I travel, I fight, I train and I write. Coming from former Soviet Union I drink an occasional vodka and I eat a lot of borsh.
I am an aspiring level designer, artist and world traveler. I love to create interactive worlds and environments. I write tutorials and share my knowledge with everyone who wants to learn.
First things first. I want to thank everyone who reads my website. Most of the visits have come from level design community. Most read pages are my level design workflows and tutorials. I can assure you there are a lot more in progress where that came from and higher quality. I truly hate that I don’t post as much as I really want to on my website. I have so many ideas for tutorials, for videos and for articles to write on here.
Read more about upcoming Maps for Unreal 3 and Counter-Strike Source.
World of Level Design recent articles and Animation Thesis.
Traveling from Florida to Oklahoma during 2007 winter break was an adventure. I didn't want anything less. If I can't find stories to live through, I had to create some.
This is what happens when you put me and Waffle House together. It started at rest stops. I started to get a small audience. By the time the last dance happened, the whole breakfast crowd at Waffle House was watching.
5 weeks later and dozens of blend shapes completed we are now at a point to start animating. Bear with me and my animation. Its not my strong point and its not something I want to go into. I am more of environment/modeling guy.
Blend shapes were a pain to do and I personally hope I never have to do them ever again. I don't have fun doing blend shapes.
What I am going to do over winter break is I will write a comprehensive tutorial on the blend shape process. Covering all aspects from artistic, technical and animation standpoint. Then release it to you guys. I think you will get a lot of value out of that.
Back to Thesis.
Character is rigged. All the changes from before have been applied, well most of them. As well as we had to take our 2D Animatic and replace it with 3D by posing our character and improving staging in 3d. Basically completing 3D layout in order to start moving into animation and laying in the groundwork.
“Believe in yourself. Believe in your own potential for greatness. Believe that you can change the world. It is something that is within each of us.”Evan Tanner
"Evan Tanner was a great man, and his goal was to spread the life lessons he learned, to open people's minds to what really matters in life, and teach humanity the power of one. We will help him to spread his message and acomplish the goal he dedicated so much of himself to reach. We will make him be heard. Everyone that watches this video will be part of Evan Tanner's legacy, and everyone who helps to share this video will be part of what he was living for. With great respect to a great man."
First faculty crit was this morning. Got a lot of excellent feedback on how to improve my model, textures and my story.
All week I’ve been working on improving the model and texturing. Although I have one character in my animation but I will probably end up rigging two characters. One for interior shots and one for exterior. I don’t want to rig more then one but if it makes my model look better in the end, I’m all for it.
Next step is fixing everything that I received in the critique. Finalizing the model. Improving textures. Then to move forward with blend shapes and rigging, as well as continue to model the props and environments.
It’s been 2 weeks of school and we are deep into modeling. First day of school we had to come in with something to show. So we pretty much went from 0-60 in 3 seconds flat.
In one week, next Thursday, September 11 2008 we have our first faculty critique. That should be a lot of fun.
Some story changes are beginning to happen, but those are minor. I believe that my story is pretty strong and after almost 8 months of having it on my mind I am still excited about it. That's always a good sign.
Here is my latest modeling work. Character changed dramatically from what I had before.
