Hey everyone:)

I hope that you are all doing well and keeping safe throughout the pandemic!

With 2020 over and done with, I thought I would take the opportunity to write a little life update blog and give you all an insight into what I've been up to and what projects that I have planned for 2021. If you have seen any of my projects before, you will know that I normally like to write blogs throughout my projects and show my progress. Over the past six months, I haven't wrote any blogs but I have been hard at work in the background learning new skills and workflows that will come in handy for the sort of projects that I want to do this year.

The last 6 months

Over the last six months, I have transitioned to permanently  remote working full time meaning that I was able to move back to my home town to be closer to the family. I have been really fortunate to be able to do this but it meant that personal work was slim whilst I packed up my life in Liverpool and moved into a new place near Leeds. In the new flat, I now have a separate room just for my office which is an absolute dream and it means that I'm happy to spend way more time at the pc doing personal work.

Personal work

I have a lot of projects planned and the goal for this year is to have a portfolio that shows a good range of 2D and 3D projects. The first half of this year is mainly going to be a lot of concept projects and one 3D diorama. In the second half of the year, I will take a few of these concepts and turn them into real time game environments. I really like doing concepts but my main job is a 3D environment artist so I need to make sure that I continue to improve them skills.

The sort of concepts that I plan to make are focused on storytelling and are more keyframe concepts. I really like these sort of concepts that Wojtek Fus does which can be seen here: ArtStation - The Verge, Wojtek Fus  If I can make images like that, I would be pretty happy with myself and I've tried my best to get this level of storytelling in my recent project that I just posted.

In the image below, you can see that I've started making my next project, this is a realistic style pirate building modular kit that I will use in three concept keyframes. The three keyframes will be two establishing shots and one interior shot. I'm not sure what program I will use for the final images has blender started to get a bit slow in my last project so I may go back to unreal for this next project. I hope to get these three concepts done by the end of next month. 

Current Work

I think it's good to reflect on your previous work now and again and below you can see my most recent project compared to a project that I did around 6/7 years ago, I think I was 18 at the time, I'm now nearly 26. I'm really happy with the improvement here and I'm looking forward to see what my progress will be like in another 6/7 years time. 

Hey Everyone,

Happy new year to you all:) 

If you have been following my work you will know that just before Christmas, I finished working on a New York train project, if you haven’t seen this please feel free to check it out on my Artstation page. Now that I’m done with that project, I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know what personal work I will be doing this year and want I want to focus on.

I think it’s really good to set yourself yearly goals with your portfolio so that you can keep moving forward and improving. My main goal for this year is to improve my concept art so that I have a really nice rounded portfolio that shows both 2D and 3D work. Concept art has always been a huge interest of mine and I originally wanted to work as a Concept Artist before I became a 3D Environment Artist.

When I was first trying to be a Concept Artist at 16/17, I was ok at drawing but I was never good enough to gain actual employment from it whilst with my 3D work, I just picked this up a lot more naturally and I could make the realistic images that I had in my mind but couldn’t fully draw. Nowadays, most Concept Artist use a lot of 3D in their pieces as a base and they paint over and photo bash over the top of the 3D renders. The reason that they do this is because they can solve the perspective, lighting and gain a few different compositions a lot faster. You can also apply quick base textures to your 3D block outs to help with the colouring stage.

Now that I have been doing 3D environments for quite a few years, I can set up block outs quite quickly that would be ideal for painting over and using as Concept Art so with this in mind, I want to give Concept Art a second try. This doesn’t mean that I will be trying to gain employment has a Concept artist but you will start to see a lot more of this type of work from me.

In all of my previous environments, I have created concepts for them first but they are normally quick sketches and they are not portfolio pieces. I would love to be able to make concepts that could be used as portfolio pieces has I have a lot of environments I want to make but creating them as playable game levels can take months for each one which means I don’t publish work often. At the end of last year, I made this concept below to test the workflow of using 3D as a base, I used 3ds max to model, Substance painter to texture and Substance Iray to render, I then took this into Photoshop and painted over.

I am very happy with the result that I gained and in my future projects I will use Octane Render for UE4 to render my base images.

As well as the concept projects that I have lined up, I will also be doing two 3D projects so that I can keep improving as an Environment Artist. One is a small stylised diorama and the other is a bigger project that I will do proper Concept Art for. I’m not going to give away the subject matter right now as I want it to be a surprised but expect a lot of work from me this year. The main aspects that I'm trying to improve on with my 3D is prop work, I feel that I really need to push this area and start using Zbrush a lot more and do more complicated hero props. 

Moving back to the train project, I still need to put this onto the marketplace and show off the graffiti generator that I made, I’ve not forgotten about this stuff and I’m currently working on getting this stuff online. The main thing that I’m doing this month is creating a book for the Train project that I will get printed. Books are a great presentation piece and they have helped me in all of my interviews within the industry as people like to be able to flick through them and they are a bit more interactive than just viewing your Portfolio website on a monitor. The last book that I made was for my dissertation at University based on my two Diner environment, you can see an example image below.

I will upload photos of the train book once I have completed it and got it printed up.

Other things that I will be doing this year is trying to Network and get involved with the community more, I tend to stick to myself and just get on with my work but this year I will be starting to attend Industry Workshops again and this month I will be going to an event in Nottingham linked below:

https://empire-nottingham.confetti.events/

That’s all for this blog post and in conclusion, there should be way more art from me in 2020!

Thanks for reading,

Dom.