Jami Lukins

GDC Approaches

2010-02-24T13:55:00.000-08:00

So I've decided to dust off my blog and start posting again! The craziness of the end of last semester and the beginning of this one put a halt to my networking, but as the end approaches and the need for a job becomes more imminent you seem to find time for these things!

This semester has been incredibly productive for portfolio work. I've been working on a facebook app with Brian Giame and I can finally show the work I've been doing on that! I've also joined a sophomore game team and am working on a game called Syne.

So firstly, here's some work I've done on Brian's project (called Details). This application let's you rate your friend's posts.

The game I'm working on is called Syne. Yes, it's a sophomore game, but don't underestimate it! I am the only artist working on the game, so ALL of the art is my work. They sort of let me go in whatever direction I wanted, so I did very abstract iconic shapes. So here's some work from that!

New School Year!

2009-09-22T18:14:00.000-07:00

I apologize for the long time between posts. I've been very very very busy. I am now starting my senior year. I'm BFA president, Art Council Chair, continuing my internship, TAing for money, and have a very active social and family life.

I like being pleasantly busy, but having every second of every day scheduled out on my google doc is a little tiring. I'm hoping my last semester will be more relaxed schedulwise so I can stress about finding a job freely. :D

I've gotten a lot of good work done, even some portfolio pieces over the summer at Andrograde and the beginning of this semester is also shaping up. I'm taking my portfolio class so I get to put all my stuff together. Here is my portfolio website: http://jamilukins.daportfolio.com/ . Not much up right now, but it should be growing here shortly. I might just make my own website with some help from my classmates and Flash.

Class is starting soon, so I gotta get back to work! But here is my leader head for portfolio class!

Enjoy!

~Jami

Internship!

2009-06-16T21:05:00.000-07:00

Hey guys!

So I got an internship a few weeks ago for a little company called Andrograde! It's a company that hosts flash games and also makes their own flash games. It was founded by a DigiPen grad a couple years ago named Will Perone! You can check out the website at http://andrograde.com/index.php . I was luckily in the right place right time! My first job is to redesign the website. Here's a screenshot of some of the work I've done so far!

I'm also joined another game team called Solar flare! It's a really fun game where you have a planet and you battle other planets by building cannons, shields, and generators! It's a great way for me to build up my portfolio further! Here's their new game logo:

Hope you guys like! I'll post a link to the new website once it's up!

~Jami

Trials and Tribulations

2009-05-17T00:56:00.000-07:00

This last week, Adam Crespi, Chair of the Art department, our 3D Studio Max Guru, and my personal hero and mentor was fired from DigiPen over a breach of contract on his part. He was teaching a class at the Art Institute in order to earn some extra money to help support his family. Working at a competing school, however, is against a clause in his contract and so he was swiftly fired.

This event happening so closely after we lost Tony White as dean, leaves the art department leaderless. I was only just elected Student body president, though I have been chair of the art council for a couple years now, I still feel like it's a lot to take in right out of the gate.

Crespi was always there for me when I felt doubt, he was there with advice when I needed it, he was one of the phenomenal faculty members who convinced me to not leave DigiPen and continue with my education there.

The student reaction to him being fired has been overwhelming. I was flooded with calls, emails, text messages, IMs and even then, there were groups of students getting together and planning their own separate rebellions. I'm having an incredible trouble trying to organize all these rightfully upset students, especially since most students are not in class right now and much of the organizing has to be conducted over the Internet. I am hoping that on Monday, after I have spoken to one of the high up administrators and have met with the student body, things might be a little less crazy.

Brittany, the previous student body president, has been a great help to me. A supportive voice with experience and advice. There is now a facebook group where we can try to calm people down and plan. So maybe we have a chance.

We, the students, are the passion and the heart of the school. It's soul, its purpose. If only we could focus it, we could move mountains. There are times I question why I put so much time and effort into the frustrating job of being a student representative, but then one of my peers thanks me for my hard work. Then I remember the countless hours, quarts of blood and tears that my class mates have given to the school and improving themselves and I am honored to be their voice. I am proud that I can make a difference and fight for their wants and needs so that they can concentrate on their work.

I may not be as good at art as I could have been if I had dedicated myself to my school work and not stepped up to represent, but I am a more experienced and better person for it. I have little in the way of changes in the school to show for my work, but I have learned so much from doing this.

This event, right at the start of my term as president, is a difficult one; one that, I confess, I don't think we will win. But watching the students unite, straining my leadership skills, testing everything I've learned about politics and self discipline, is an experience that I will tackle whole heatedly and extract every bit of learning from as possible. This is a school, and even if it feels like the administration does everything in their power to limit my learning, they can't stop me from growing. And best of all, they can't fire me or take away my spirit.

I'm probably being over dramatic about this. Generally I'm a practical person. Perhaps I've reached yet another breaking point after three years of watching deans, teachers, and administration leave for the same tired reasons. Perhaps, it's facing the possibility that iron will and hard work can't accomplish everything. Perhaps I will read this tomorrow and laugh at myself for seeming so childish. I am thankful that it feels like I write the posts for these blogs and then they enter the vast space of the Internet into nothingness, read only by Brittany and my own mother.

Then again, maybe that's what these blogs are for? A chance to get your feelings out there and maybe even share them with someone else. That is the goal of us artists: communication. If I can help someone see the world in a new way, find enjoyment in the ordinary, and experience the extraordinary, then I can die a happy woman.

Thank you for reading. I hope that you too have something that you are so passionate about, some you love so dearly that you would freely give your all to better it and defend it. It may be hard. It may be painful, but I wouldn't change it for the world.

~Jami Lukins

FINALS = OVER

2009-04-28T16:34:00.000-07:00

Yes, school is out for the summer and it couldn't come soon enough. The weather is beautiful, I have a stack of unplayed video games and a pool begging to be swam in, and a whole summer to hone my skills.

My only worry is not having an internship yet. I've been looking around, but I haven't really hit the pavement too hard. My biggest problem is not having an online portfolio other than this blog. I'm looking at local companies in the Bellvue/Redmond/Seattle area. So if you know of a company looking for an art intern, contact me at JamiLukins@gmail.com or reach me at (206) 819-3997.

Enjoy some of my final animations!

Alpha!

2009-03-02T11:19:00.000-08:00

Last week we did our Alpha presentation. The whole team played the game while Brittany talked about it. It was the first time I played the game with other people actually and Josh got some really good ideas for how to make the game more fun! So that was very productive.

We now gearing up for career day. I'm nervous and excited about it! Sadly, Josh and I aren't seniors, so we can't stand next to our bored. I think it's pretty dang lame. We've worked all year on this project, we should be able to show it off. So instead, we volunteered to help out on Career day, so we're in the presentation room, we're just not allowed to hover around our board.

I've been busy making more 2D assets, including Hooligans themed business cards for our team! Since we're not going to be around our board, we wanted to have Hooligans style cards so potential employers would associate our name with our game. Here are our cards!

Front: Back:
And my teammates:

Since I haven't put up my junior project, here's my updated Cinematic!

Hope you enjoyed!

~Jami

Odds, Ends, and Fonts

2009-02-19T14:29:00.000-08:00

Lately the work on the game seems to be slowing down for me. With Josh being sick I've sorta been in limbo, unable to complete certain projects without his vastly superior 2D art. I've gotten a lot of little projects out of the way like modeling level assets, cleaning up my files and organizing them, adding new animations with the characters holding the flag, and trying to work out little bugs. So maybe it's a good thing I don't have the option to play around with menues.

However, recently Brittany, my game producer and all around awesome person, asked me to make her business card. So I was having a lot of fun with that and decided to go ahead and make myself a business card as well.

Front:

Back:

Once I finish Brittany's I'll ask her if I can post it up here as well. This little project has been tons of fun. It makes me wonder if maybe I should have gotten into layout and design as opposed to 3D art, but then I animate a little scene and I remember I love that too. Maybe someday I'll be a UI designer, who knows?

Hope you guys like the card. I'll try to get up pictures of my updated animatic and some of the level assets I made for the game in my next post.

~Jami

First Playable!

2009-02-03T13:29:00.000-08:00

The past couple weeks I was deathly ill with the stomach flu, but now I've caught up on all my work! I've really been enjoying my animation class and spend most of my homework time on that. In my spare time, I've been playing Valkeria Chronicles for the PS3 and it is awesome!

We just had our First Playable presentation, which went really really well! Everyone was majorly stressing that week, since half of us had been under the weather and hadn't gotten much work done. But when we finally went up there and showed our work we realized how far ahead of the other groups we were and how much the people watching were interested in the game. It was a huge moral booster!

I worked on some more animations, which I need to render out in little videos so I can post them. I can throw up the UI that I did for the game. I'm really finding that I enjoy making UI and I really wouldn't be opposed to doing this for a job. I love making animating buttons! I'm excited to see my new work in the game!

Here's the timer without the text:

Here's the attack hud:

Here's the character customization menu:

To Break and Back Again: A Student's Tale by Jami Lukins

2009-01-07T12:45:00.000-08:00

I knew break was going to be crazy, but no amount of knowing would have prepared me for the craziness. I celebrated Christmas no less than 3 times, one for each side of my family and once more with my roomates, I celebrated my 21st birthday 3 times, AND I got engaged!

Understandably, I got very little work done (the shiny new playstation 3 may have had something to do with it). I did, however, manage to get all my website assets done, so, hopefully that'll get up soon.

I'd like to say I'm excited to be back at school, but it's difficult to feel motivated in many of my classes because they all take away time from working on the game. I know they're all important, but knowing and feeling are two completely different things. My passion is games and game animations and only a couple of my classes even touch on video games. Only thing I can do is keep on going and try to get the most out of my classes.

All in all, though, it was a great break! I got a lot of new stuff, including a phone, a PS3, and rock band and I have all semester to not have enough time to enjoy it!

I'd put pictures up, if blogger didn't seem to be having problems. I'll try again later!

Finals week OVER!

2008-12-16T21:24:00.001-08:00

Ya, I start up my new blog then ignore it in favor of finals week. Sorry!

Finals week went well. It was mainly submitting final projects and the like since it's a little hard to test art after all. We made first playable, which was nice! We had a terrible exporting issue involving my model and some animations...we were tearing our hair out trying to figure out what went wrong all of a sudden, since the rig hadn't changed at all.

Like last time, we trouble shot by deleting stuff and then exporting to see if it work, lol, not very scientific, but hey it works. We narrowed it down to the main character controller. Then it was up to me to do my untrained, trail-by-fire technical artist stuff. I solve technical problems by mumbling to myself, cursing at the computer, and trying anything and everything at least once. Eventually, I turned all the controllers into bones, including the IK chains (I didn't know you COULD change an IK chain into a bone in the first place, learn something new every day). It totally solved the problem. We're a few finger joints short now since we had a bone cap and turning our controllers into bones pushed us a little over, but hey, better than nothing.

It's a little scary working on a project knowing that there's no one with all the answers. If something goes wrong, it's completely up to you to figure it out. But after solving both exporting errors I'm feeling a little more capable. Don't get me wrong, I know there's going to be WAY more problems with no apparent solution in my future, but there's not need to freak out about it. Take each one, one at a time and it'll all get straightened out with enough hard work. It also helps that I have a great team there backing me up!

Now that I've gotten all sappy on you guys, let me throw in a render of my current scene:

Animations, Animations, Animations!

2008-11-23T14:28:00.000-08:00

I finally got SVN working and have my work now! We're really getting down to the wire on the game, so I've been animating battle and death sequences like crazy! I finally got done all the ABSOLUTELY necessary animations for our game play last Friday, so I'm feeling pretty dang good about my part of the game. Now I get to work on UI! I'm so happy that I'm ahead in all my classes so I can concentrate mostly just on the game.

Here are my battle animations...(No she does not have pupils, haven't gotten to that yet, lol)

Here's the shield block. If you time it just right you can stun the person who attacked you!

And now for my favorite animations! The death animations! When I got towards doing the last one, I started to feel really bad for my character...I have one death for each main direction they could be hit from: front,right, left, and back! So it should look pretty cool in the game...I hope!

So I Finally Got a Blog...

2008-11-21T20:10:00.000-08:00

I finally bowed down to peer pressure and got a blog! I've been feeling a lot of pressure lately to get my work on an online portfolio; it feels like every second I don't have one I lose another great job opportunity in the games industry! And since a full on, personal website costs a lot of money this poor college student doesn't have...I got a Blog! I'm hoping I'll be able to throw up my work on here and friends, family and future employers(?) will be able to enjoy my work!

Right now I'm working on a little 5 man game team. We're making a Capture the Flag game called: Hooligans! If you want to check out the FULL game rather than just my work, our producer Brittany Aubert maintains a blog for it: http://littlegamedev.blogspot.com/ So check it out!

I just got a new computer and am getting everything up and running on it, so hopefully soon, I'll have access to my work and I'll be able to post some things!