Teleporters and EGX

Hi again, remember last time when I said this blog will be updated more frequently? That hasn't happened as much as I planned at all, despite actually writing out some posts I just never uploaded them because I thought they didn't have enough content. Anyway, it turns out I actually do have quite a bit to cover. This week I have started my third year at De Montfort University, plus over the last few weeks I have been up to a few things like going to EGX in Birmingham for example. (Which was incredible by the way.)

I have been working on some new stuff recently, namely a remake of a teleporter design I made in my second year of college. I decided to try it again using high poly techniques which is what I'm trying to wrap my head around at the moment. The plan is to use substance painter and designer aswell to texture so I can cover a bit of learning in those programs. Here is a early render though: :)

EGX

I went to my first ever expo and it was absolutely fantastic, I'm already looking forward to the next time I can go and see everything. There was a large presence there from all corners of the industry, especially those from indie game development. I had a chance to play some new games with interesting concepts. One I liked a lot was a game called Four Sided Fantasy which uses a mechanic which freezes the 2d camera in place and allows travel from one side of the screen to another. (Rubbish explanation, look at the link and you will see what I mean.)

Also Star Wars Battlefront had a large presence there and I was pretty excited to about it. However I was unable to actually play the game as the queue was too long and it was too late in the day but I did get this cool picture of the life size tie fighter they had there.

The highlight of EGX though was the careers fair, a group of us went and spoke to some guys from other universities (I tried out a student project for the Oculus Rift) as well as having in depth discussion and portfolio review from the guys at Creative Assembly. The advice I got was valuable and has given me the focus I needed to continue in the direction of environment art, my current focus has been shifted to doing smaller, more quality assets rather than trying to cram a whole environment project into my free time so I am not as easily overwhelmed. (Also my portfolio was noted as having too many paintings and not enough environment models for someone who wants to be an environment artist some change is really needed!)

In the next post I will talk about the start of the new term and our new project! Also I hope you enjoy the new look of the blog as well, I spent a whole night delving into the blogger html and css to get rid of the massive white border around the header. So I hope it's an improvement, there is a list of other stuff I'm looking into aswell to make it better. My next step is more organisation of posts and more obvious links to my portfolio, twitter, youtube, etc. That should be done in the next few weeks. :)