A bit of hard surface practice plus a chance to use Zbrush for something not bumpy and lumpy. This character is a high ranking official of some sort, out in the bad areas in a suit fit for hot, cold, bad air, and whatever else may show up.

The first one is for a would-be game of mine called Starfunk. It’s a space opera with a strong infusion of modern music and a visual style of psychedelic color mixed with retro sci-fi illustration. I hope to do some concept work for this universe someday. (click the logo to enlarge)

Just a sci-fi piece for fun. It’s something of a city made of tower-of-babel style mounds of architecture, strung together with massive bridges, themselves also civilized.

I wrapped this baby up with 2 days left on my 30 day Zbrush free trial. Polypainted and rendered in Zbrush. I’m not decided yet on whether or not to get a 3D print of it.

Watch the trailer first to understand what this is: Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo. Then watch the original of the clip I remade: http://www.starwarsuncut.com/#/scene/428 And here is my version: Star Wars Uncut – Scene 428 from Lucas Hardi on Vimeo. This was so much fun to make. I did it in [...]

My first sculpt in about 3 years, the same subject as my last sculpt, but this time Paul Bonner style (still WIP): And an update:

After spending two years as the Lead Concept Artist on Warhammer Online, I was asked to take over the UI design. It was about 6 months before we planned to release the game, we had completed the bulk of the concept art for the game, and Michael Phillippi was ready to step up as the [...]

I found some more pieces that I thought would go well on the site here. These were done between 2005 and 2007.

I’m not a fan of the new look that was recently revealed. Without going back and looking at any of the old games, I did this sketch. (less than an hour)

This was a painting for Dominance War 4, an art competition for game artists. I’ve been so busy with UI, that this is the first painting I’ve done in a few months.

I posted these on a forum recently. I can’t claim them as original thought, but I have found them to be my most useful heuristics in filtering game design ideas: Everything Rests on the Core Loop Sometimes called the “game mechanic” or the “30 seconds of fun,” the core loop is the series of actions [...]

I found this sketch on my hard drive. It’s about a year old, but I still believe we will see a lot of the ideas come to fruition in the *next* generation of game consoles. The basic idea is that the momentum from successes like the Wii and the social games market will focus the [...]

I always enjoy a chance to look over a list of recommended books and add a few to my amazon wishlist. So, I thought it would be a good idea to look over at my favorites on the bookshelf and write a list for the site here. These are the top three (or 6, depending [...]

This is my entry to Conceptart.org’s “Last Man Standing 3″ competition, round one. The topic is “Underneath it all.”

Just some sketches :)

I recently gave a short talk on Photoshop Custom Brushes here at EA Mythic (I might post about that another time). I started off talking about stylization and ended up rambling for quite a while. I think the subject is big enough to deserve a post. What I’m going to say here has been said [...]

I’m thinking about trying to get a 3D printout of this guy after he’s done. I’m just starting on the armor.

Another Warhammer Online character – a Rat Ogre.

It’s the most common division of labor amongst game artists today. In my experience, there is a distinct skill imbalance in favor of character artists.  They’re what students and hobbyists almost always are, and so the best artists get to choose to keep working on characters. The best of the rest get to do something [...]