The Portfolio of Tyrone Ward

Originally, the Gray alien model started out as practice, something I could do between classes in College. I was looking to improve my skills in Blender and came across the book “Blender 3D by Example” in my college’s library.

Outdated, in theory, by the time I found it. It released in 2015, in which I believe Blender was in it’s 2.7 series, whereas I came across it in 2022 and would be using it in Blender 3, a huge jump for those who know what came before. Despite this, I found a lot of valuable knowledge it in, and one of the projects it runs through to teach character creation focuses on creating a classic Gray Alien. I learned a good bit of new information, but a lot of it reinforced my current abilities.

I sculpted the model, but the retepology and texturing wouldn’t come until later, along with its armour/spacesuit, as I decided to use the alien as the protagonist in a Twine game I had to make for a class.

The game, titled INVADER, served as the prologue to a hypothetical story in which this Gray Alien, on a mission to scout out Earth for an invasion, crashes and must avoid Men in Black in order to survive. Because of this I had to refine the model, retpologize it and get it ready for posing by rigging it. I also felt it was weird to have the Gray running around naked, so I designed an armoured sci-fi space suit for it to wear.

Finally, I wanted to create some creepy imagery and I felt that the Gray’s face was too pretty. With the thought in mind that this being is here to invade the planet, I decided creepy glowing eyes and a helmet with an interesting silhouette would make for a great impression.

Now that the Gray itself was done (and textured in Substance Painter), I felt I needed to show where it came from.

And finally, how it would end up if it (or the player) failed its mission:

This project, which started out just as practice, was a lot of fun. The Twine game itself was a simple ‘choose your own adventure’ type thing, but I may eventually make it available somewhere, most likely here.