I have been working ... honest!

Been having a hard time trying to fit in working on my portfolio around my social life. I know that my portfolio should be taking pride of place at the top of my priorities right now, and it is, but it's hard when I lose at least 3 days when I go up to London to see my friends and boyfriend every weekend.

When I used to live in London that was all so easy but now I have to get a train and I can't just pop back and forth like I used to. Not that I got much work done when I did live there since I was always busy cleaning, cooking etc.

However I have been making progress, sort of. I basically got stuck with my VW van, I keep getting strange smooth shading errors from where I have triangles on the wheel arches and no matter how i can't seem to get rid of them.

So I decided to go back to an old project I was working on and go back to it at a later date with fresh eyes.

So this old project? Well, it's a sword. Here's the original concept art, not by me but this guy: http://wen-m.deviantart.com/

Anyway, modelling and such was fine, nothing too head-scratching about it. But then it got to doing the textures ... Lets just say I sat staring at the image for an hour or so just thinking "ok so how the hell do I make it look like that?!"

Done some very basic stuff to rough out what I should put in diffuse and what in spec. But at the moment my task has been hand painting a height map to use to make my normal map. Now any sane and normal person would have gone into ZBrush, but no, I thought that hand painting all the details in photoshop would be more accurate (probably true actually) and easier (not really true at all).



But I'm hoping that the hard work will pay off and I will have a sexy sword to put in my portfolio and *hopefully* get me on the way to junior environment artist!

^_^