I’ve been chipping away at this game project for three years now. Never took it seriously, more of a hobby. To do the type of 3D art that I like. Not everything needs to be bleeding edge realism and hyper detailed. In the summer of 2023 I decided to leave my previous job due to burnout. I needed to be closer to my family. I didn’t want to be preoccupied with my job over taking care of my family.

I thought I’d find a few freelance gigs fairly quickly but the scene is quiet for now. Since I more free time it’s time to bet on myself.

During my free time my little girl was born. I was able to see her grow up from zero to 3 months. Not many men get to experience that. My daughter won’t remember this time, but it was a joy and a huge gift for me.

I’m blessed to have a varied career in 3D. I’ve done AR, VR, animation for games, adverts, and product rendering while working with some amazing people. A great bunch of experience to build and run a game company… we’ll see.

Lets go.

Rigging is such a chore for me. I love character modelling, texturing and animation. However there’s that little obstacle in the middle called rigging. Sure there’s loads of utilities out there that help the process but I find there’s always an issue when bringing the result into a game engine. Which makes it hard to troubleshoot the issue, as I did create it from scratch. Which is where Cascadeur comes in. I can use a web based rigging tool like mixamo to generate the bone rig. Clean up the skin weights and bring the result into Cascadeur. After a brief setup I’m up and running with animation. It’s early days with this application but I’m hopeful it can help speed up the process. It seems it’s made with game engines in mind so fingers crossed there’s no import issues for Unreal, Unity or Godot . I’ve got a lot of characters to animate.

For a long time I thought it was cheating to use assets from places like Turbosquid or Unity Asset store. Especially for a commercial project. Long story short that’s utter rubbish. I don’t know why I thought this at all. Every company I’ve worked for has used some version of an asset library to buy what they need for their project. If someone has already done what you need and they’re selling it with a commercial license then get that. If the license allows you to sell you’re creation legally then you’d be stupid not to. I’m no longer a fool in this regard. 😅

The best part of two years I’ve been working on a game project. can’t really call it a game yet as there’s nothing to play. I took the approach of starting on the mountain of 3D assets that’s needed for the project. I couldn’t find anything out there that totally suited the art style I had in mind so as and when I have some time I do a couple more assets. As I remember to post some more I’ll ad them here. bare with me as the project doesn’t have a name yet. You’d think I’d have something after 2 years.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Some months back I saw a really cool app for iPad called Shapr. Seemed pretty easy to pick up and play around with. Turned out to be true, so I set out to do a couple of extra asset models for the game project still without a name. I promise I’ll come up with something soonish. In the mean time hear are results of my journey with Shapr.