Sci-Fi Assets: The Definitive Release

Oh man. I finally released all of my Sci-Fi stuff out to the world. Let’s take a look!

Opinion: The Future of Modding with Paid Mods

Rarely have I felt so passionate about a subject like this.

Game mods, for me, have been my primary source of creative output since I was 10 years old – I’ll be turning 27 this November. I’ve been modding dozens of games for as long as most up and coming modders in my primary community have been alive. I have a library of public releases dating back to 2003 that have garnered a traceable number of over half a million downloads, I suspect though, that since this number only accounts for downloads in the last three or so years, I’ve likely hit well over a million people that have downloaded something I have made. If you account for derivative works or media that others have created that used my content as a cornerstone, that number is truly uncountable. I’ve never directly made a penny from any of this. I’ve never asked for donations, and I recently started fulfilling private contracts using my reputation to make legitimate original content for projects – even then, I held to the right to free public distribution when I could. This year, I moved into the sphere of Indie dev as an environment artist, and I don’t plan on stopping now.

Does it bother me that I never made a dime off of my years of work and contributions? No. Would I like to have gotten paid for my efforts? Well I’m not going to say no… if there’s money on the table, I’m not going to just leave it there. That said, I don’t think I would be half the artist I am today if my main goal was to make money. Allow me to extrapolate how I see modding communities split up as a result of paid mods, and why this would have made me quit a long time ago.

Substantial by Design

I took a few extra days I had off recently to work on exploring new tools, specifically Substance Designer (4). In this post, I’ll be talking about my first time experiences with it and directly contrasting it to my experiences with the Quixel Suite. My end target was Marmoset Toolbag 2, if only for general testing.

January February Rollover Report

Okay so this is a little late going out. the main reason for the delay has been good news, and I wanted to make sure it stuck before I wrote up something on it. Also, here’s a fan!

2014 Q4 Updates

Hey everybody! It’s been a little while! I have been busy and although I haven’t done any one thing that I feel is ‘blogworthy,’ I do have enough small things that are worth an update. If you want more granular updates, I post pretty actively on twitter, it’s generally the same content I post here, just more granular and with horrid compression on images. Plus you can get in contact with me, I’m using it as  This post is just going to jump around a little more then usual, I just want to give an idea of what I’ve been doing without drowning you in transitional text.

The Making of Synthesis – Models

Alright, part two! In this post, I’ll be talking about the various model and texture projects spawned by the cancelled SFM short Synthesis. Just a heads up, I’ll be digging deep into the new Quixel tools and dDo workflow; this project was a case study in producing results in as little time as possible.

The Making of Synthesis – Environments

With our Saxxy 2014 entry canceled and a solid month’s worth of source asset development done for a cancelled project, I though I’d still release what was made for the project. These two posts chronicle my workflow and touch on some things I made, since it’s still very solid work that leverages SFM and source in ways I don’t seem any people in the community do. I wanted to do some workflow breakdowns for how I achieved a very specific look for the short in hopes it’ll help others improve their craft. This post will focus on the environmental design.

Postmortem – Death of a Project

Truth be told, I’ve had a few posts waiting in the wings, completely done, to be released (along with all the maps/models/textures and some dmx files) with a short film that was slated to be done about now.

It did not pan out.

Recent Goings On

Alright, it’s been a little while since I last made a blog entry, and I aim to rectify that. It’s not that I haven’t been doing anything (Truth be told, I’ve been playing a lot of Space Engineers) but I’ve also made some stuff since last post. Let’s talk about a bit of it!

SFM Tutorial Stream

I decided to do a video stream of making a poster in Source Filmmaker last night with the intention of helping people transition from Garry’s Mod to SFM.