FX breakdown for my latest piece Uroboros. I usually do my pixel pieces manually in, however the more elaborate the animation gets, the easier it is to resort to more advanced techniques an ways of imaging like 3D, especially on parts like the flocking of the leafs/feathers/scales with curve particle flow, and the symmetrical bits like the triangle and the snake’s belly, would otherwise be very difficult to draw, let alone animate by hand.

A piece I’ve been holding onto for the past 3 weeks, finally having had a chance to finish it. Inspired by the recent globalgamejam theme of Uroboros, an ancient egyptian symbol, that signifies the cycle of life, death and rebirth and infinity as a perpetual cycle.

I’ve been thinking of making a sort of behind the scenes video showing how I create some of my pixel works using this one as example, since it’s the most complex one as far as production goes. Real pixel art here is only the outer rim of the snake, with the rest being developed in Maya and put together in AfterEffects.

UPDATE: I posted a video sort of making of - breakdown video of various 3D elements that went into making this, check it out in the link here.

Quick pixel cyclic animation gif play, 10 frames.

Nothing can describe the experience of Journey. The multitude of layers of meaning this game delivers is unbelievable, from the environmental message in the main storyline, issues of indigenous people and resource mining, to values of companionship on path of enlightenment and it’s temporality, language, rebirth, every playthrough reveals something deep and thoughtful.

I’m in love with this game, to which I pay tribute with this pixel art piece. I can only hope you play the game and experience the Journey for yourselves.

Last week, a talk of office wars / LARP gaming came about, and being geeks that we are, we decided to run a post apocalyptic LARP campaign. Since it’s an indoors game surrounded by computer screens and furniture, the weapons of choice are Nerf guns and improvised foam melee weapons.

I saw this as an opportunity to make this a mini art project, and try something I haven’t done before. I bought a Nerf Spectre, and modded it (internally too), giving it a vivid black and red paint job, finished with some wear and tear, oil leaks and ageing. The whole thing took me 2 days to complete, and now I infected the whole office to do something like this for their own :)

Before coating the red paint, I assembled the gun for preview, so there is an alternative color scheme pic.

Some work in progress shots in the links below -

spray, mask, spray mask, spray, coloring dual tone process

moving parts and mounts

I have some more ideas and would like to make more of these, some people even suggested I paint these for commissions, but I don’t think I’d be able to meet demand :P

Another pixelart piece I’ve been working on for the past week. Inspired by the Hindu and Buddhist statuettes and patterns, notion of psychedelic trips and the recent theatrical audio visual mashup performance Bathing with Elephants I attended in January in the Civic theater in Auckland, where I saw the Ganesha statues.
Themes of time, recursive motion and repetition heavily influenced this piece.

Every 2 weeks, in the studio, we have an open art challenge among the artists. A few themes were generated with one of those random cliche name generators, and we polled on one. This fortnight’s challenge was “filthy weary alchemist”. Random. I went with retro animated pixelart style.

A friend of mine is prototyping a visual node placement and distribution network for a project in Unity3d. He created the effects and propagation algorithms, I borrowed the project files to draw this guy, with further aftereffects composition. I’m really fascinated with procedural things like these, especially made trippy!

Check out davidope’s tumblr for some decent trippy inspiration!

A bit over a year and a half ago I was applying for an environment artist position at Gameloft in Auckland, New Zealand. As every other applicant, I had to do an art test. The requirements were to create a night port scene environment with 2 cranes, a cargo ship and a warehouse in under 36 hundred triangles.

The focus for my piece was to create a really low-fi art style, with pixel art textures.
What I ended up with was everything textured in a single 512 bitmap (excluding the skybox).

I am still currently employed at Gameloft as a 3D artist with emphasis on technical side of things. I’ll post some work I’ve done on our completed projects, but otherwise I don’t represent Gameloft in any way, so all that is related in my posts are my sole personal opinion.

On the 6th of February, it was a last day of the Lantern Festival in Auckland, Celebrating the Chinese New Year. For Auckland, It’s a big 3 day cultural event with thousands of people attending from all cultural backgrounds.

As tradition, on the last day, at the end of the event, fireworks light the Auckland sky. It’s a rare opportunity to enjoy fireworks in Auckland, since not many occasions are marked with a fireworks display. Last year as far as I remember, only the Rugby World Cup and the New Year celebrations had fireworks, excluding Guy Fawkes day, since only amateur fireworks are being lit on that day.

I am very fond of experimental photography, and even though on the night I was equipped with my 7D, my lens was not enough to capture good night shots, so I went with just playing around, making blurs, shooting with bulb exposure while zooming and twisting/moving the camera around. As a result, there was a lot of crap shots, but there are these 3 rare favorites of mine, which are full size crops of said photos. You can have these in 1080p for your desktop pleasure.
UPDATE: Unfortunately tumblr limits photo size uploads, I will put full size ones on my flickr shortly
UPDATE: Flickr only allows XGA resolution with free accounts, so I uploaded HD wallpapers to my deviantart. Get them here: 1, 2, 3.