Direenworks

Author: James

  • Blender Compositing

    Compositing experiment, using blender’s camera tracking, rendered in Cycles.

  • BANG! Custom Crate

    Bang! A card game I was introduced to 7 years ago, and has been my favorite since.

    The special deluxe edition comes in a great, but very large bullet shaped tin; so I decided to 3D print my own case for it.

    Was a fun project to get more experience with my airbrush, and play around with some weathering techniques.

  • 3D Printing

    I think the thing, I draw the thing, I print the thing, I have the thing!

    So I’ve gotten into 3D printing.  A technology I’ve been interested in since college. To take a digital design and print it to the real world, awesome!

    I had always thought of 3D printing in terms of making knickknacks and figurines. Neato, but I couldn’t see myself doing that more than once or twice a year; hardly worth the expense and effort of owning a 3D printer. What really got me into 3D printing was my other recent hobby, custom electronics.

    When I realized I could design and print custom enclosures for my electronics projects, I suddenly had a more practical reason for owning a 3D printer.

    Things I’ve designed and made:

  • Sherlock Gnomes

    I was only on this project for a short time. Mostly helped out with some prop assets. The most notable being the book in the opening sequence. You may not think a book asset would be the most exciting thing to rig (I didn’t either), those type of things are fairly run of the mill for the rigging department, but then I found out that it was more of a landscape. Characters would be bouncing around on top of it, and the camera would be close enough for the text to be legible — which meant I had to setup the page deformations realistically enough that the page wouldn’t look rubbery an stretch.

  • Casita Travel Trailer Miniature

    Made a little Christmas gift for my folks :)

    Based off the Spirit trailer, which they’ve been tootling around the country in for the past couple years.

     

  • Son of Jaguar – VR Short

    This was a neat project to be apart of. I was responsible for rigging the lead character, Jaguar.

  • Shelf Lights

    Built me some lightup shelves:

    Made with neopixel light strips driven by an ESP8266, that I integrated with Home Assistant.

  • Paper Light Pictures

    Been making these as gifts recently.

    They sure were a fun design challenge.

  • Misfits Bird Battle

    Painting in VR is fun!

    Created in Oculus Quill, I did this based off an old collaborative concept my buddy Jeff Bellio and I did a few years back:

    We have a history of stealing each other’s art and adding to it :) Here’s a progression of it as we worked on it back and forth:

    First two characters were Jeff’s -> I added the other two -> he added the bird -> I finished it off with the ship and monkey.

    We both love this concept and daydream of making a game from it.

  • A Bunch of Hot Air…

    This is a bit of a personal project postmortem. A little over a year ago, my brother and I made this:

    The project was fueled by curiosity. VR being such a new media format (even more so back in 2015 when we made this) we had many fun ideas we wanted to explore. Artistically, I wanted to play with the sense of scale — how big could we make it feel? Primarily though, between the two of us, we wanted to see how much effort it would take to make a small game in Unity.

    It only took a couple weekends to put together what is shown in the video, and though we had ideas to make it into a small game we’d release on the market, we both ended up getting busy with our actual jobs :)

    This first painting is one I did several years ago that sparked the idea.

    This outer space scene was the idea for our level select screen.

    And just a very rough idea of another environment. Playing  with the level of detail we wanted to go for.