Today I finished my kitchen chairs, and I have cleaned up my would be-artist boyfriend’s cupboard. Now it is quite a few triangles less, the UV looks nice and I have only to finish the texture of this poor thing. I am getting a bit fed up with doing all these wooden things - I have browsed a lot of free-stock-websites, but it is very hard to find good samples. I don’t know about the colour either; light wood, dark wood, painted? I have been very tired today as well, and it shows on my texturing work. Let’s hope for more sleep tonight and more energy tomorrow!

Today I finished the coffee table I did a few days ago, complete with a vase and a withered flower. Now I am making a kitchen chair, that is supposed to be a classic Swedish chair, with much inspiration from Pettson and Findus’s kitchen chairs. I guess ours are not supposed to be blue, but white looked awfully boring in Maya’s viewport! I think painted things are hard to texture, hopefully this will look a deal better when I am done!

Yesterday I made a coffee table, with a super pretty normalmapped little tablecloth. I started on a vase with a withered flower as well.

Today has been character assignment-day, and I have managed to bake a nice normal map! I had a lot of problems at first, but after fixing some problems with the high-poly mesh and switching from xNormal to Maya, it is starting to look really good! Next up is making an ambient occlusion map in xNormal, if I manage to export my cage from Maya… we shall see!

Some progress on my doctor model for our character assignment! I am stumbling around in ZBrush, finally somewhat learning the controls of the program. I found out that I had to clean up the mesh and add a few supportive edges before sculpting, but when I actually started it went quite fast to do what I wanted - add some wrinkles, strands in the hair and stuff. I am going to work more on the face, eyebrows and hair, but other than that I am feeling quite finished already! And that’s good, because deadline is only two weeks away. No pressure!

I guess you guys are tired to death of my little logs already, so here are some pictures! It’s the rug and phone I finished yesterday, and the ant I finished today (after a very productive day of being at home with a fever). The ant is not something I would put in my portfolio, but it will be so small that I think its ugliness won’t be a problem.

I have started to experiment with blending several unrelated texture samples in my diffuse textures, which is really fun. The rug here has one quite obvious rug texture, and more than that I put on some marble, soil and grunge samples. The table I posted before has two wood samples and a cracked grunge texture. I think blending different textures helps a lot to get away from the unnatural “CG Textures-feel”, the textures become more unique, realistic and interesting to look at.

Monday again, and I am really tired after the hike! I finished a cellphone, a rug for the foyer and started on a model of an ant. Nothing very special, but at least it is something. I look forward to seeing my assets in-game!

Today has been quite uneventful, I have fixed some more walls and experimented with an ant trail, that will be a clue in the game. I have managed to tile and pan a texture with ants on it so that they don’t just slide in one direction, but it still looks a bit funky up close. Oh well! Time for a few days off and the scout highlight of the year; adventure hike!

Hello! As of today, we are supposed to write a log of what we do each day in school. Which means, I am going to pester you with one post a day, writing about what I do in our current game project. We are making an indoor environment, and today I have fixed the lightmaps of some modular walls, and made a texture for a kitchen table. Look how pretty. The walls actually look quite pretty as well, I have had a lot of problems with them. I can recommend a guide for solving lightmap problems, for UDK and probably other engines as well.Have a nice day!

I just finished a very cute and clever game called Thomas was alone, a minimalistic puzzle-platformer by Mike Bithell for PC, Mac and PSN. You are playing a little red rectangle, called Thomas. He can jump quite well. Later on, you play other rectangles, that are better or worse at jumping, but  they all have names and think a lot, about one another and their situation. Without sound the game is a nice platformer that lets you use different-shaped rectangles with different jumping abilities. With sound, there is a soothing narrator that makes the game come to life, giving the little blocks meaning and self-awareness. It is a lovely example of how a story can be integrated into a game without being in the way of good mechanics, but enhancing them instead! Needless to say, I like this game a lot, and I recommend it to all of you who like indie games, platformers and heart-warming stories.

After a few weeks’ trip to Tekniska Museet, my Journey picture is back home again! It was really fun to exhibit there, and I encourage all of you artists and creators to take every opportunity to show off your work in places like this (outside the Internet). The man who helped me at Tekniska seemed really interested in young creators and popular culture, and if we really wanted to, I’m thinking maybe our class could have something of an exam exhibition there! Art and games and cool stuff. What do you think? I think that would be quite awesome!