Okay, so I majored in Illustration for the last year of my degree (last year :D ) and minored in 3D and Stop Motion. Which means I've got an eccentric skill set *slightly* removed from the gaming world, but I'd like to see how I can adapt my stuff to fit into games and hopefully work with some of you to produce some awesome 2D stuff (I can model in 3D, but as soon as I have to rig something I'm out :p ). I'm also REALLY getting into interface design and UX, if anyone wants to risk me making sumthin horrible, I need to get some experience and get a proper portfolio going (one that is more appropriate for this community).
Anyway: stuff.
Stylised Characters:
Detailed Character Work:
Other Thangs:
My Behance Portfolio if you want: http://www.behance.net/wesselmatthews
Anyway: stuff.
Stylised Characters:
Detailed Character Work:
Other Thangs:
My Behance Portfolio if you want: http://www.behance.net/wesselmatthews
Cow.jpg
508 x 800 - 59K
Duck.jpg
508 x 800 - 60K
Penguin.jpg
508 x 800 - 52K
Smoke.jpg
508 x 800 - 57K
Angus20.jpg
640 x 800 - 138K
BerzerkerColourTest.jpg
640 x 800 - 81K
notesonelf.jpg
400 x 800 - 57K
PNew_07.jpg
640 x 800 - 167K
El_09.jpg
566 x 800 - 56K
Heads13.jpg
800 x 513 - 86K
We Like It_11.jpg
800 x 513 - 135K
Scene.jpg
800 x 450 - 87K
LizardBook_07.jpg
582 x 800 - 194K
WesselMatthews_MPP.jpg
566 x 800 - 139K
Comments
On a side note I would like to see some more resolution on some of the character paintings you have done. You seem to have stopped a few of the paintings half way through and I think they have a lot of potential.
Looks like you've experimented with a lot of different styles, which is awesome. Like @TasticLuc said, most of your work is a little rougher than I'd expect in actual game production.
Nothing wrong with having a 2D game development skillset (in fact I have found it harder finding good 2D game artists than good 3D game artists in this country).
If you are looking to adapt your skillset to game art, and prove it to prospective collaborators, a good thing to try is draw-overs of games. e.g. Take an old game like Flashback and draw over it in your style. I mention Flashback because of your jungle image, and also there is an HD remake of Flashback which isn't all that great looking and has much more confusing visuals than the original.
It's easier for someone to commit to working with you if they can see what your work would look like in a game (rather than having to imagine it and hope that their imagination is accurate).
@BlackShipsFilltheSky I'm totally going to take your advice! I'm gonna have a look today at something that seems like fun (quite honestly I love Flashback the way it is, but then it reminds me of games like Pitfall and Lomax and Simon the Sorcerer's art and I'm heavily biased towards that era's visual flavours). For the developers sake: in the case of say a character sprite, should I present a sprite sheet, an animated gif, both? While I'm on this I'd like to know what the developers want to see.
Anywho, thanks for the advice guys! Let's see what I can do. Hmm... I'm very tempted to look at Day of the Tentacle, but then I think that game is an artful god and you don't mess with gods...
(I never hit send :P, this was meant for the day after I posted these)
Haremageddon was a game I was working on for Flash. Actionscript is a bitch though, and I only got as far as getting a looping parallax background.
Close ups:
Other Things:
Hipsters on Fire was a zine I did. Long story short it's a style I really wanna develop and animate, get some landscapes going and seeing as I can do an inventory, produce a game interface.
Okay, that's it for this week. Next week I'll have some dedicated in-game art for you guys, so ready those crit guns.
And thanks, if people like the stuff there might be hope yet. :)
Anyway, take a look and tell me what you think. The colours are for the most part a bit of a retinal-burn bright, will tone them down a bit I think, but the tiles should work well for something colourful. Think Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker meets Minecraft. If anybody thinks they can use these, I will release them as free to use, just gimme credit. I'm making trees and rocks and stuff too, if you've got tiles in mind that would be useful, I'd like to hear about it.
Steampunk Girl:
Camp Guy:
Doom Goat Rider:
Beasts in Battle:
Beware the Sauce Poster:
Here's some production art I did for a project a while back, it ultimately fell through though. Was supposed to be a short animated music video about a VERY uncomfortable encounter in a restaurant. I thought it's a pretty decent display of the process and something that might be appropriate for a point 'n click adventure game. Let me know what you think.
A few frames from the storyboard:
Character Design Process:
The story itself was actually quite crude and explicit, se we decided to temper it with a bit of cartoony cuteness.
Further Development on the male lead:
After selecting a winner, some fine tuning options for the client.
Animation Prep:
Her puppet, almost ready for animation, both assembled and with the pieces separated. Pieces are kept rounded where joints will be to accommodate movement, and facial features are kept separated to accommodate for replacement parts (blinking and mouth movements).
The set pieces:
The set, being 2D, relied on parallax scrolling to achieve depth.
And a mockup of all the different pieces assembled:
Here's the tileset I'm working on for a little art demo I wanna get out: parallax scrolling forest thingie. (My copy of Rayman Legends recently bombed out a bit revealing some of the lighting maps they use in game, if ever I get THAT much time to work on it I'd love to build something a bit more versatile in terms of colour and lighting.).
I built a set for Nessie. Water was made by using these swirls, spinning them, stacking them, then staggering their animation using a bit of javascript. Was an experiment more than anything else, but it created a decent effect and plausible stylised 2D water.
You can watch it in HD with a bit of lighting and DOP here.
This was my first ever YouTube upload so any feedback in that regard is very welcome :D
Thanks man. I'm chuffed with the water, but also that Nessie seems to be a bit herpaderp.
@Mexicanopiumdog
Sent ya a DM. Let's dooooo eeeeet. :D
The app itself was a social/dating app aimed at feature phone users in Africa, around 18-25 in age.
Salvaged rat bones from owl pellets (pretty much as gross as it sounds), strung them together and shot this on a 3 tier multiplane using a DSLR.
Rigged the Freak in a Tank to show the rendering process and make a looping splash image.
From left to right:
Pop-up Murderer, Greasy Merchant, Needle Princess, Omen Bearer, Tranquil Mystic.
If you like you can follow me on Instagram (wesselmatthews). Wanna do at least five more of these and start looking at environment design.
On that note, here's Osiris, my entry for this month's Character Design Challenge! on Facebook. This month's theme is Egyptian gods.
And my previous entries for the hippie and samurai & geisha challenges, cuz apparently I haven't posted them here:
It's really rad to see your progress over the last couple years.
Btw. Did you ever finish that parallax forest (like actually putting it into a game) ? Seems like there must be a programmer round here that would love to help make that space come to life (if you haven't yourself).
If a programmer/game designer is out there who wants to help with this: BY HIS NOODLEY APPENDAGE YES PLEASE. I've been working on it intermittently, but asset generation and animation are keeping me busy (and those are admittedly my main interests in this), so someone with a bit more experience in the technicalities would really free me up to invest more time in polishing the crap out of the viuals. I think I'll open a new discussion with a bit more on what I have so far and where I kinda would like to see this thing going (visually at least)?.
Having said that, I know this is amazingly basic compared to quality and complexity of stuff on these forums, but I'm proud of having figured out:
* The basics of scripted level generation
* A character controller (double jump not seen here because still painting sprites [by hand])
* Sorted out clipping issues/layer sorting (foreground script hasn't been updated but those bushes were whack for a while)
* Getting the cameras working
* Basics of lighting and cameras in Unity
What I wanna still do or at least look into:
* Finalising terrain ascension and descension
* Some variance in generation of trees and scenery by assembling sprites
* Fiddle to see if I can use normal maps for some lighting bling bling
* A few 3D touches (think giant bridge/mountains in the background)
* Get the middle and background layers' sprite sheets out
* Figure out the rostrum thing because none of this has really been optimised and all my sprites are needlessly huge
Haha, so ja, progress is slow. Send help. :D
So... like... please don't stop! :D
Detail
This is what I'd like to make things look more like (not my work):
So I'm keeping the highlights and shadows pretty darn subtle for the most but I'm missing something. I'm guessing it's the bounced lighting, also kept fairly subtle, but... eish dis moer baie werk daai, and easy to botch (looking at you, torso). XD
I'm gonna try some small thumbnail studies with simpler shapes and see what I can pull off there.
Back on Sprite Sprint:
Wanted to show my run cycle with a leaf. Motion can be polished up a wee bit I think, though I'm pretty chuffed with leaf: putting a mild rotation around the Y axis in scared the crap out of me but I think I pulled it off. This is all hand animated, so if the speed or frame rate is out I may have to redo the whole thing anyway. Joy. :D
Trying out VFX made by hand: looks okay, but wanna try building particle effects in something else and just painting over that.
Have also sketched out an idea for a jump animation.
The idea is:
* Leaf shoots out, propelled magic or some inexplicable foliage fart.
* Leaf then pulls Sprite in, propelling it into a jump.
* Leaf flares out at the end of it's distance to create a parachute
* Directly after the precipice of Sprite's jump, his fall gives the leaf a slight tug downwards, but then their movement stabilises into a glide cycle, with the leaf kinda fluttering a bit.
Not satisfied with it yet: the little sequence should be reading as the two taking turns to lead the motion and tugging the other into submission before it ends with a glide, and not pulling that off yet.
And then I read a few pieces about how anticipation in game animation makes it feel like your character isn't responding to your input, which makes total sense but I hadn't thought of that, so test more to make that jump button press feel hellah good.
The character's run is super cute!
With the dust puff, it looks like each puff has the same lifetime. I think you'd get a more organic feel if the puffs disappeared across some 3 frames or so, and if the last frame of each didn't look so similar to each other (they all look like they share the same "dot" shape). Some might dissolve as lines, some as C-shapes.
Keep kicking ass dude!
I want to break this thing into nine images so it looks pretty in the grid view, but also make sure each of the 9 sections works *decently* well as a standalone image, so currently running through each square for a layer of detailing work, starting at nice and working back.
Biggest pyn in die gat so far has been trying to come with a way to *quickly* render the masses of buildings in a way that fits with the style of the overall but still lets me point out specific landmarks. That's three goals, I may have to let one go (and I just can't see myself meticulously painting every building in the city bowl, I'm just not THAT into this thing). Also want to add in the AO effects @Elyaradine mentioned, as I still want it to have that kinda clay-ish effect.
Also considering re-styling common emoji to use as icons on the map and then supplying a key in the post comments, essentially making it a light UI project too.
I might be trying to do too much with one piece but gotta leverage what I have for all it's worth. (People always want a *specific* example of something in your portfolio, I've got a list of things I wanna prove I can do). We'll see what sticks...
Welcomed: your thoughts.
Everything I make the last month or so just doesn't seem to meet the quality bar. Not great for morale. :/
I've been working in a production studio inside an agency (I'm still not 100% sure who I really work for tbh) for just over a year now where I get to illustrate a lot of stuff. So, for stuff that is no longer hush-hush confidential, I can post some things. So much vector work, I miss my Photoshop brushes...
These are characters and environments for an ad about a diabetic monitoring device.
Here's a few keyframes for a Western Cape Government education initiative. Another designer had a few assets for print ready and I extrapolated from that to storyboard/generate assets for the explainer video.
I hope I have the mental clarity to remember to post here more often. Doubtful but one can hope. :)
Today I'm sharing some backgrounds I did for a project called Story Stars. Western Cape learners are invited to write short scripts for some premade characters, and selected entries were then animated by us. The characters in question had an interdimensional space ship so the kids could take the story wherever they wanted.. They made me create a snot planet and I love them for it.
The Snot Planet
The Grand Theatre
The Shoe Kingdom's Gates
The Kruger Park
The Deep Blue Sea
My School
The project ran for a couple of years, might still be ongoing, but I'm no longer with the studio. Was also done on a shoestring budget but probably some of the most fun I had at the agency, so tried to squeeze in as much love as I could, and every year the style changed a little bit as I experimented with the fastest ways to get the most done.
Some art I did with Clockwork Acorn for Ludum Dare's Harvest Game Jam
I feel like this one managed to come together pretty well, after some initial hiccups trying to figure out the colours.
If you'd like, you can play the game here: https://francoisvn.itch.io/beeline