Welcome to Floofyart, my games art portfolio. I'm Jessica Hyland, a 3D artist, and I'm currently working at Jagex Games Research Labs in Cambridge, UK.

Examples of my artwork are just below, my details are above. Feel free to browse!

My entry for Dominance War IV was Alima, a Norm Invoker whose character design took inspiration from Creatures, a series of AI games which I'm very fond of. Alima is a Norn sorceress who wields a clawed weapon made from a jade-like substance as a magical focus to boost her powers.
Alima was modelled, textured, rigged, lit and rendered over the six week duration of the Dominance War and came to 5915 triangles in total, using four 2048x2048 texture sheets. My final submission images are thumbnailed below; click to view the full images.

Intended to be an entrant in the GameArtisans.net Death Knight 3D mini-challenge, I missed the deadline for submission and decided to take my time finishing it. The brief was to create a 'Death Knight' character in the style of World of Warcraft's new hero class, in 2000 triangles with a 512x512 texture. My model ended up at 2010 tris and I had a blast painting the texture - all done by hand in Photoshop CS4, with a photo overlaid at the very end to add a bit of graininess. I also made a weapon model for my Death Knight to use; a pair of bladed weapons wielded in a similar manner as tonfa. The weapon model is only 70 triangles, with a 128x256 texture map.

An ornamental shield model which I made as practise creating normal maps and metallic shaders. The low-poly model is 134 triangles while the high-poly sculpt that I made in ZBrush3 is just under 2 million triangles. It is textured with one 512x512 diffuse texture which is fairly simple, and a 512x512 normal map which gives the model most of its detail. I used a composite material to vary the amount and colour of specularity on the metal versus the wooden part of the shield and also to overlay a green Fresnel falloff effect on the metal to simulate an oxidised metal look.

Normal Mapped Shield Turnaround from jessica hyland on Vimeo.

Mostly practise in normal mapping and rather more advanced materials, an ornamental beaten copper shield.

Made to the specifications of the GameArtisans.com 'Mini Judges' competition, this model is a 'chibified' character model based on the Judges fom Final Fantasy XII. The brief was to design a character based on the Judges, but with 'chibi' proportions - short and stubby with a large head and short limbs. The models were to be made to a maximum of 700 triangles and be textured with a single 512x512 diffuse texture and nothing more; roughly the limit for a model in a handheld game. My character model comes to 696 tris and took around 4-5 hours from concept to completion; the 512x512 texture was entirely hand-painted in Photoshop and took another 7-10 hours to complete to my satisfaction.
A turnaround video file(AVI, 4.2MB) was rendered after finishing, with texture filtering and antialiasing turned off to simulate a handheld console's 3D engine.

I like making low-poly props and bits and pieces as quick and easy practise. Here are some of them:


A trio of Mario-style koopa shells. They use one base model of 132 triangles and a common 128x128 texture which is recoloured to suit. The blue shell is 198 triangles.


A DS-resolution version of the incubator from the original Creatures, an A-life game from 1996 which was my inspiration to want to work in games. The incubator was used to hatch eggs containing Norns, the creatures who you had to take care of. The first game in the Creatures series was quite simple in terms of graphics technology; it was limited to 2D sprites with only 256 colours, but it was visually arresting with a warm, organic palette. It was the first computer game that interested me enough to make mods for.
The incubator model is 199 triangles and uses two 64x64 256-colour diffuse textures, one of which uses single-colour transparency. It is lit using vertex lighting.


A friend suggested I 'do a barrel roll', so I did! 124 triangles, two 64x64 256-colour textures, one barrel rolling. 20 minutes from concept to rendering the silly little .gif.