Ed Coyle's Art Blog

Call it having too much on my plate, never being home, a lack of enthusiasm, working too much and too late, etc. The fact of the matter is that I just haven't updated this site in months. There is a lot I want to do, and very little time to do so. In fact, it seems that every time I begin planning my next project, I get sidetracked by something. Usually, it's a "small" job for a client that just keeps coming back for more, which I seem to have lots of lately. I can never seem to get anything finally OFF my plate.

Regardless, these are all terrible reasons for not being more active. One thing I really wanted to do with this site is update daily, but I've long since given up on that idea. I actually have done a lot of work in the past few months, but I haven't uploaded it here. Maybe I'll try to start a daily update with all of that material very soon, and try to keep up those kinds of updates until I run out of said material.

There's a lot I've wanted to do lately. Here's the list:

~ Work on my Fiancee's invitation business website, with which I'm having lots of issues trying to build a shopping-cart type website for ordering event invitations. I've reached a level of programming that I don't really understand, and I need to educate myself on Object Oriented Programming, something that is going to take some time to familiarize myself with.
~ Really dig deep into the artistic style that will encompass the next TGP project, which is something we want to be commercially viable. It's going to have a fun, yet detailed art style that may be part art-deco, part acid-trip, and some other parts that I haven't quite figured out yet. I've had some ideas, and some sketches, but I'd really like to start getting into the details in terms of color, shapes, and the whole experience of the game. Art is going to be a major part of this game, and I've barely scratched the surface.
~ Put together my next demo reel. I've done a lot of work professionally since I've been out of school, and have little to show for it. I've got a lot of Comcast commercials, some 3D models, and a whole lot of websites and 2D sprite animation. It's really not the portfolio I wanted to have at this point in my career, but I've got to make the best of it, and make it look fabulous. I think I've been holding off also because of a few personal projects that I've wanted to finish, but it seems like they can never get done.
~ Do some more job hunting. I've been looking mostly for more clients to do work for, but part of me still wants to find something full-time at the moment. I feel like even though I'm not making a whole heck of a lot of money, I'm working constantly. Maybe if I had something full time, I'd be able to come home at night and put more time into my business, my fiancee's business, and my personal projects.

Maybe I just have too much to do. Maybe I'm spreading myself too thinly. My mom told me recently to "breathe baby, breathe." Maybe I need to just sit and breathe for a while.

I've taken up reading lately. I've been reading a whole lot of websites learning all types of things. This website lists some books I want to read about game design in general: http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/464/the_game_design_portfolio_is_.php?page=1. I've also been reading a lot of news sites, and learning about how crazy my country's politics are.

Not sure what else to write... I just felt like I needed to.

I recently did some work for D4 Creative Group in Philadelphia in the form of rotoscoping. My job was to remove various distractions in an otherwise clean scene. Some of these included various brightly-lit exit signs, as well as spots on the ceiling and car tail lights that just happened to come through at the time of shooting the footage.

I cut together this video to show before and after shots of the work I did. Some of the footage was not color corrected at the time of the rotoscope, but the final renders I show are all color corrected by other freelancers. This footage is ©2009 D4 Creative Group. However, the monstrous rotoscoping skills are all mine

For my Grandmom's 70th Birthday, I did some sketches of her and my late grandfather. The originals are pencil drawings on good sketch paper. I did the sketches separately, and photoshopped them together for a finished printed 5x7. She got both the sketches and the finished image for her birthday.

I haven't updated for a while, so I figured I'd start a new posting trend with this image. This is a concept logo that I did for Gary's Stick Figure Fighters game. Mostly because it has little visual representation at this point in terms of interface, I decided to add in this logo when I cut the recent gameplay footage that is now on TGP's front page. It's only a concept logo, but I think it's nifty enough to stick.

Shot with a nearly-20-year-old video camera in not-so-decent lighting, I managed to get what I think is a fairly good demonstration video/commercial whipped up for our iPhone game, Hurdler. Using Gary as the narrator, we walk you through how the game is played and show you a bit of the gameplay using the touch screen. After cutting apart the sound in my old version of Goldwave, I did all of the video editing in Adobe After Effects. I feel like it came out very good, and I enjoy checking the video daily to see what the comments have to say (which as of right now, there aren't many -- tell your friends about Hurdler!)

Keep on the lookout for more of these, as we plan on releasing a ton of new games on the iPhone very soon, including an update to Hurdler!

To go along with our new iPhone and iPod Touch game, I've also been busy building a fresh website to house everything to do with that game and any more games we do for the platform. It's basically similar to the Back Room, except its layout is much different, and much of the emphasis is on buying the full version of the game.

The site includes a scoreboard system optimized for the iPhone's Safari browser, as well as basic pages for description, instructions, and screen shots. I'm very proud of how this site turned out. It's pretty gratifying to see my web work on-the-go

You can see the site on a normal web browser, but it's best viewed on an iPhone/iPod Touch. If you happen to have one, point Safari to http://i.thegamespage.com to check it out. Expect that front page to fill up with more games later this year

I haven't been able to update this blog recently because, despite the bad economy, I've had a large stream of freelance work, as well as a lot going on for Easy 8 Software. This is the first week in a few months that I've had no work, and I'm happy that I have a second to collect myself and update on what I've been doing.

For those that don't know, we're going to be releasing our first commercial game on a widely-known platform soon, the iPhone and iPod Touch. What better game than one of my personal favorites and one of our most popular, Hurdler! We've been working with a talented Mac programmer to help us port the game to Xcode, but we've also been trying to spruce the game up a bit in terms of presentation so that those that buy it feel they got their money's worth. After all, the first thing the user sees when playing a game are the graphics, right?

My Wacom Tablet's been getting quite a workout lately. I've been doing lots of Hurdler illustrations for the various screens throughout the game, as well as the interface design (buttons, special effects for user input). Below are some examples of these. The last screenshot depicts the areas of the screen that you will touch to control Hurdler, similar to how you'd press the keys on a PC's keyboard.

In addition to win and lose screens and such, I've also been doing the usual promo art thing. I had actually drawn up this promo art for Hurdler 2 a while back, but decided to change it up just a bit for the iPhone game. Notice my mad "modular" art skills

Finally, we've gotta depict the game on the apps screen somehow, right? The two images below will be first thing you see after installing either build of the game on your iPhone/iPod Touch (depending on if you get the "lite" version for free, or pay for the full game).

As you can see, this has kept me busy for quite a while. This is far from all the artwork I've been doing for this game, as I've done much more interface work than just this (I've made LOTS of buttons and menu text). Look forward to seeing all of this stuff in action within the next week or two, as our Mac programmer is putting the finishing touches on it before submitting to the apps store. Makes me wish I could afford the AT&T plan

Link: http://www.twitter.com/EdwardCoyle86

It's been a while since I've updated. I've had two big freelance gigs going on at the same time, so it's been tough (very little time to myself to play with 3d). However, I've recently signed up for Twitter due to a few friends from college coercing me into it. I've been having a lot of fun with it. If you like to tweet, hit me up @ EdwardCoyle86. I'll put a link up here when I get some time.

At least, that's what I would have thought as a kid if I had seen this. In my free time, I've been making adjustments to my signature character to make him look a little more realistic. I finished the unwrap yesterday, and I'm working on retexturing him now (still need to make some nice looking, open-fingered gloves and add a bump map to the whole thing). Not to mention, I added some Vray HDR lighting now that I'm familiar with it, and it's looking mighty fine. By the way, this is rendered with Vray 1.5 SP2 for Max 9.

I plan on redoing the rig from scratch, as there are some more complicated movements that I'd like him to make for the new demo reel that I'm planning. Just figured I'd post this today because I'm very proud of the way it turned out.

so after struggling for awhile to get my head around how Vray works, I've finally started to make some progress. I've got what I believe to be a nice evenly lit room in the works, and now I'm working on unwrapping and texturing everything in it. I'm very happy with the way its coming out so far, even though I'm just playing around with textures at this point (as you can see, some areas of the room aren't even textured in this render).

This image was rendered with V-ray 1.5 RC3 for 3ds Max 9. I believe it took roughly a half hour on my machine, but that was because it was drawing up a fresh irradiance map and light cache. It should go down a bit when I'm ready to do the final render and I have these two files stored. If you're 3D savvy, leave me some feedback on this sucker (make sure you click the thumbnail to get a better view).

I'm trying to keep this blog up to date, but the truth is I'm just bad at updating it. I've done a ton of work over the past few weeks on various things including my own website, Hurdler 2 graphics, and other 3D models. I will try to update every other day this week with new posts about this new work, rather than just give it all away in this post

UPDATE: I just realized that the original image I uploaded had an Alpha channel on it and was making the render look a little funky... if you took a look at it before, take another look at it now, it's much better