How I started my journey

~This article will not be for everyone. If you don't want to hear about how I got into 3D art feel free to check out the other articles that are available here at the game art blog~

The start of a journey

Initially I wasn't a very avid gamer. I would play the odd flash game online or go round my friends house and play call of duty. I had a PlayStation 2 but gaming didn't seem to be something I had a great love for at first sight. It grew when I started playing games such as: Grand theft auto San Andreas, Vice city and the Simpsons hit and run on the ps2. I loved these games but I didn't find a true passion for games until I started going around my friends house to play Call of Duty on their ps3. Many of my friends had a ps3 but I could justify the purchase. Eventually I asked for a ps3 for Christmas once the prices had dropped on them a bit. From there I fell in love even though Call of Duty was the only real series I played for a great deal of time.

When it comes to the creative side me, I was definitely lacking. I felt, if I couldn't draw I was naturally untalented. My art teacher in year 7 (6th grade) was an inspiration to me. (This was my first year in secondary school). She was a really nice person and somewhat brought out my creative side. Despite this her art lessons still didn't really stick with me and I sucked. During this time I found a program called moviestorm. It was a tool where you could create your own animated movies with preset animations. I thought this was really cool and continued to make really bad short films with the software. From there I though animation or film making would be my thing. I experimented with live action film making and stop motion animation but I knew myself this was all a phase. Time went by and I knew I wanted to do something with my life but I didn't know what. My mindset started to change and my school grades started to improve but it just felt worthless because I didn't know what I wanted to do. One day I decided it would be cool to learn how to make games.

I found a software called gamesalad but at the time I had the ambition of making IOS games because I recently got a iPad. As a result I bought myself an old mac book G4. Because I was young and stupid I didn't do my research properly. The laptop couldn't run the software and you needed a license to develop for ios. I later sold my macbook and got a gaming PC around the same time. It was the new thing apparently and my friend persuaded me to get one. I had so much fun and loved it a lot more than my ps3. All my money went into that, i'd saved for ages and was glad I enjoyed it so much but at the time I didn't realize how much of an impact it would have in my life.

Because of my failed attempt with the macbook my cousin kindly lent me her mac mini. There I created my first game using a gamesalad template. I had so much fun learning how to code using gamesalad's block coding. I was so proud even though in reality it wasn't that hard.

Image: The game in question

All the sprites in the game were not made by me. I only coded part of the game with gamesalad's simple block code.

After creating this I went on to create more 2d games but from scratch using my own assets. They were terrible but I found something creative and productive that i love doing. After creating a plethora of 2D games I started to dabble in 3d with the unity game engine. I learned to code quite a bit with unity and later got referred to a friend of my cousins that creates apps. He taught me how to code a bit with apples xcode. He wanted to work with me to develop an app. Although I was having fun I knew this wasn't what I wanted to do. I went back to game development but this time went all in creating 3d games in unity. I was having fun coding but I felt like my games were being held back in the visual department so I started to learn 3d and photoshop. I tried blender but I couldn't get into it so the next choice was a student copy of maya. 3ds max was another option but that's not available on mac so I started to learn Autodesk Maya with online tutorials. I started to really enjoy modelling as I can see what I'm creating in real time and monitor my progress. To spend more time on modelling I used free unity assets to make my games with just bits of coding on my part for custom events. At this time I had no sense of optimization so my game started to get laggy real quick and that held me back a bit but I was enjoying myself.

A game I started creating that fell through very quickly (not all assets were created by me):

A game I put more time into:

Most assets were created by me but not all. Most of the coding was free off the unity store.

As you can see it's very bad but I learned a lot from just practicing, doing my own thing and having fun. After creating this i started to drift away from game development and focus more on my 3d art skills because it became clear to me that that's what I wanted to peruse.

I tried a verity of styles!

Cartoon:

Hand Painted:

3D rendering:

Whatever this is:

Experimental?:

As you can see a lot of this is god awful. Trust me, there was probably some projects that looked a lot worse.

My first real breakthrough was this image:

It was inspired by a piece of concept art from naughty dog's game, the last of us. I created everything from scratch including the brick texture and I was pretty pleased with myself. I'd like to say this piece was planned a lot but it wasn't. I just made it up as I went along and I believe that's the best thing to do when you're learning. From here I just kept creating and every so often I created something pretty good and I still believe in that today. Just keep creating.

I appreciated that this article was a boring one but I hope you've took something away from it. If you take one thing away from this i'd say, just keep creating, eventually you'll make something amazing.

I haven't touched upon my college education in this article as I'd like to talk about it in a different blog post so stay tuned for that. Follow my instagram or email list to get notified when that's available.

Best Reagrds

~Ross Hankinson~