vimeo site

https://vimeo.com/mkartstudio
for higher res videos of this stuff

Forest Ruins Scene

Here is a quick view of a 3d jungle scene with a large stone relic in it that I've been working on.
Its a design for a 3d person action adventure game with a storyline revolving around
buried treasure and excavation.
Kind of Indy Jones meets Tomb Raider.

A concept drawing of a large relic head in the jungle

mini tank

more mini tank movies with brighter lighting. Rendered in Marmoset.

MiniTank

Had some fun building out this little guy in Maya and texturing with dDo. Amazing program!

Yosemite Valley

Some quick one hour studies.

The weather has been really warm,

60 degrees, so pretty comfortable for painting outside

Here's one of El Capitan

Spore G.A. movie

A quick movie captured from a mission I designed using Spore GA.
I made two different armies and basically had them fight to the death in a desert plain.
There was a cool drop-ship I made for that mission too, I should try to find the screenshots.

Spore Creature Parts

Some more Creature Parts Concepts for Spore EP1

Spore Robots in Galactic Adventures

This was a design for some snap on weapons I made for one of our Spore creatures. The creatures got all kinds of interesting parts and capabilities in that Spore Expansion Pack.

Here are a few quick videos of that creature in a walk cycle

Spore Robots

more concepts showing body blocks snapping onto a bendable spinal structure;
The key was a certain fun tactility as you dragged the body block off the palette and onto the spine.
How it snapped in place and slid around clicking and snapping in small increments along each spine segment.

You could then attach other blocks to this main block and they would move with it and the parent spine segment.

You could also reduce the number of spine segments or add them by pulling end handles (like in Spore)

A decent robot could be built with 2 or 3 spine segments, but more complex behaviors could be made with
longer spines.

Spore Robots Concepts

concept for a spinal structure

sketch showing how body blocks could attach onto the spinal structure

concept for a robotic leg assembly for use with the Spore Creature Creator

side or top mounted weapon concept

Spore Robot Prototypes

Scouring my older backups for artwork and came across these concepts I did for a Spore Robots Game

we pitched.

The core idea was combat between highly customizable robots in 3 different classes or types based on Speed, Weapons, and Defense, in a destructible environment.
We wound up outsourcing these designs to get modeled and textured. Some of the designs and models made their way into DarkSpore eventually :)

Spore -Small City Concept

This was a concept for a small city built by a primitive and artistic culture

Here are some maya models I made showing the basic look and color scheme of the architecture.

I was really inspired by ceramics and Gaudi for these buildings, so I called this the Ceramic Culture.

 This was the City Hall building; on the right are the basic building block shapes used to make this structure.

Factories would have alot of smokestacks

 A typical residential building. Dr. Seuss was also a real inspiration in designing these buildings, especially the way little things would animate and bounce around on them.

Spore Space Colony Concept

A model for what the walls for a space colony might look like. There would be some kind of energy or glass dome, ala old time sci fi, on top of the walls to seal the colony from hostile planet atmospheres.

After talking with Will about the idea, we decided to go with a high tech look, he also wanted some kind of video screens around the outside of the walls that would show that this colony

was advertising itself...kind of Blade Runner-esque.

 

Spore - Editor

More work on the spaceship interior editor mockup.

Thought about having the editing Dais be a platform that drops down into the deep shaft before releasing the creation onto the planet via some ejection capsule or pod.

Spore - Editors

More vehicles and buildings using Spore editors, and exported into Maya for a quick mockup of a planet setting.

An Army of Fun

A bunch of vehicles I made using the editor when we were testing it out.

I exported these out of the editor and into Maya, then textured them in the way we would

expect it in game.

The assembly of various vehicles in editor was a very fast and creative process, that gave lots of creative freedom as well insured that the group of creations all share enough similarities to make them look like they belong together. We knew we had something cool at that point

.

Spore - Vehicle Editor Parts

Here are some Vehicle parts in maya, used to show how we partitioned the meshes up for texturing in game

by the player.

In later expansions we figured out how to make Robot Legs disassemble able so the player could make their own configuration, we just made the individual limbs.This really was fun to play with.

 

Spore - Editor Concept

War Plane

Playing around with the lighting a bit in this test.

Spore - Editor Concept

Battleship
Another vehicle exported out. These were fun to make. (I also modeled and concepted the parts that made up
the vehicles which made it even more rewarding to see the final creation) I could have made a whole army for an RTS with this exporter and Spore in a day!

Spore - Vehicle Editor Concept

Spore- Editor Concepts

Here's a preliminary and rough modeling, lighting, and texturing concept done in Maya of what the vehicle editor environment would look like for Spore.
I was inspired by backgrounds from the game MetalSlug. I was imagining it as a giant interior of
a spaceship, and picturing some kind of energy doing the "editing"(represented by the volume light)
I'm using an exported vehicle from Spore with a baked on AO map from game (kinds low res) and standard specular and reflective settings done in Maya using a baked out specularity map, also from game.