D_Rogue Game Art Project

A fter being away from blogging for almost a whole year, it's great to be able to get back into it and share my latest artwork for  D_ROGUE . A Polaroid camera! Onboard the  F/V  Scully will be numerous crew personal possessions. Things from cigarettes to books, to clothing and other miscellaneous items. One of the more interesting items of these in the cabin area, happens to belong to the protagonist. A Polaroid 1500 Land Camera. As an avid photographer and vintage camera collector, I just couldn't resist putting in a camera model in the game! I just had to think of a way to incorporate it into the world. One of the most distinctive cameras of the same decade  D_ROGUE is set in, was the  Polaroid. What made me feel like this would be quite feasible to recreate digitally was that I own a  Polaroid (a 'The Button') that is almost identical in design and form to the  1500 model from 1977. Unlike a lot of previous models where reference material online wa...

A s mentioned in my previous post, I recorded the entire process of my latest 3D model of a double-barreled Kriegsmarine signalling pistol. I actually created two videos from the all footage. The first time-lapse is a short cut of the key stages. The second, is a full extended breakdown showing almost all 32+ hours in 32 minutes (for those curious on the complete modelling process). Hope you enjoy! Watch the short cut  here : Watch the extended cut   here : Thanks for reading :)

H ello! After being away from blogging for almost an entire year (big life changes) I am finally back! Posts might not be regular every month from now on, but  D_ROGUE is still very much alive. Things are just moving a little slower, as well as a bit sideways...like a crab. As the title for this post states, I have created a model of a  double-barreled Kriegsmarine signalling pistol for the game! A couple of years ago, I visited The Royal Navy Submarine Museum. Amongst the fascinating history and artifacts on display, I saw what looked like a firearm. Upon reading the information plaque, it turned out to be a unique and very rare double-barreled flare gun from a  German  submarine.  These big-bad-beefed-up flare guns were used on U-Boats in the Second World War not only for signalling and when in distress, but also for lighting purposes. My interest peaked,  I took  several photos for reference thinking it would be a fun hard-surface model to recreate....

A s I mentioned in a previous post, I planned to go back to the assets I created last year for the exterior and finally complete modelling and texturing them. I started with the hydraulic picking crane. One of the largest pieces of gear on the main deck, the crane towers over everything and is really hard not to miss. I felt I needed to add more detail to the arms, add all the hydraulic components, link up the main cable to the winch and add a hook. Below is a rigging setup of a lifting hook at the end of the crane arm I modelled.  Jason Bartlett © After watching enough episodes of  the TV show Deadliest Catch, I gathered enough knowledge of the correct rigging sets to not have to try and find references! What I did need reference for however, is the hook shape. Years of advancements in technology as well as health and safety has changed the overall shape and features of tools in the crab fishing industry. A lifting hook being one of these. Luckily, I was able to look at ...

N ow D_ROGUE  has been several years in the making (with this week marking the third blogiversary! ), I thought it was time to do a spring clean and better organise everything. I began by cataloguing all the assets (3D models) into a table in a spreadsheet. I structured the tables by interior and exterior items onboard  F/V  Scully,  and then by area/room. I then labelled what has been completed, what I am currently working on, what there is to do and any key items (essential items that can be picked up in-game etc). All colour coded of course! This process took some time to list everything down. Planning from what will be unique items, versus what will be duplicated and copied into different areas was no easy challenge. I had to think hard about what will fill each space and make it feel lived in (without being too empty or too cluttered). So far, I have just over one hundred and eighty assets on the list! At first, this seemed like a totally unrealistic goal. At th...

B ack in 2012, I created a project that required me to make a fictitious production company. I named my made-up company Exit Entertainment and even created a  title animation for it.  I soon went on to reuse this  again and again, for my own short films and comedy sketch outros while at college (see here ). Over the past decade, I've created several different iterations of the  Exit Entertainment  title animation . Going into this project, I thought it would be a great time to update and overhaul the whole look of the sequence to include it in the game's opening titles! Since D_ROGUE is set in the late 70's, I thought what better way than to create it in the style of what an exit sign might have looked like from that era. Although, a vast majority of them in the past just said EXIT, so I mostly just changed the two-tone colour palette. Getting started, I had to dig out the old files which needed to be cleaned up and vectorised. Ten years ago, I had only just st...

H appy  New Year! For my first post of 2022, I thought I'd give a brief summary (like usual) on the year gone by and where I'm going in the future with D_ROGUE. 2021 was quite a stir up in my creative output. I finally got a full-time job as a digital artist in a production company. I know, I still can't quite believe it!! This shifted my whole outlook as well as output in my artwork. Both figuratively and literally. While I was working part-time, I was able to use my available free time to create artwork for  D_ROGUE. Now my creative profession is full-time, I find I have less opportunities to create my art digitally (having already spent over eight hours each day staring at a screen). Now I know what you might be thinking. Am I ending this journey here? Not even the slightest. My productivity will indeed be slowed considerably, but I still intend to continue creating  3D assets and much more . One positive I have taken, from having less time on my hands for my personal ...

W hile I've been constructing the exterior of the F/V  Scully , I thought it was time to block out the interior for future modelling and complete the bulk of the boat's body.   From the start of the project, I had a rough idea on what the layout of the decks would look like from viewing similar crab fishing boats in the  TV show Deadliest Catch. Though it was only until I had completed the exterior of the hull could I make a start on building the internals. I was able to use the design sheets I created of the fore and aft cross sections (see  here  and  here ) to help guide me in the construction process. Jason Bartlett © Here is a preview of all the  F/V  Scully's  interior compartments   blocked out.  Jason Bartlett © Above I have unhidden the starboard hull surface for a better profile of the boat's outline. Once I get to a stage later down the line, where it feels overall closer to completion, I'll mirror the geometry ...

F ollowing reference material, such as photographs, can have its pros and cons. It can be rewarding to find new reference images online, of objects from different angles; to help better aid the accuracy of a 3D model. At the same time, for me at least, it is very easy to get lost in the detail of trying to precisely recreate things from real life. Take the anchor chain and drum below that I modelled. Although not entirely complete, the  bulk  majority of the model is done. I didn't have any close-up reference images of chains from crab fishing vessels in the 70's, so I had to use the contemporary equivalent (from the TV show Deadliest Catch) with some creative licence here and there to age it all (i.e. taking the design and construction from an engineering perspective and stripping it all back). The result turned out quite well. Overall, looking at the broader picture has worked great and I think I'll use this approach in the future. So long as i...

T he very first model I began to create at the start of the project, back in Autumn 2018, was the bow mast of the  F/V  Scully.  This was created using very little detailed reference; mostly from photographs (much like the rest of my work in the project). Since then, I have come a long way in my modelling skills and decided to take on creating one of the last large pieces of gear attached to the bow mast. The picking boom. This acts like a giant winch that hoists up crab pots onto the deck. After the coiling block has brought up a pot from the sea floor to the surface, the picking boom then transfers it onboard onto the pot launcher. Jason Bartlett © Above is the complete picking boom attached to the bow mast. I quite enjoyed working out the location of the mounting points to join the two like that onboard the fishing vessels seen on the  television show Deadliest Catch. Jason Bartlett © To create all the rigging, I used bezier curves and extruded highlighted cylinde...