An Empty World
Back in 2012, I worked with artists Tale of Tales to prototype a game about a little swan in a world deserted by people. That game never happened, but the art is still some of my proudest work.
I was responsible for making and placing all of the models. I also created many of the shaders using the strumpy shader editor. The rigging and animation of the swan is by Laura Raines Smith, and the concept artist is Vicki Wong, of the amazing Meomi.
Here's a side-by-side of concept artist Meomi's illustration (top), with my version (bottom) running in Unity.
This shot from Blender shows what the scene looks like without custom materials, and shows the extreme distortion I had to resort to sometimes to match the imaginary perspective of the concept.
These scenes were made the same way. They're points in the game when the swan has stopped to rest for the night.
And this is what you see when the swan is in flight.
Early in the production (before we brought on Meomi), I was tasked with modeling lots of props to populate draft levels that would cover several environment types (city, fields, mountains, etc.)
Here's part of the city before its "plantification". You can see my attempt at a modular train track and sidewalk network.
These buildings ended up not being used in the final version, but I'm still fond of them.
At the time I took lots of notes on buildings I wanted to make, and also made plans on how I wanted to use alphas, texture blending, vertex colors, and so on.
I also did paintings when I wanted to share an idea about color.
These early levels can't stand up to what Meomi eventually drew for us, but I had a lot of fun making them.
I was also responsible for making the swan in his various growth stages. These are very closely based off of Meomi's illustrations and feedback.
An empty World - teaser 2013