marque_pierre

Just a quick note... are any of you guys submitting anything for the first annual Blizzard art contest?

Ensemble Studios, Blizzard, Valve, Double Fine, Bioware, Naughty Dog, Nintendo, Capcom or Ubisoft. Possibly Rare if they can get they can get their shit together.

Hi guys, Just for the record, my article is up on Gamasutra now... Heavily edited from the 19some pages down to 2 now, but anyway here goes: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060417/sondergaard_01.shtml This is but a smell from the kitchen, next time will be the real meal. Meat and bones, trying to sink my teeth into the nitty gritty details that make up an art style...

You must know something I don't, or have gear I didn't imagine existed. Don't think I have critted with an aimed shot above 3000...

Blender: Pffftt... Playing a hunter takes A LOT OF micromanagement in the heat of battle to squeeze him/her up there where he is a threat to be reckoned with...

Might as well give you guys a sneak peak... http://www.marquepierre.com/article.pdf

Just some stuff I am writing on. Some ideas I got, that I am trying to shape into something useful for games development... I will link to it of course. Or it will be on http://www.marquepierre.com/articles.html at any rate...

Gamasutra is gonna run my fucking article later this week!!!!!!! Just heard it now!!!! Not all bad, huh? Mapcorian done good!!! I know you don't care about my Develop articles, but GAMASUTRA!!!!! Doesn't get better than that + these are a few of my own thoughts! Yay!!!!

Come on the Riviera! You got Barcelona and Spain just ot the left of you, and Italy to the right. Sounds and looks like a super place!

My main is a 60 Nightelf hunter. And has been 60 for quite some time. My alts are a 30 something (don't play him much) tauren warrior and a 15 nightelf rogue both on Thunderhorn. But I so love to play the hunter class. Dropping people in 3 shots before they even get close to you. So I rarely play my alts. Just high instance raids with the main. Good fun. I hear crack is good too...

But they do. :roll:

Actually if I could have the G repeat last action command from Maya, I would be perfectly content with Max as a modeller. This is what I do for medium to higher poly modelling. Make sure you know the deformers and the primitives (all of them not just the basic ones) by heart. Depending on what version of Max you have (after 5 the Booleans really picked up), get a Power Boolean plugin (optionally). When I model something I try to block it out of as many primitives as needed to make the shape. Just slap them together, like building with crude building blocks. Then finetune then into the shapes they need to be with the deformers. No, don't flatten the stack just yet. At this ppoint you have great influence over your polycount and resolution density. After some tuning, you have what you want, and it is still perfectly quaded and all neat geometry. Which is the major plus to this technique. Then you weld everything together with the Boolean operations. Which will effectively flatten the stack of course. Tidy up the vertices, and you are done. Works particularly well for organic and odd shapes which can be hard to keep the geometry neat and quaded on. The drawback on this techniques is that Booleans normally create incredibly nasty and messy geometry with stray vertices and edges all over the place. But the Booleans in Max have come a long way, and they are actually useful now.

I feel like Homer Simpson sleepwalking to the friedge... "Uhmmm. Unexplained bacon/WoW!" I wonder what raids are on tonight. What server do you play on Zacker? I rule the alliance hunting class on Thunderhorn with an iron fist, or should I say bow...

Thanks again guys. Like I said, a new and improved portfolio is on its way as well. Not asking for jobs here, just a little headsup if you hear of an opening.

Would I? Of course. I would go to Shanghai or Australia if need be.

Sure thing Squirrel. I am game for anything. Have lived across a few different countries as it is. The search is more or less global.

Thanks for the sympathy votes. Yeah, I got 2 girls. Thanks for the suggestions. Now, onwards and upwards.

Yeah, so my life is down in the shitter. Divorce, arson, backstabbing, you name it. Gotta put my masters degree on the backburner for a while, find a job and finish the rest of it as and when it can be done. Man I feel cheap and stupid for saying this: So right now I am gonna revamp my portfolio. Most of the stuff there is about 2 years old anyway. And then hit the global job market with full force in search of a gig as a texture artist or environment artist. So dear and resourceful Mapcorians, if you hear of positions opening at the junior levels, I would very much appreciate a heads-up. plug>

What are you guys on about? What games are there other than World of Warcraft?

I have not tried any of the dedicated modellers like Silo and Modo yet, but in my opinion, the superior Booleans and deformers in Max beats the pants off any of the modelling tools in XSI, Maya or Lightwave. Or perhaps that just the way I work. And I am not a Max fanboy by the way, but for modelling it is good and fast.

Meat textures? Hmmmm. That is an idea. Wow! You just gave me another idea! Yes!!! That's it! Heureka! Stay tuned...

Cartoony can be really hard to do because it challenges your imagination. You have no reference material. Realism is easier because everybody knows how wood looks in terms of colour, shine and bumps. Cartoony, there you have to invent a whole new reality and fit that together. And there are no reference materials for you, in fact, if you start looking towards realism while working, it will look awful. Painting a colour map is easy, but fitting that surface information together with details on shine and bump and what not is a delicate balance. Something I still need to work out for the above style. No, I am not making Animal Crossing for Source. I am just a texture artist, I wanna make 1001 different styles, that is all I care about for now. Let others make it into games...

Nice work. Water and grass and cliffs are spot on AC.

Absolutely right! It all started with me admiring some Animal Crossing shots!

Join the club! Thanks btw.