To kick off some of my post 2K work I wanted to pick a scene with a small scope, so I can finally kick off my portfolio with some good lighting and material work. I picked the hotel/condo place that the main character Oh Dae-su is stuck in at the start of Old Boy. I thought it would make some interesting environmental story telling of a man being stuck in a room plus I'm just a big fan of that movie. 

For starters the movie uses a lot of fisheye lens trickery and also the fact that it's a movie set, so I'm sure they'd just move around the walls to help them get the shots they needed. It had me a little confused on that actual scale of the room but I think I'm striking a good balance so its not to big of a pain on how to layout the camera once I get closer to the final product. Anyways this is also a project for me to learn blender's bread and butter cycles renderer. EEVEE is awesome but it has it's limitations for sure, that  being said I'm still working in a game workflow and I might try to dump it into unreal 5 too.

I was also pretty inspired by some Valve artists showing off some fancy UV techniques they had used on Half Life: Alyx, so here's a little spot that I think came out pretty well.

I also started to create the wall paper that is repeating in the room and just recreating it in itself was a challenge because there's really no shots of it directly, but I think I got pretty close.

It looks repetitive as hell but I think that's the point. It will definitely help break the repetition once I start going hard on the material side of the texture.  Anyways expect more blog posts from me! I'm currently taking a 6 week course with Oliver Beck for concepting environments in blender and I have another block-out that I want to write a blog post about that as well, so till then I hope you have a good one.

One of the cool perks I personally enjoyed while working at Visual Concepts for the four years that I did get to work there was how much they were willing to give us the chance to try and work on stuff a little outside our traditional roles. Like for example you can see some of the court designs I got to do in my main portfolio but I wanted to use this blog post as a chance to show off some of the other work that I got to do that I'd consider a little more miscellaneous.

To start I got assigned to make 10 murals for the MyCourt. For context MyCourt is a game mode that allows the players to invite other players online for private matches but more importantly for this blog post. It also allows players to unlock different banners, murals, and many other items to decorate their own MyCourt with. I had started a little on the first two but it was on the side of other work I was already doing at the time. Then I was told actually we need to wrap these up in about 2 weeks. It was a miss-communication from some of our other teams, but It was the tail end of crunch and everything was winding down so I'm sure they had a lot of other plates spinning and it probably just got lost in the shuffle how important these tasks actually were.

This first one is for Donovan Mitchel aka Spida. I had done most of the line art for this one by the time the deadline bomb had dropped on me. I rushed the render a bit and would of loved a little more time to really polish this one up way more but for the time frame I got to work on this one I'm pretty proud of how it came out.

This one was the other one that I had started before I knew the actual deadline. I had the sketch done for this one but I really wanted to push myself to complete it because I loved the idea for this one too. So honestly for these first two I did really crunch on them and had to make a few compromises because I just wanted to see these through. All that being said I'm happy with how these two turned out plus I just had a lot of fun making them as well.This one is of Kevin Garnett and his famous quote, "Anything is Possible."

This is how they are displayed in the game. Unfortunately I don't have the other back wall to show off and also this was before someone had pushed a fix for this mural wall because as you can tell it is being slightly squashed in the 3D render.

This one for example was a little more closer to how the other 8 were handled. Unfortunately due to me getting laid off I don't have the others that I had made but fortunately I think this one was one of the stronger pieces anyways. This one was for Giannis Antetokounmpo aka the Greek Freak.

I had to be creative because the deadlines were so tight. I'd would really have to push myself pretty hardcore to draw something like this in a more traditional sense, so I opted to do the smart thing and utilize blender to make a sweet render then use assets of the athlete's we already had. it took me a little over a work day to do one of these. I would be about 90 percent of the way done with one of these by the end of a work day  then I'd do a little more polishing the next morning, export, and then do everything that was needed to get it into the game. Mind you that these were all started from nothing other than the prompt I had, "hey we need a mural of X athlete." I could of for sure just done them all in the same style, but I challenged myself to make each mural unique.  Plus I just had faith in myself to do that in the timeline I had to wrap up the rest of them. For example I did one for Wilt Chamberlain and I made a collage of a bunch of his jerseys because we just had a bunch of renders of them in our depot.

Here are also 3 other logos/graphics that I designed for the game. Really this sort of logo/design work felt pretty foreign to me because I never really had any interest in doing this sort of work before and it's a little opposite of how I traditionally want to approach my own personal work. Regardless I really learned to love it and honestly wouldn't mind exploring more graphic design and even motion design work going forward. Plus getting the chance to do work like this was always a nice break from the typical 3D work that my job entailed.

Also I got the chance to design clothing as well. Unfortunately this is the only one I was able to save. These were unlock-able pieces of clothing a player would unlock by playing and completing limited timed events in the online part of the MyCareer mode. At the time I don't quite remember why but I had to also wrap these ones up quickly as well because another fire came up and I specifically was the one with the most knowledge of how to fix it. It was more than likely something to do with UI, because I volunteered to help out with that team a lot. I got the chance to make quite a bit more clothing but unfortunately I can't show them off because I only have shots of them in the debug mode and I'm unable to share those images. I know for a fact the spray can was put on a shirt at the very least.

All in all we were always on and off with tight deadlines, but honestly I personally think my brain works pretty well with a fire under my behind. Although at the time I was always a little down on myself for a lot of these pieces, because in the moment all I could think of is how I could of made these all look better if I just had more time. With the benefit of hindsight and considering all the other factors that went into making these I'm proud of this work regardless. 

To also address the elephant in the room and because I mentioned it a couple of times. I was laid off in late 2023, and it saddens me to see the continued layoffs that are continuing to happen at the Austin office as well as the rest of our industry as well going into the new year. We had an awesome team of talented folks and I'm sure everyone will land on there feet including myself eventually. The job market is just a little rough out there right now to say the least. Anyways I'm very proud of my time with the company. I joined Hookbang in late 2019 when they were a small company of like 15ish employees and we got acquired by Visual Concepts to grow to about 80 plus people. Most of the growth was during Covid so it really hit me that, "Wow I actually made it." When we finally started going back into the office. We really moved up from a small open space office that was pretty cramped to then having my own personal office in the domain. (which for context is like a giant outdoor mall that is like the pseudo downtown area for north Austin.) I felt like even though we were growing so fast we never really lost our original culture, so it still felt like we were still that small little company for the longest time.

Anyways expect a few other blog posts dropping as I try to drop some other miscellaneous 2K work I managed to save and I'm cooking 2 other projects that I want to document on here as well.

Cheers,
Danny Tamez

Its been a minute since Ive posted anything on my art station so lets change that. In my down time I've been working on this homie. Its a design by Billy Machin that I really love because its the fun colorfulness of something from Splatoon but instead of being some goofy water gun its just a normal gun lol. Seeing his work makes me want to try and design my own funky guns but in the mean time I thought I'd brush up on some good old hard surface high poly and a nice low poly with a bake. Mostly because I think that's something my portfolio is missing. It was also inspired by a co worker that mention about a workflow of using mostly booleans. I made it a challenge for myself of how many booleans I could get away with on this boy and I'm pretty happy with the results. The next step for this homie is to start working on the low poly and push it from there. I hope to have it done before October because Ive been kinda sleeping on this piece for a while and I want to finish it once and for all.

As for a personal update, Ive been working/Contracted with a rad company in Austin Texas called HookBang for about a year now and we were tasked to help push out this year's NBA 2k21 game and handle the switch port as well. Its been a very challenging and fun learning experience getting my hands dirty on working on an actual game. I'd also love to share some of the work I've been doing in a blog post and ect but I still need to get everything cleared. I've also been having a lot of fun learning unity and doing some dumb VRchat world stuff. Its almost a bit therapeutic to work on goofy stuff for that game just because I don't really take it that seriously. I planned on doing all my personal projects in Blender only because eevee is so fricking awesome but honestly its very tempting to want to do a piece all in VRchat just because its been fun getting to play around with friends in a 3D space that I made.

I'm also going to make it a goal to at least have one blog post a month just because it does bum me out that Ive been so radio quite on here so hopefully I can start changing that

I've been loving following Pablo Dobarro's updates to the blender Sculpting tools and have been wanting to give them a try for a while now so I've been slowly cracking on this since I posted that one pumpkin a little less than a month ago. Originally I was wanting to model someone's front porch but I decided I wanted to do something more out there and I got inspired by Grace Liu's Pumpkin House. The day job has been all Sci-fi modeling so this is a nice change of pace. Blender seems awesome for being able to switch back and forth between modeling and sculpting, but I've never tried getting a high poly sculpt so we'll see how it goes. I want to finish this before Halloween and get a noice highpoly bake out of this guy so if need be I'll toss it into zbrush to continue sculpting.

It's still very early but I want to keep in the habit of posting more personal work on my down time.

Thanks for reading and have a nice hump day,

Danny Tamez

I saw Daniel Thiger's "Spaghetti and Meatballs" piece and Kento Yamamoto's "Variable Ramen Material" piece then decided to try and do something similar but stylized.  Part of me wants to try and continue and push myself to finish this on in substance designer but another part of me just thinks I could redo this whole thing a lot quicker if I just did it in Zbrush. Make it just a whole model rather than just a texture and then I think I could reuse a few of these height maps for it.

We'll see but regardless I've been having fun getting my feet dirty again in Substance Designer. It's been a while.

Hey, how's it going? It’s been a minute since I've actually written a blog post and it's for a good reason I promise.  To get a bit personal august has really felt like my life had actually fell into place all at once. I finally after a year was able to move out of Florida and luckily after one contract ended another opportunity fell into my lap at a perfect time. To then work on Orb Rivals at Orionark Games which is awesome for me because not only do I think the project looks super rad but it also checks a goal I had for this year of actually getting paid work on a video game project! It's strange how some of my bigger goals for the year just so happened to land all at once but I guess that's just how life works out sometimes. :)

Anyway as for more personal work that I'll be able to share. I want to try and have a little diorama-ish Halloween piece that I had already started to work on a whim done before the end of October. I'd also like to take some time to go hard on some Substance Designer work, because I haven't had the chance to do some fun work in there as well in a while. Plus I think I'd really like to improve my understanding of materials as well. I'm thinking I can combine those last two goals if not all of them together. Unless I get swamped with work I think those are doable goals. 

Anyway thank you so much if you actually took the time to read this and if your in the Austin, Texas area expect to see this handsome mug around some game dev meetups. 

So, for the time being this is the final render. I'd like to come back to this project after a bit of a break. I've been grinding on this pretty hard for the last month and a half and it be nice to come back to this after a bit of a break with some fresh eyes.

The texture masks were done in substance painter and being able just to do slight edits on them in substance and then just re-import them into unreal was a god sent. in the process gif a lot of the edits were just touching up the masks and making slight changes to them. its an extremely satisfying work flow once you got it all set up and you can just go for it. You also get so much out of the texel density I really couldn't see an argument for not working this way.

The decals were also super satisfying as well! I love the work flow of just modeling to a mid to high level and then just tossing on a bunch of normals decals for all that extra goodness. I'm not sure if the guys at Cloud Imperium Games were the first one to do something like this but geez it so fun to work this way. You should check out this blog post on polycount they do a way better job of explaining it than I would. 

Special thanks to Jeremy Estrellado for giving me a whole lot of guidance and feedback on this project and be sure to check out the DiNusty Empire for the best 3D art community on the net! 

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nQL5WE

I kind of wanted to avoid making this before I made the big final art station post because I figured I be done with it by this morning, but I keep finding little nitpicks to touch up and change that I wanna give myself till the end of the work week to fix a hand full of things. In all honesty I'm really antsy to start applying to jobs hardcore again and I really want this piece in there, because I feel like its shaping up to be my strongest piece in my portfolio.

So here are just a little nugget of all the notes Ive been making for myself. I wrote these and more in a trello document but that is way less interesting than just a picture. Typically I just do this on paper but I think getting used to writing this up digitally would be awesome for working in a group/team setting. 

So what comes after Post Sci-Fi corridor 2 drop by Monday? Well I think I'll feel it out by then but the goal is to have the piece done to a point where I feel comfortable making a big art station post about it or just uploading it to my portfolio website so I can start applying for jobs with it in my portfolio. If I end up doing the latter that means I'll more than likely keep hammering on it until i mustard up the courage to do the big art station drop. I'd also like to go back and clean up some of my older work on here based on some notes from my friend Poji Chow (go look him up and hire him hes great!) So more than likely I'll be cranking on that by the weekend as well!

Thanks for reading and look forward to the drop and the break down blog post too on Monday!

This project has been a bit of a roller coaster where I'm really high on it for a while then I crash a bit because I'm starting to think the project is junk. 

Which I think has to do with the workflow Jeremy had me learning (working with masks and material functions) and not quite understanding it at first but then I just kept pushing myself and it just clicks with me a little bit more and more. To now where I'm pretty confident with working this way and wouldn't understand a reason not to work this way unless you were just working on very tiny props. Working this way actually seems like wizardry because you get so much out of the masks with texel density and such.  Then just reimporting the masks after making slight edits in substance painter then seeing the changes pretty much instantly is great. I'll have a better explanation of what I'm actually doing with the mask and such closer to the end of this project because I'm still not there when it comes to materials in my scene.

Next on the chopping block for me is to completely redo the lighting then figure out what I need to do to get my materials to a point where I'm happy with them and it doesn't look so grungey. My goal was to have this project to a point where I was happy enough with it to make a full artstation post with break downs by the end of the month and I still think I'm on track for that. Although we'll see I could easily see myself wanting to wait a bit longer and crack another couple of weeks into it. I mean this project has been about 4ish weeks in the making imagine what I could do with another couple of weeks and anyway I'll still be writing a blog post like this every week. 

My goal with the blog is to write a post like this every week till I land my first gig. I think it would be interesting to do and cool to look back at when I finally do make it.  Plus I just find writing very relaxing recently. :)

Thanks For Reading! 

So about a month or two ago while learning Blender 2.8 during the Heavy Poly mentorship I made a Sci-Fi Corridor. Which I was actually really proud of and I wanted to push it to be a full fledged Unreal piece rather than just a fancy render in Blender 2.8. Unfortunately the piece was actually made in a week and a bit jank due to how quick I made it. So because of that I just decided to start over and base it on a piece I had Recently stumbled upon by Alexandr Nepogoda. I then broke it down to about eight pieces and one extra for a hallway connector because I didn't think it would be really that interesting to make a mod kit of only a straight hallway.

I was fortunate enough to stumble into DiNusty Empire right before Jeremy Estrellado was starting his next round of mentorships, so I was super quick to hop on to that. So Jeremy has been super helpful giving me direction on how to keep pushing this piece further and further.  So this was the final-ish block out and you can see I was starting to push everything right into the next phase. I am currently further than this screen shot but all the materials and lighting is still pretty rough and very much in the works. 

I've been documenting this project pretty thoroughly so I'm pretty confident that once the piece is looking killer by the 30th (Which is the goal I'm really pushing myself to be done by) I'll have an awesome piece to add to my artstation! 

Thanks for reading!!!