Last update before wrapping this up.

A couple things were bugging me as I pushed forward with textures:

• character personalization/story - originally was planning to add knife carved bits like the gang's logo, some hash marks to denote heists, etc but the scale of those elements felt like too much detail
• several similar but slightly different metal materials

Ended up unifying the darker metals into one for simplification and came up with a change to blue paint for accents which ties into the character's jacket color and tells a simpler story where he painted stuff to make it look cooler.  :P  Also came up with a simple manufacturer backstory and weapon logo.  Wanted something that felt like alien english, and the triangle motif was already there from the original grip concept.

I also took some time to make the ammo can and setup animated materials.  These textures are still old and need updating, but I'll fix that in my project page once it's added.  Even though this was originally imagined as a 3rd person shooter weapon, I figured it'd be cool to show how it might reload up close.  I'll be showing a couple different angles of this and explaining my thought process for functionality.

I'm eventually revisiting an old project with new characters to modern specs, more fleshed out environments, and possibly some gameplay prototyping.  For now, decided to remake the main character's gun as a way to learn Blender and refamiliarize myself with other tools I haven't touched in awhile. These are just rough materials in substance after baking in marmoset and implemented in unreal to make sure everything was kosher.  There's a couple design elements I'm going to tweak for visual  balance, but overall pretty happy with it so far.

Time to head back to finalize the model and uvs, do final bakes/textures, and maybe some bonus animation in unreal to show the reload.

I've got lots of personal projects lined up and in process, so figured it was a good time to start a blog up again for tracking WIPs and stuff.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/YGm426

Some of the first projects I'm tackling this year are reworks of past pieces that weren't completed or have lots of room for improvement.  This character was designed for an art test many years ago, but the model, textures, and animation were fairly low quality due to time constraints.  I tweaked his overall design to be more spherical (to fit my animation vision), chunkier legs, and friendlier. I've got some ideas for a fun little intro cinematic and environment.  Right now I'm planning to learn more about unreal's control rig and animation systems and possibly pcg if I end up making the island.