In an effort to get my third year project on the move, and with a burst of inspiration again from www.androidarts.com, I am going conduct some research on this here blog. I'll start off by analysing some of my favourite ever RPGs and i'll see where it takes me. So here goes, tonight I'll be looking at probably my favourite ever GBA game Fire Emblem, specifically it's classes and characters. Third Year Project Research - START!
Fire Emblem
Seventh in the series but the first to be released outside of Japan, I've no idea where I got the idea to play this game but I did, and I was proper hooked for a while over a summer holiday I seem to remember. Good times. Anyway, i'm only going to look at the character classes tonight as it's very late, but here goes. Firstly here's a sample of my favourite classes in the game:
Knight These guys were massive, the ground shook when they walked, and they attacked slowly but powerfully. I've not looked at an image of the game for years now probably, but I still remember them. Not exactly original but a brilliant redesign of a classic. As a side note, this game is a SRPG (Strategy Role-Playing Game). You basically play like pieces on a chess board, advancing towards the enemies and carefully managing your formations until you were in range and used the 'attack' command, when you would be shown a small clip of your little guy smashing the little bad guy with whatever weapon he held. The animation was beautiful. Here's an animation of the Knight's upgraded form - the General. (That's another point, the guys upgraded when they reached level 10 out of a possible 20. I bloody love when things upgrade/evolve)
weee :D
Swordmaster These were awesome (i'm going to say that about every class.) I remember they were quick, got critical hits like all the time, and had crazy evasion. Their animations were among my favourite in the game I think. Well, maybe not but at least they got criticals all the time and they looked class. Here's a critical.
Paladin I don't actually think I liked these above the other classes, but while checking through the animation is really snazzy, so check it out anyway. I think I prefer the paladins from FFXI. Maybe they'll feature in an upcoming blogaroo.
Troubadour I remember thinking these were quite a strange class, not something i'd come across before. They're basically White Mages (clerics, healers, etc) on horses. Hmm... Also I remember liking her more when she was in her unpromoted form. Not a special animation but here's Priscilla the troubadour.
Pegasus Knight What a brilliant class eh? Some girls with lances on Pegasus'. How are there more than one pegasus? Who knows. There were three pegasus knight sisters, awesome. They were super weak to begin with but became awesome if you really trained them up. Lovely animation as well. I love how much dynamism can be captured in the tiniest of sprites. And i even love the colours, what are there, like three? You see, that's the type of thing that I wouldn't allow myself to do but marvel when others do. Anyway, anyway.
MAGE! I love mages. I've always loved mages. I think it's because they're the smart weak ones. I mean i love warriors and stuff too but I guess i feel an affinity to the mage. This is probably my favourite character in the game and possible even one of my favourite mages ever: ERK! I don't know why, I love his name, his little outfit, everything. Brilliance. Here he is doing some magic. (You'll have to imagine the magic)
Druid A close relation to the Mage is the Druid. They look a bit like evil mages, but in this game they could be goodies, they just dabbled in Dark Magic or whatever it was called back then. Arcane? Maybe. Here's Canas.
Assassins I'm going to show you the most memorable Thief/Assassin in the game, Jaffar (even though he never spoke as far as i remember). I remember he looked after the litte Mage, Nino. (She was awesome too.) On this occasion I think he was cooler outside the battle animations, I feel he lost his personality when they shrunk him down so small, but he was awesome nonetheless.
I think that'll do for tonight, but here are a few more animations whose characters didn't make it, but are still super-awesome.
Okay so maybe this isn't anything like hard work, but it's helpful right? At least i'm writing a blog. And it has helped me to remember a little about what I really love about RPG Classes. I have quite a nostalgic feeling. I love the moment when your characters evolve, they get bigger, better, more awesome... Maybe we need some evolution in the third year trailer? That'd be pretty fucking sweet. Something to think about.
Semi-EDIT: Alright, looking at the pictures on the blog is really annoying, what the hell is with those stupid white borders? They're ruining everything! I think it's time for a fresh layout for the site. I'll work on that when I have some free time. Might just copy android arts' blog, that looks nice.
Just a little closing rambling, turn off now. I actually feel a little bad because this blog post hasn't contained any hard work lols. Actually that's probably not it. Regardless, I'll continue to do this research, post it up here and as I sketchsketchsketch I'll update also. I actually have some that i'll upload tomorrow or something. Tomorrow, the very final deadline... I wonder what we'll do next week. It'll be really nice to have some free time. I'll still be coming in to the studio but i'll just be doing what I want. I think I want to get good at mudbox. It wasn't as easy as i'd expected. It'll definitely take some working if i'm to make really beautiful models for the third year... actually that's inspired me to go do some digging, so that's what i'll do :) Au revoir. Hope this post's not been too crappy.
EDIT: Fixed the white boxes :D Also I forgot I was gonna do a little Listening to: bit, because I love music and more people should know this. Just a quick one for now.
I've really neglected this blog for the last few months, which is really a shame as I was doing so well! Anyway, needless to say it's because of the damned Talking Dog project and the massive workload. I just never gave myself the time in which to blog. I may try to enforce a blogging sunday, if not from now on then at least for my third year project (Which i'm reeeeeeeallly excited about :D). Where do I even begin to start eh? I think i'll make this a mega-post, and hopefully, since i'm in uni right now, be able to back it up with the pics and all! Let's start with the most obvious, hulking, elephant in the room, the Talking Dog.
TALKING DAWG.
Damn, it seems that I actually haven't properly updated my blog since I did the concept for the stripper at the beginning of the Easter break. Well you can see the results below, in an update which i just threw up (lol?) for group presentation purposes, but regardless, i'm actually pretty damn happy with it. Particularly the body, the face... not so much. It's an okay face, I just don't think it really fits her character, or maybe it's the style of the piece. Whatever it is it just doesn't feel right. The hair's kinda cool, though. The only other thing that's really wrong with her, is her rigging... well.. not so much the actual rig, but the deformation. Luckily it won't be finished in the final animation (omg we've still not finished), but her shoulders go all funny when you bend them in certain directions. Let's delve into deformation for a bit...
-Deformation This has been one of probably the trickiest matters to overcome throughout this project. We've had problems with bad geometry deforming awkwardly, and it's something which can only be overcome, I think, with first hand experience. Some of which i've gained over the process of this project, and i'm thankful for that.
This is a fairly mild example (compared to some) of the deformation that has occured over the course of the project. As you can see there are folds in the skin, underarm and boob area that simply would not occur in a real-life human. These problems really irritate me, as there seems to be no simple way of correcting them, at least when the deadline is looming and there are a thousand other things to be doing. Painting weights didn't seem to help, probably because of the way we've laid out the geometry and rigs, and this is something that i'll attempt to get better at with my next models. I've also watched tutorials on using pose-space deformers, which seem to be a good solution to the problem, but could take FOREVER. Literally having to do a blendshape for every pose that the character needs to be able to move in seems tedious and long-winded...but maybe this is what is necessary when creating top-notch characters? I'm still not sure. This is sort of reminiscent of the starting phase I had in maya when everything seemed alien. Is rigging and weighting my second frontier? (I feel dirty). I digress.
What else has happened during the project that I should talk about? Maybe a little texturing
-UV/Texturing My short foray into texturing was a little weird. I feel sort of uneasy about this topic. I should really be able to do it, as I can (sort of) paint in photoshop to some extent, but when it came to painting a 2D texture that needs to be wrapped around a 3D object, it proved much, much more difficult. For one, I believe you shouldn't really paint many obvious shadows on the model, as the lights are there to do that for you in maya. Secondly, it seems you can't really use any sort of hard edges anywhere, as, I guess, people's skin and generally any material in real life have no great distinctions between colour. What I mean is, it's not like rosey cheeks on real people are red circles on their skin. I'm not expressing myself very well, but what this sort of meant to me, was that I felt like I was just painting one, very slightly varying colour. For instance, the black guy's skin was simply a shade of brown with only slight highlights for the bits where the light would hit, or the different features. Here's a pic containing the textures, for better explanation.
It looks a fairly poor texture, sort of, but I was limited by (shouted at to adhere to) the simple style of the piece, and so I didn't experiment much. On the final model it kinda just looks like a material with no texture present. I dunno. Another thing is the UVing. Without blabbing on any more, the thought that's going through my mind is that there must be an easier alternative. I believe most of, if not all of these techniques that we're using inside the Maya interface are sort of antiqued, or if not then at least there seem to be far better programs which are solely devoted to UVing, texturing, etc, such as Bodypaint and these skinning things I've heard of. And this is where a problem arises. Obviously in university they need bloody licenses for everything, and while I would try my hardest to pester the tutors or technicians to order licenses for us, even if i succeeded then they take seemingly foreeeeeeeevver to appear on our machines. I remember before I even joined the course asking if we'd be able to get Mudbox or Zbrush for the computers. This is what interested me in the course. To be fair, Andy replied with the response 'we'll be doing things like that in the second year' or something similar, which was almost true. I think there was every intention of getting it, along with Maya 2009, on the computers for this year, but very sadly, we're still awaiting them :/ I know there are many problems like not wanting to interrupt projects, making sure everything is compatible, etc but it's sort of disheartening when you simple don't have the programs on the machine that you desire. (Even worse when your computer at home can't handle the strain...) But we make do. Plod along. There are maaaaany things to learn aside from these other programs. but yeah, that's something. And i'll kill myself if we don't have mudbox next year loleee. We should just get administrator priveliges on our respective computers and destroy them every year, to be wiped and started anew at the end, but that'll never happen.
I'm depressing myself with all this negative talk. What can I talk about positively? Oh yeeeah the third year project :D. Okay i'll wrap this up.
So I made Karl. Made the Stripper. Rigged the Stripper. Rigged Karl. (Rigging is HARD, had loads of problems, kind of solved them, can't be arsed to talk about it). Textured Karl. Painted LA (below). and am in the process of texturing and animating the Stripper. The project still isn't completed (we're hoping to have it finished by the end of the next week, and I think we should. And i cannot wait til it's over with. I wanna pursue new things!)
Alright I think that'll do for the talking dog, let's get on to the good stuff.
Third Year Project: Title TBC :D Alright my idea stemmed from a time when my girlfriend said the word 'Journalist'. And you know sometimes when your brain skips a... wave? And words don't seem like what they're meant to seem (Like one time I was really freaked out by the word 'Pirate'.. think about it). Anyway, in this particular instance, the word Journalist gave me images of job classes from Final Fantasy or something, like these awesome little guys:
So it got me thinking, thinking a thought which is probably highly derivative, but nonetheless I found it quite exciting. That thought was what if RPG lore, eg. the wizards, the warriors, the golden ages of magic and fantastic conflict were to be merged with our modern times. With men in suits, tedium, pretentious kids with hair and angry kids without hair? I'd also recently seen this piece of art:
This piece, along with a few others by the same guy feel really magical to me. They are by no means perfect as far as technique goes, but I really love the mood that is created, and most relavent of all in regards to my project is the use of the football helmet. Using such common everyday objects in what seems like a completely alien subject matter really struck a chord with me for some reason, the image pops into my head shockingly often, I think it's something that i'm a little obsessed with currently. But this feeling is one that I will be trying to emulate in my third year project. The colliding worlds sort of theme is what is driving me to create this world that will hopefully come to fruition throughout the rest of this year and the next. I'm hoping that since the idea is currently really exciting me, the way in which the topic of Real world Vs. RPG World has soooo much scope for creativity, and my love of computer games will give me the motivation to make something really amazing.
I'm actually scared by all of this, but I think it's a good kind of scared. I feel like I want to start working on it right away, and this actually isn't such a bad idea. I think i'm scared because to be honest I almost feel like every 3D project that we've created so far has been a failure. In one way or another they've all disappointed me, I have relatively little that i'm proud to show as far as finished pieces go, and I don't really like that. This time I HAVE to do well. I want something that really amazes people. Something that I can be proud of, and something which was worth an entire years work being spent on. I think I can do this, but there is just sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much effort and good old hard work involved. Andy says he'd 'rather have 5 or 6 projects which went somewhere than 21 which went nowhere', and right now I really feel like I can make something awesome, but I never fully comprehend just how much work is involved. Of course I know there's a shit load of work, but it just doesn't sink in... Maybe I should timetable myself like.. now. That might help indicate to myself how much work will be involved... hmmm.. I think if I go through with this then it'll mainly be a solo effort, too. Everyone seems to have their own ideas for their third year project, and I think that's fair enough. I for sure wouldn't want to work on someone else's idea that I wasn't convinced about for an entire year. You'd probably get so sick of it. We do, however, get command over some now first years, then second years, for one term, which may turn out to be very handy.
Anyway, yeah, Today Vs. RPG Yesterdays. That's the very loose theme of the project. Another thing I really want to do is keep it fresh, fun, humourous, lively, vibrant, and a million other words. I want something great. Really really good. My storyline is kinda weak so far though, but I've not thought about it a huge deal. In my head there's rather just a swirl of images, people, etc, just the feel of the piece, rather than the story. What I have so far is a main Villain. A Bill Gates-esque nerdy zillionaire who buys an island inhabited with people, maybe britain or something, maybe I should make it fictional. With this island he plans to create a real life RPG. He may erase the memory of the island's inhabitants or maybe he holds them against their will.. maybe he pays them. There are plenty of possibilities. To conform with the RPG philosophy, there of course must be at least one, if not an entire party of protagonists who are to come up against the villains. If the main plot is their struggle against Bill Gates, who naturally must be, or seem to be, the mastermind of the whole thing, I feel I need some other plot strings too... I initially thought of not putting a lot of emphasis on the plot, but then I realised. This is one of the problems I have concerning characters, stories and all that. I just care about the looks, never the heart, and that's gotta be bad. So in an effort to make this something more than just aesthetically pleasing, I hope for it to be emotionally compelling, also. Even if we never see half the story, It'd be good to be there.
For the final output, I plan on creating the most amazing game trailer you've ever seen. Coming 2010 :D. I think that's pretty much enough for this blog. It is ridiculously long and i'm taking less care than usual in augmenting my thoughts so that they're actually readable. Also i'm wasting my dissertation proposal writing time.
I'd just like to talk about one last thing. I stumbled upon this absolutely amazing guy's website the other day. 33 Year old Niklas Jansson. First of all I was intrigued by his drawings. Highly computer game and anime-influenced, he draws cute little characters, monsters, spaceships, cyborgs, machines, basically absolutely anything that you'd find in a world. This is his passion, creating worlds. He writes 'Actually, I don't really like doing art, especially not illustrations. It's mostly just a laborsome process, just like programming. I've had to learn doing both because they're needed when realizing universe design... which is what I really wanted to do all along. I've made very few 'art for art's sake' paintings'. This thought absolutely flawed me. He doesn't even like art? Yet he's soo good at it. He's devoted himself to art and programming, as he says, for the simple reason of being able to create worlds, universes. I feel this is what I should be doing. His work has so much heart, and if you check out the Android Arts website he has created, you'll see just how ridiculous the level of detail that he goes to in describing his worlds. He basically does what I plan to do for my third year project (although i'm not sure if he gets paid for doing this, but i'd like to think he doesn't). To summarise, he's an insanely passionate individual, and his passion is making life. I think this will stay with me, hopefully i'll be better off for it.
Check out his Android Arts website here: http://androidarts.com/ and his homepage here: http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/
Example of his awesomeness:
That's all for now, amigos. I'll try my best to update more often :)
aiaiaia
EDIT: Almost forgot! Today this amaaaaaaaazing teaser for the new Project Ico game came out. vvvvvvv
I love the griffin creature. The way that he's not over the top cutesy and not to fearsome is done brilliantly in my opinion, reminds me a lot of real animals. The actual game is going to look even better, too, since this is a fairly old video apparently! Can't wait. <3
