looking to upload these blog posts to Tumblr over this experimentation period but if all goes well I will be moving my posts to this new platform. So, what does all this mean for you, my viewer? Nothing really as of yet, if you're viewing this on Tumblr you will still be able to see all my posts but this may change in the future. If you're viewing this on my website danielrhodes.artstation.com, nothing will change, ever. There will be a few updates to how I structure my posts but all my posts no matter which platform I use, will be posted here for your viewing pleasure.

You can view this project on my website here.

Something I have been wanting to do for a while is model and texture a weapon. I wanted to start with something real and iconic, nothing made up. I saw that as a challenge because if something is overly wrong with the model in reflecting its real-life counterpart, you can see it straight away. I am not saying this model is perfect and is a 1-to-1 remake of the real thing but I feel that it is a good representation of the M4 Carbine. I didn’t want to stop there though I wanted to do something a little unique with this weapon. Make it explode.

Okay, so I don’t mean blow up in a massive fireball. I mean create the weapon in such a way where every part is unique and separate from each other. Nothing too in-depth but a way in which I could showcase this weapon through animation.

The M4 is an old weapon platform, it’s been used for years. So to reflect that I created some textures that match that idea. You can see that the paint is wearing off, there are scratches from use and what once might have been a nice looking stock is now dark and worn. I am impressed with what I have created, yes it can be improved, anything can always be improved. But it was a challenge for me and I feel like I passed.

This project isn’t over, in fact, it’s only just getting started. (Tease for what I am working on now if you can’t tell) I’ll be explaining a little more on this in the coming weeks so keep an eye on this blog and my website for future updates.

Finally, in the video above you can see a breakdown as to exactly how I created this asset and clicking on the link below that you can take a look at the weapon in more detail on my website.

A look into what could be…

At the end of 2018, I finished a project that I had been working on for a while. I say finished but it is never really finished, it was an idea to showcase what a remaster of one of my favourite childhood games could look like in a modern game engine.

Simpsons: Hit & Run has somehow never had a remaster or sequel. So what if it did? What would it look like? This was the premise for this project. As you can see I only recreated one room but it would be cool to see what the entire house would look like. 

Doing this type of project meant that I would have to look into using an art style that I haven’t really used before. I wanted to try something different than the realistic look of previous projects. Arguably it is still quite realistic and I could have taken the cartoon style further but the thing with the Simpsons is that it is just flat colour. This is hard to replicate in a game since you want extra detail in textures, I had to find a balance. I think what I ended up with shows a good interpretation of this but could definitely be improved. By picking this room to replicate I also started to look into foliage creation, something else I haven’t done before, but feel like I have done a good job of. This will something that I will be starting to implement into some of my other projects in the future.

Above you can take a look at what I created. I chose the TV room as it is one of the most iconic rooms in the Simpsons house, and within the game, it is used as the menu screen. There is more that could be done with this and it is currently more of a proof of concept, one which shows what could be.

Let’s talk.

So I haven’t written a blog post in a while, but this doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy. I have been busy updating my website into a hub for my work, my thoughts and my professional life. I have also completed my other two projects that I was working on alongside this. They have been done for a while but I just haven’t really talked about them, until now, more on that in a later though.

Now to highlight some of the changes made to the site. The main change has been to overhaul the branding, make everything look a lot cleaner and visually interesting. Adding new graphics that make my work stand out more, give it all a consistent look and also give the viewer a little more information about something before they click on it. I have also removed some of my older projects, making room for the newer ones and giving sperate sections to some of my work that I want to highlight separately to my portfolio. This refresh was needed and now gives me a great base to carry on improving from.

Before I go on though I just want to do a little comparison, put a few images side by side, before and after.

This being my last semester in university I am looking forward to what I am going to do in the future. I will be looking to develop more game theory content on my Youtube channel and also attend more game jams. Giving my portfolio a little extra content, other than just my projects. 

Speaking of future work, I have started development on two new projects, one which I see as my “hero piece” that will hopefully show off the skills I have developed over the years. Combining a mixture of environment design, animation and UI/UX. The other, a smaller project focused on CGI animation, taking a real-life scene and adding a believable 3D model to it. I’ll have more to share on these a little later in development.

That’s it for now, be sure to keep an eye out for two more posts on the Simpsons: Hit & Run project along with my M4 Carbine.

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton