Zachary T.

I have 4 years of Adobe Photoshop experience. From creating textures from scratch, layering and combining textures to create a new one, create different maps like normal or specular and texturing my assets that I've created in 3Ds-Max. 

When texturing non-modular assets in 3Ds-Max, I unwrap the UV of the model and arrange the poly's the way that I feel is comfortable and export it to photoshop. In photoshop, I begin to look for textures or start to create my own that I think will go perfectly with the asset. I create textures from brick to rock to some dirty metal. 

Yes, I do get most of my textures from ' cgtextures.com '.

I have 1 year of Cinema 4D experience, I learned/learning in a class that I have in school. I mostly use C4D to model buildings, however when I do animations it's usually for testing and for school.

My animation can go from basic movement to rotate and scaling to making physical rigid bodies and collider objects to create simulated falling balls or falling objects. I can create bones and joints for creating character animations, but I'm still learning the basics.  

 

The experience that I have with the Unreal Development Kit is roughly 3 years, knowing Kismet, Matinee, Cascade and almost all the other tools that can be used. I have created small concepts in UDK which can be seen on the Gallery page. I mostly use UDK to import my assets that I've created to view them in game perspective and to create small scenes. 

However, when I'm not doing that in UDK I'm using Kismet to create  small concepts that can be used in a game like camera angles, puzzles, cinematics with Matinee or creating movement in Kismet with different speeds, velocities, etc.

 

My 3Ds-Max experience is 2 years and I can do any kind of modeling from modular assets and pieces to modeling guns and weapons. I use a texture sheet to create my modular assets which is explained in detail in the Photoshop section below. When I create basic assets like a fire hydrent or a stack of plywood, I usually like to look at game references or pictures online that I can follow with so I can really know what I'm modeling. Creating the second UV channel for lightmaps for UDK is always a pain though, but I can go through with it.

The time it takes to create certain assets really depends on what I am modeling. A full modular library could take a week or two, depends on how many pieces that are in it. For a small asset like a desk or light post, it could take me about 30 minutes to an hour to model and texture.

I cannot make organic like assets like trees or humans/characters, I do not have the experiences or the need to do so. 

                My past experience of 3D Modeling first starts off when I was young, almost 10, making maps for UT99. I made multiple maps for a variety of gametypes for public servers and some are still being played today.  After making maps for about 3 years I saw the UDK come up on Youtube and I was really curious on what it was about. I downloaded it and I was stunned to realize that it was used to make games, not maps for UT3. I learned everything about UDK; I learned Kismet, Matinee, Cascade and learning workflows and importing my own stuff. I started small little games that were never completed, but I saw that other people on Youtube had custom meshes and assets in their scenes. So I researched, I found out that these were completed with 3Ds-Max, Maya and many other programs. I chose 3Ds-Max because I found out that the Epic company used it to create the Unreal Tournament games. I learned so much about it. Modeling simple things like boxes to barrels and keys and then stepping it up to create modular assets and meshes. Making basic meshes and importing them into the UDK got me a problem - the UV mapping. I researched UV mapping and found that it was a serious and important part of a mesh. Learning more about photoshop and textures, I started UV mapping. Later after a bunch of assets being imported, I noticed another problem with the shading and lights. After looking online it had to deal with the Lightmaps. As before with anything I found was a problem, I learned about it. Now here I am, making meshes in 3Ds-Max and putting them in UDK to create scenes and maps. 

A year ago, in highschool I joined a class called Scientific Tech Visual or SciVis. I found out from my friends that it had to deal with photoshop and animation. Immediately, I went for it. We learned animation in Cinema 4D and photoshop in Xara ( do not know what version ). We learned basic animation, modeling and physics. I learned the modeling very quickly as with 3Ds-Max I could see how everything was very similar in modeling. Animation was a little bit of a struggle for me, but I'm still taking the class and learning online so I'm getting better with it. So my life and experience with game development and 3D art and modeling has been growing and growing to a point where it's a passion and a hobby I love doing, so eventually I hope I will get into the game industry as a 3D artist / modeler.

As of now, I'm currently working as a 3D Modeler for Ozone Development.