Littlest Tokyo by glenatron on Sketchfab

Introduction

I’m Glen, and I’m a Senior 3D artist at Space Ape Games, which is a mobile games studio based in London, UK. I grew up and went to University in the city of Lincoln, where I studied a course called ‘Games Production’. This touched on most aspects of games development but helped me decide to specialize in 3D art.

Post-University, I spent a huge amount of my free time on websites such as Polycount, making personal artwork, and creating a portfolio. Some of my early work was horrendous, as I found my way through learning new software packages, and new workflows, but through practice and persistence I got good enough to land a job in the games industry.

Starting out, I worked in AAA console, on titles such as Killzone (Shadowfall and Mercenary), Little Big Planet 2, and Ridge Racer: Unbounded. The company I was with at the time (Fireproof Games) then decided to start producing their own mobile games, so I spent the next few years working on The Room games (sadly nothing to do with Tommy Wiseau). It was a switch from long production cycles and working with big polygon/texture budgets, to short production cycles and working with stringent budgets (at the time we were developing for iPad2/iPhone4).

Stylized low poly art

I work primarily in mobile games development, where hardware is less powerful and games are designed to be scalable to operate on many platforms. This requires tight budgets to be put in place, and we have to be mindful of where we use textures and vertices, in order to remain performant across these devices. I think creating low poly artwork comes more naturally to me because of this, and it’s something I carry over to my personal artwork. I suppose the method in which I share a lot of my artwork also encourages low poly thinking, as I use a real-time solution as opposed to renders.

Sketchfab is my go-to way of sharing most of the personal artworks nowadays. For those who don’t know what Sketchfab is, it’s a web-based 3D model viewer, which means it can be accessed on a variety of different platforms and hardware. I like to do entire 3D scenes on Sketchfab, but I still want the scenes to load fast, and run smoothly, which means that I have to use the techniques I learn from my day job to be stringent with budgets, and smart with how and where I use vertices and texture space.

In terms of my personal texture stylisation, I think it’s a case of emulating/taking inspiration from what I connect to when I’m looking at artwork myself. If you look through my Artstation likes, they’re pretty much all hand painted, low-poly models, and that’s definitely echoed in the kind of work I like to produce.

It’s also the type of texture style I want to learn and develop because I find it rich and multi-layered. I love watching people who are pros at hand-painting; layering in lighting, color, texture, and character in a single texture. I feel like I’ve only just scratched the surface, and there’s a high skill ceiling to this sort of texturing, one which I aim to reach someday.

Dioramas

Creating these dioramas is a very iterative process, where I spend a lot of time switching between Sketchfab and 3DS Max. They start out life as a series of simple grey meshes, to represent the major landmarks that I want to portray in the scene. These then get chiseled away and detailed, until you start seeing the the final form. All this time, I’m constantly moving, adding, taking away, making sure that there’s a consistent level of detail across the whole scene, that it’s nice to view from all angles, and that there are some interesting elements no matter where the camera is pointed. I’m a simple man, and all of this is done by poly-modeling inside 3DS Max. I only really start opening up other packages such as ZBrush if I’m tackling a complex organic structure.