blog

June 1, 2024 | 7:40 AM

I finished my first year of College, that was pretty cool.

I'm a 3D art major, so going in not knowing close to anything about it was a little daunting. I struggled alot with my projects, but towards the end I got the hang of it slowly. I still struggled alot with UV's and Substance Painter, which is what I'm using the summer to get better at. So for my summer project, I joined a group of homebrew developers as a modeler working on a demake of Super Mario Galaxy for the original Nintendo DS.

I went in not knowing really anything about DS development, low poly modeling OR texturing, I was really the most unqualified person that they could have chosen. My first project was working on a model for Gearmo, the little robot creature you find throughout the game.

I forgot to mention, I was pretty much forced to switch from Maya to Blender for this project, since their custom plugins and developer tools were made with Blender in mind. It turned out to be a really good excuse to get out of my comfort zone. Anyways, I begin with Gearmo, and boy am I struggling. Even the worst looking model ended up being around 400 tris, which on a system that can only render 4000 tris at once, is absolutely horrible.

Eventually I decide to come back to Gearmo later since he's such a complex character to get down in a low poly budget, with all those gear tips and round parts of his. I move to thwomp, and a similar story ensued. I struggled with the textures, had to learn blender, had to figure out how to UV, it was great. Eventually I got it down and moved on to another model, got that done easier, and then I tackled Gearmo, which yielded a very promising model at 350 tris.

A big thanks to Jelle for the opportunity to work on this project, Stomatol for helping me through even the most basic of texturing and UV problems, Geek Joystick for his cooperation with implementing my very rough early models, and everyone else for being patient and giving me this learning opportunity.

Feb 28, 2024 | 2:09 PM

I started my second semester of art school a few months ago. So far it's been going pretty well. I started learning MAYA, which has been a mixed experience. I've never been amazing at 3D modelling, but surrounding myself with fellow creatives in the school computer labs has proven beneficial. Making friends and saving yourself the headache of struggling alone is awesome, and is definitely good for my grades here lol

Attached is the last project I did in 3D, we had to model a SNES controller, and UV it correctly and paint it in substance painter. UVing it was harder than i thought (since i was doing it blind and alone), but with the help of a friend he helped me practically finish my project in less than 2 hours. Thank u Mateo

Break is coming up soon, then soon enough i'll be out of my first year as a freshman. Time really flies. I need money lol

Also the website is being updated more, atleast i'm trying to. The next thing i'm aiming to do is to model, uv, and add a ps1 type shader to a character model for this website. I'll see what I can do : )