Rohan Knuckey

I exist!

well I've finally managed to create a website to host all my game artwork. It's actually been farily straight forward and with a little patientce and repettitive action I've got a small stand-alone site. Visit it here at www.rohan-knuckey.co.uk for a view.

Face off...

I had a brief break from the head as I was so busy at work that coming home and attempting to get 'my' head around the problems of a modelling a convincing human-bean was just too much. I know I've still got a way to go with her but considering that I've never modelled a head before I don't think I've got off to a bad start; also the learning curve of SSS and so on is something that I must not ignore.

Polygonal personality...

I've been struggling with this; how do I make a virtual character look like they're fit to be a member of the human race? I mean, I can move the vertices around, I can extrude parts of her face until my heart's content, but where is her 'life'? What defines her as someone that would not look out of place walking down the streets of any town.

Proportions have a lot to do with it, as do the finishing touches of skin, hair and as we all know the eyes are of major importance. I could texture her lime green and give her a moustache but as long as I get the eyes right I'm 90% of the way there. But what of the other 10%? This is my quandary...
I've made sure she is built in an efficient manner (there are no triangles on her face and only a couple of them up on there top of her head) as this will help not only with adjusting the mesh while modeling but also it's invaluable to get it right for skinning* and animation.
I've researched faces and heads and got myself some decent reference.
I've spoken to friends and work-mates about their experience of modeling characters.

I'd better leave for work. I'll continue this later.

I've made some minor tweaks to Elles head; namely I've softened down the SSS effect so her nose is no longer so 'fleshy' and transparent. I've also been messing around with the area around her lips, especially her top lip as a few people had commented that it was not right. Oh, and I've fixed her forehead so that she's no longer got that 'Klingon thang' going on.

*Skinning is what we do in order for the various parts of a model to be manipulated and animated. In this case her face would be mapped onto a series of 'bones' and the vertices assigned (or weighted) to each bone. When the bone is then translated or rotated the weighted vertices are influenced and move with it.
I should really write a jargon buster for some of the terms I use.

In my lunchhour at work I've been attempting to model a car. Not just any car; a Porsche 550 Spyder... Now anyone who knows me will know that I' have a certain affinity with Porsches (namely the 911, although if I could afford it I'd own one of everything; 356, 917, 928 and so on) which started when I was a kid. One of my first memories of moving to the UK from Fiji, when I was 5, was seeing a BRG (British Racing Green) 911 Turbo. Shortly after that I saw the film Condorman in which the stars of the show (IMHO) are half dozen or so black 911's that get trashed down the side of a mountain in Spain (well, the med somewhere). Anyway, at the tender age of 5 I had decided that that was the car for me... 25 years later I'm still trying to scrape together the deposit... One day, you'll see.

Right, back to the model. Making a car is a real first for me; I've spent so many years making environments and props that characters and cars are things I only glimpse on other peoples monitors. Hence deciding that I wanted to diversify my skillset (although it seems that everyone else in the games industry is specialising) and give my brain a different kind of challenge.

Pour Homme...

Just spent a few minutes rescaling the ear as it was a bit small and it was niggling at me to be fixed. I'm probably jumping ahead of myself here but I'm enjoying the shading and rendering aspect of this little project; I should really go back and refine the mesh and get it finalised before I continue to 'play'.

Better leave for work.

Pour Elle...

I've spent the day making a high-res head; the first one I've ever done and so far I'm pretty pleased with the results. I've made her out of Polygons which I'm able to subdivide to get massive amounts of detail and generate a 'smooth' finish on the mesh.

So far she's just got a really simple salmony-pink tinge on the texture map but eventually I'll be able to add wrinkles, moles, freckles, veins and small blemishes to make her look a bit less plastic.

Anyway here she is, Elle;

Yet more guns...

More Guns

Gun Props

Recently I decided to render off a few of the props I made for The Movies. In total there was well over 600 props made for the final game and although many were originally outsourced I was still responsible for managing all of the prop assets in the 'prop shop' and the database. Amongst my environmental art duties I was also tasked with making a significant number of props; somewhere in the region of 100.

Here are a few of the guns that I made; some were based on existing weapons but others, like this light machine gun with its double magazine and bipod, were concepted, designed, built and textured by me. The final result was a mesh that is made up of 500 polys and a 256 texture.

A 9mm British Sten gun;

City Street

Here are a few more images taken from work I've completed on The Movies.

Bombed Street

The following images are of a war torn street that I modelled for The Movies game. I created them in 3ds Max5 and the textures are ones that I made using Photoshop7. The renders were also done in 3ds Max5 with a very small amount of editing in photoshop.