Interblag.

New Stuff!

2010-05-16T14:03:00.004+01:00

So i've not blogged in two weeks I think, been really busy in uni recently working full bore trying to get these characters out for the final show. I really want to be able to show something that i'm proud of or it'll be a nightmare. So over these last two or three weeks I've been working on my second character and he's almost finished :) Sadly I didn't manage to finish him this week but i'm giving myself one more day to finish it and that's it. Then I have two weeks for my final character, really tough but I think I can do it (there'll just be a lot of late nights in the studio).

Without further ado here's my last two weeks in pictures.

So I left off last time I believe when I had just finished modeling. Don't think I'd started UVs just yet. Anyway, here's my guy after I'd finished UVs. I must admit that I was quite messy with this project as I wasn't really sure of my workflow. I initially modeled him then got to posing without doing the UVs. You can see the posed model on the right and the T-pose model on the left. I posed him using a super crude rig that took a few minutes to make (and really I should've put more time into is as it threw up a few problems later on that could've probably been fixed earlier with more preparation.)

So. I had the posed model and the original model, but then I was like 'crap, how do I uv a model in such an extreme pose? That'll be tricky' so Andy suggested using blendshapes, which turned out to be a damn good idea. So I started UVing the t-pose model (and by the way I usually UV one side and then mirror it, saves a lot of time. Half way through I thought i'd ruined everything by mirroring it as I thought the blendshapes wouldn't work... but they did, miraculously.) and finished it up and that was all grand.

Above you can see both of my models. I found that when I originally applied the blendshape, where there was a lot of distortion in the mesh due to the poor weighting, the UVs went a little dodgy. So I went back into the UV editor and using the posed model I tweaked the UVs for better distribution. That's what the arrow in the pic is trying to show. The trousers on the t-pose model look dodgy, but when in it's action pose it's decent. So that was that.

I made this picture to take a look at the pose, which i'm actually pretty happy with. It's quite faithful to the scribbles I did and I think it looks fairly dynamic which is good.

Here's the basemesh smoothed, looking pretty horrible, but what i'm trying to show is the guitar (would you have noticed? :P) I modeled the guitar using some reference and then duplicated it a million times for a laugh. I like the idea of having a guitar stand though, I might actually use that in the final. Happy accident!

And here's where i'm at now! Almost finished mudboxing the guy :D all but the hair really, and i'm quite happy with what i've gotten. This probably doesn't show it off to it's fullest but hopefully my final reel will do that! I've enjoyed this stage a surprising amount. It's a good laugh using mudbox when it's going right for you. I had some trouble with the hair as originally it was a load of separate objects which I had to laboriously combine together, but now that's done and an hour or two and it should be complete :D can't wait to get him textured and finalised. Georg is gonna help me with the renders and hopefully he'll be beautiful!

So that's what i've got as far as 'real' work goes, but here're the little buggers that i'm blaming for me not hitting my target of completing that guy on friday. Friday was also the deadline for business cards and postcards, and being a perfectionist I buggered around with these for hours. Luckily they look good in the end and it's important to make a first impression, or so they say, so it's not all bad. Here are some .PNGs of my cards. I'm reeeeeeeallllyyyyyy hoping that they come out this colour, as some weird stuff has been happening with previewing the files that I made. In photoshop the TIFs (which are the files I sent off to be printed.) look great, just like these. If I save out .JPGs from the TIFs, they look dark and inferior. If I PREVIEW the TIFs in windows media preview they look like the crappy JPGs but in photoshop they look fine?! Arg. Hope for the best, assume the worst. Here they are anyway.

Snazzy yeah? I'm in the process of creating my website (which is much more complicated than I thought, but is being paid for by my brilliant cousin as a graduation present :D) and i'll probably go now right away and transfer some of these graphics :) Seeya in a week or two.

For Steve

2010-05-03T16:14:00.001+01:00

Modeling for Andy Fossey's 'Corked' short film. (Turnarounds provided by Andy.)

Compilation of characters and a few finished concept paintings from my final major project

Sketches from the same project

3D iteration of one of the above characters (Work in progress)

Turntables of the pirate characters along with a video I put together as a pitch for the other project can be found on my Vimeo Account here.

Thanks for looking!

Postings

2010-05-03T15:47:00.004+01:00

Alright, I haven't posted in a while. Hopefully I have enough stuff to show to redeem myself. Since the last post, I've been working on my new character, Sam, and also helping Andy with some more character rigging.

As rigging is possibly the most boring thing in 3D to talk about, i'll gloss over that (but don't you forget I did it!) and instead talk about the character, including pretty pictures.

So to start off I compiled a little folder of images to use as inspiration for the piece, along with a few sketches and other bits and bobs. Around the time I was scouring the web for pictures I came across an article, by chance, on Mick Jagger who must've been some sort of subconscious influence on my guy because they aren't too disimilar.

The main thing that I liked about these shots of Jagger was his ridiculous gurn, most of all his mouth, which was the sort of expression that i've wanted Sam to have for some time.

And then out of nowhere, here we have a disturbingly attractive shot... weird, but I like the contrast.

This is another image I picked up. Real life sculpting, folks, but obviously whether it's digital or RL, it's not so different really. The mouths, again, I thought would be helpful. Also the lion-o sculpt is boss.

This is one of the first few pages I drew of Sam that I thought fit his personality.
And after many attempts, here is the turnaround sheet for Maya. This was pretty difficult to get right. I wanted him to look fairly unhinged but not axe-murderer or mental asylum mad.

A fairly crappy looking pose sheet (so bad at these, really need to practice.) I went for the one on the middle right. You'll see in a second.

So I got to modeling. I decided to model him in a traditional static pose and make a crude rig in Maya to get the rough pose which I would later take to mudbox to make pretty. Above is me testing out a bunch of different render settings, trying to get rid of the grainyness in the shadows. Didn't really work, need to figure it out for final renders.

Close-up of his face. It's really difficult to get an accurate translation from 2D to 3D I find. Especially in Maya since it's quite restricting as far as if you want to make major changes then it takes a good bit of time. He looks like he's possibly passed into the realms of mad-mad, but I think i'm leaving him like this until mudbox, where I find it much easier to change proportions and stuff. A little worried about bringing him back into Maya after that, though. Do I retopo? Disp maps maybe? Hmm.

Well that was pretty sharpish. Finally I'll leave you with a link to the turnaround (will probs embed later). This is where i'm currently at: http://vimeo.com/11428114
He's posed, needs a few tweaks and to be UVd but then it's into mudbox :D (should I have UVd before posing.. perhaps.)

P.s. Website is well underway, and it'll be an awesome one :D when that's done i'll probably start blogging there instead. Anyway, seeya soon!

Normal Mapping Workflow in Mudbox and Maya.

2010-04-20T17:08:00.004+01:00

New Term!

2010-04-16T16:34:00.004+01:00

Back once again. Was away for a week and a bit over Easter when I went up to Scotland, which was pretty cool. Edinburgh, especially, is lovely. Got back on Monday and was back in the studio Tuesday morning, bright and early. When I left, I left behind a fully rigged Lightning Mike who was in need of being bound, so that's what I got straight to work on. Before I go into that and the rest of the week's work, i'll go over some of the troubles I encountered when I was rigging the bugger.

Rigging Mike
So after I came to terms with the state of the model, accepted it's flaws etc, I got to work on the rigging. I really didn't expect to bump in to any more problems, as the rig was to be very basic with nothing fancy but lowe and behold, all hell broke loose. That might be a bit dramatic, but I encountered a problem which put a massive dent in my schedule.

The problem, as with Andy's rigs, was that the elbows were spazzing out to high heaven. Whenever i'd move the pole vectors anywhere near to the bones, they would start to go crazy and it was as if they were on reverse or something. I've snapped a screenshot of one of the many tests I made, but it doesn't really do it justice.

On the left of the image are two sets of joints that I created with very mild differences to the original bones of mike's arm (pictured right) that were going mental. The first picture shows them in the default pose, and you can see the problem in the second picture. I must've made about 20 or more difference joint chains whilst trying to figure this stupid thing out, and spent I don't know how many hours. The worst thing is though, that I never really nailed down what was going wrong. In the end I solved the problem by remodeling the arms so that there was more of a bend in the elbow. The only reason I can think for the trouble was that the IK handles just got confused and didn't know wtf was going. I won't be making the mistake again, though. Bent 4lyfe.

Since it's been a while since I encountered that problem, i'm not speaking as emphatically as I may have back when it was doing my head in, but that's probably a good thing. At least now it's solved, so I can go on to bigger and nastier problems.

Binding/Weighting

As I said, when I got back I went ahead with binding pretty much straight away. We have like 1 day left, so there's literally no time to waste. With that in mind, I started binding as quickly as I could, whilst being less picky than I usually am. The results are alright, I've a bunch of pictures of my character in the pose that I drew him in in the concept art, which is a moderately articulated pose and shows the level of weighting off quite well. In the pictures you'll notice an intersection on the glove (an area which is quite tricky, I think I could've placed the joints a fair bit better than I have), but that's about it. The shoulder is a tricky area but i'm hoping that it'll do for the small bit of test animation that i'm hoping to get done with him. It's a far cry from my hopes of a perfectly polished and working rig, but I guess that was a little too much to ask for.

Anywho. After rigging I started doing blendshapes, the first that i've done, which were in equal measures enjoyable and irritating. Not much to say, really, so let's get on with the pictures!

Did this for a laugh by flipping one of the renders. Looks pretty cool I think! But I forgot the moustache :O

Full body shot and a few caps of process/blendshapes

Happy! This is the initial shape I did, without an added shape that you can see in the picture above, which gives him dimples dawww.

Coolest angry face render i've done >:O

And that's about it. I'm very tempted to start my next character on Monday. Will need to chat to the tutors first, though. There's a lot about this guy that needs cleaning up and improving, but why dwell!? Looking forward to my next one :D

Friday post.

2010-03-18T11:44:00.003Z

Posted a few pictures here on Thursday for the production meeting, and now I have a spare minute i'll elaborate on them, and complain about a few things while i'm here.

In fact I think i'll start the complaining right away. At the minute i'm feeling like i'm in a bit of a mess. My model is alright but not great. There's so much that I still don't know, e.g. practically everything to do with materials and texturing, and a whole lot of other stuff and it's kind of wearing me down. Apart from the textures that i've painted (a category in which you can probably only include the skin) I feel i've accomplished very little.

This would be down to a few things;
-Complete lack of knowledge in the area. I understand that this is the way that 3D, or as Derek said, everything, is as far as learning goes, but sometimes it's easier going than others.
-My nature. I seem to be unable to accomplish what I would like to - what I have in my head - due to my lack of knowledge, and it's leading me to continually tweaking and re-tweaking but making no headway. At least this is with the Maya materials. Mental Ray materials are a whole different matter, and bring up problems that so far I can't solve. For some reason the mental ray materials seem to require twice or three times the light strength as maya materials do, which must be something to do with a setting in my Maya, because it doesn't seem to be happening to others in tutorials i've watched. I digress.
-Lack of motivation. I think a combination of the above and other influences have depleted my motivation a little. I can't deny that I haven't been working as hard as I have been previously, and I find myself getting easily distracted by any old rubbish I find on the internet. Rendering things probably doubles the procrastination also, as when you're rendering there's potentially a few minutes where Maya is unusable, and unless I have a pencil and paper in front of me then I just end up getting sidetracked by facebook or some other timewaster.

Doom and gloom aside, I've learnt a hell of a lot throughout this whole process, and the year so far. More than I thought i'd have learned really. And (this should be my catch phrase the amount of times that i've said it recently) I really think that the next character I make will be twice as good or better than my current guy (or perhaps i'm forgetting the hardships of basemesh modeling a little?). I'd be happy to leave this guy as he is and just bank the knowledge that i've gathered, but I think that'd probably be poor form, so i'll press on and tbh I think the outcome will at least be decent.

But yeah, lighting is a bugger. Don't think I like lighting at all. Sucks that my rigs are failing for Andy, too, but I guess that's another thing to learn from. Onto the pics.

Here's an ugly little example of the woes I faced in the world of normal maps. This'll be the last time I dwell on them I promise :P (although Georg did suggest doing my innovation project on them... I do think that'd save a few people some stress if they actually read it, but I would quite like to make a monster hand.)

Anyway, the right is my hi-res sculpt, and the left is the disgusting translation that I was presented with in Maya using my very first normal maps. Crap right? Well after a hell of a lot of effort I figured it out, and here's a little rundown of what I was doing wrong.
1. UVs were bad. Make your UVs correlate as closely as possible to the polygons which they relate to. It's as simple as that, but tedious work.
2. The artifacts on the vest are due to the geometry of the basemesh and the way which Mudbox read the hi-res mesh when it was baking out the normal maps. Since the mesh is two-sided, I believe mudbox was bringing through the inner-layer of the vest when I only wanted it to sample the front. To remedy this, choose "Furthest outside" as an option when creating your normal maps. (This method will potentially throw up some new errors if the geo you're creating normals for has more geometry close to the outside. e.g. when I used this setting on the shorts, the inside leg of the shorts had the opposite leg imprinted on it.)
3. To a lesser extent, and at the risk of telling the obvious, different materials react differently to light. Duh. Obviously the shiny materials in Mudbox will look different to the lamberts I used in Maya. Next time I sculpt I plan to use approximations of materials and possibly colours from the get-go in Mudbox.

That's enough of that. Here are some screenshots of where i'm at currently.

Pretty? Hope so... don't think it'll be a whole lot different when all is said and done, but it'll have to do for now.

Next week, to give myself some purpose and direction, I'm going to start rigging him. I want him rigged and weighted by Friday. It's a challenge, but one which I intend to complete. If I don't get him done i'll be a goner. That's all for now. See you next week bloggers.

Evening.

2010-03-14T23:03:00.003Z

Hi there. Ain't posted for 2 weeks so hopefully i'll have quite a bit to show :)

What i've done:
-Finished hi-res sculpt :D
-Figured out normal mapping (huge achievement for me)
-Started textures and materials.

Hi-res Sculpting

First off - here he is :)

Hi-Res Lightning Mike Sculpt Turntable from Jacob Golding on Vimeo.

Slightly dodgy video as I was using a new plugin that I downloaded, but it should be alright. Also before I start talking about it, as a note only his right glove is sculpted, as I planned to mirror it for the right glove and also his socks have been modeled since then. Right.

Mudbox is pretty cool. I found it a little daunting getting used to it, but that's more because of the fact that I had all of the tools needed to create amazing art and it was just down to me now. Most of the tools work as you'd expect them to (not got the hang of flatten yet) and the interface is fairly simple and very intuitive compared to zbrush. Especially when you've just come from Maya, as it uses most of the same shortcuts and such too.

I had a few niggles here and there, mostly involving normals (not mapping, just the normals facing the wrong direction etc), had a little trouble with instanced objects also but that was pretty standard sorting out. Apart from those minor setbacks though, I feel i'm sort of settling into it, albeit slowly.

When modeling in Mudbox I get the same feeling as I do when painting in photoshop. There's so much scope for tweaking this and that and redoing bits that sometimes I get caught up in one tiny, potentially insignificant, area, and I start to waste time. Being a perfectionist can be a hinderance, and sometimes you just have to stop yourself. It can also be intimidating changing areas because you're scared that the changes you make won't be as good as what you already have. I think this is one of the reasons for the hi-poly being relatively... tame? I didn't really push the sculpt to any extreme, but I think this may also be because of the nature of the character and my lack of expertise with the software. Anyway i'm satisfied with what i've done and look forward to my next sculpt (which I reckon will be much better).

Normal Mapping: O

So after the stuff I was on about last week (which i'm too lazy to read back over, I talk too much :P) i've learnt a bit about normal mapping. After i'd sculpted the shorts and the shirt I started baking out the maps using mudbox. But annoyingly they didn't look how I wanted them to. I didn't take any screenshots, but the shorts were very pixelated and the vest was just looking ugly. The maps weren't working how I wanted them to at all. I couldn't find any good tutorials online so I was working purely by trial and error, and tried a million and one things to sort them out.

I tried making the maps bigger (4k square they're currently at. I still don't know if that's a bit extreme or not, but it's the highest mudbox will allow.) That didn't seem to sort it, so I tried using TIF instead of PNG which involves taking the new TIFs into Photoshop and resaving them without any sort of compression as mental ray doesn't support it, leaving them at like 200MB each which is seemingly a bit excessive. Very little difference there either. I tried using different basemeshes, I tried using a different program called xNormal to generate my normal maps, still nothing. So I went back to the UVs, a potential problem i'd thought of but put at the bottom of the list, tweaked a few bits and bobs your uncle :D The problem was that the UVs that contained the most important bits of detail on both the shorts and the vest (the two areas i was testing on -- bit of a coincidence) didn't have enough space. The UVs were squashed up and as a result the normals came out crappy as they were stretched over a bigger area than they were meant to be. Felt great when I finally got them working. Seems like UVs are a big deal! Here's a little run-through of how i've been doing my normals, and how they seem to work best, just in case you care or could find it helpful.

-Start with a tidy basemesh. This includes frozen transformation, normals facing the right way, no instances, deleted history, GOOD UVS! all that good stuff.
-Take into mudbox, sculpt your hi-res stuff. (Make sure smooth target UVs or whatever it's called is checked before you start subdividing the mesh, cause Cherie said so)
-Go to export your normal maps
--Here i've currently been using the level 0 model in mudbox as the target mesh and the highest level as the source, (think that's right) but I think in the future i'll take the highest level into Maya, pull the verts of the original basemesh a little to fit the hi-res, and use that as the target as long as the computer can handle it. This is because the level 0 can get a bit mooshy and lose some detail during hi-res sculpting.
-TIF for format, 4k for size, (use whatever you want/need.) and i've been using closest inside and out unless the model has two sided, like the vest which seemed to glitch out the normal maps. In that case I used furthest outside, and i've also been using best guess for the distance thing.

That's all I can think of now, I did do a little writeup on a piece of paper but i dunno where he is.

That's enough chat, here are some pictures of my normal mapping experience, with a few dodgy materials thrown on.

Looking at these now they don't actually show off the mapping too well, blinns are better for that, but the end material won't be a blinn so I went with a lambert. Also I turned up ambient colour as it made it pretty, but that wont be on neither. I think that's making it look a little more washed out.

Pretty good example here. Glove is very low poly but looks just as good as the hi-res!

Face for face's sake. I'm not sure why, not even sure if the normal map is on there lol.

Here's a weird glitch that happens in the viewport. You can see the seams really badly, and I tried fixing this in photoshop for a while until I realised that it doesn't actually show in the render. Duh.

Texturing/Mats

I'll keep this short as i'm getting tired, but that should be easy as i've only recently started with the texturing. Here's a few screenshots of the texture in progress! :D

I think it's going pretty well. You can see the reference i'm using comically plastered on his chest. This won't be in the final version :P The look i'm going for is sort of pristine I guess, but I really like a little bit of sort of real life skin texture here and there. I did try to find pictures I could use to project onto him but I didn't really know where to look. I've only really worked on his cheeks and his nose so far but yeah.

One thing that's bugging me is SSS. I'm still having problems with the skin shading, and looking at how little time we have left I don't think it makes much sense to spend any more time on it, all for a little glow in the ear. I might pick it up when I get to my next character or maybe I will do it. We'll see. I think i'm about 2 weeks behind as it is but i'm really hoping that I don't get any more tripups and can just power through the rigging etc and make up a little time. We all knew it wouldn't be as easy as it sounded right? To be honest there are a ton of things that I don't like about this guy, but I just don't have the time to fix them. The bottom line is that he looks alright -- passable, and that's alright for now. He is my first fully finished hi-res sculpted model after all. I'm really looking forward to going on to the next guys as like I say, they'll be waaaaaaay better. I've learnt a whole lot and look forward to mastering what i've learnt :) That'll do for now. Laters!

Normal... Moping (I am literally (not literally)) on fire with the puns today.

2010-02-26T17:48:00.004Z

Alright. Quite an eventful, if not very interestingly so, week this week. I always forget exactly how it's gone but it's safe to assume that i've worked on both mine and andy's projects. Both are still running side-by-side meaning we've not cleared up the rigs on andy's project yet, but it's just how it goes. It never was going to be as easy as we though eh. I won't get into it this time, but it's just gonna be a case of seeing it through to the end. Andy deserves some good quality characters to go along with his cracking animatic he just finished.

So. I've nothing to show as far as the pirates are concerned, but i've a crap load to show for LIGHTNING MIKE rrrrrowerowjie.

This week i've been playing with the basemesh. Initially I changed the proportions of everything as it wasn't exactly to my taste. Here I am using photoshop to measure up the props' to figure out what was wrong. I used the Loomis figure drawing/anatomy book as a guide for what should go where.

After that I basically fiddled around til I was a little more happy. I'm not completely happy, a theme which will reoccur throughout this post, but what can you do...

So the proportions have changed, probably not very noticeably but whatever. After that, though, I got to do UVs!!

Here's an unnecessarily large snapshot, but couldn't be arsed to resize. My first proper set of uvs, they are. I didn't really mind the process. Sort of like a silly puzzle. That's just one set out of a forthcoming 21309821 though, so i'm sure i'll start to mind after a while.

After that I got to go to mudbawks. In mudbawks I spent forever and a day trying to tweak the model. Basically it's HARD to hi-poly model. The process reminded me of painting in photoshop. Tweak tweak tweak and you get nowhere. I don't think my personality helps me out here as i never seem to be happy. But I feel like I just need more experience with the program and it'll slowly get better. Of course this isn't the best position to be in facing what I am, but i'll sort something out.

I got tired of failing so I took what i'd made (a hi-res with very few changes, although the little that were there i was relatively (key word) happy with). Did a load of boring crap and took it into Maya to find that stuff wasn't working. To cut a looooong story short I basically had potentially 3 problems.

1. My UVs were linked up incorrently. Fixed by going Relationship Editors - UV Linking - Texture Centric and linking them right.
2. I forget two but there was definitely a two. EDIT: oh, it was normals. I had insane normals going on, so Georg helped me out, fixing it by exporting it as an OBJ without normals then importing it back in.
3. Cherie said that in Mudbox you have to have Smooth UVs checked (Mesh > Add Subdiv Level option box). Although i'm not sure if this did anything, i've ticked it now and it's going smootly. Here's an example of my problems anyway, Left is some bonkers stuff that may have been due to problem 3. Middle is problem 1. and right is a test i did to figure stuff out.

After that was sorted, I applied all my maps correctly and that stuff and this was the result.

Left is base mesh, middle is with normal map, right is my mudbox hi-res. As you can see there seems to be fuck all difference! there's very slightly more definition than the base mesh... So... i'm not entirely sure why this is - possibly because of shoddy normal maps or just because the hi-res really isn't that different... although to me it looks pretty different in the mudbox sculpt. Perhaps that's an optical illusion cause of the mud. Regardless, I figured i'd just continue on rather than get stuck in a rut. The next stage was textures, so I laid down a flat colour on my UVs and applied it. But then I thought 'what about lighting?'. So i found a tutorial online to create a basic light rig. Here's some snaps of that. (boring.)

So I played with the materials and crap and ended up with this:

As per usual, I am not happy. The whole thing just looks amateurish and mooshy and crap. I'm in half a mind to restart entirely, but that's probably not a good idea. I'll stop the moping, for now anyway, have a nice weekend (Los Campesinos! tonight! :D) and see what my brain thinks on monday.

Before I leave, here's one last thing that I did this week, and it's cool. Basically we're arranging a street fighter tournament in falmouth and I made the posters :D Won't indulge because andy's waiting for me to leave but here are some of the versions I made and subsequently plastered up around uni ^_^ can't wait for this. By for now !

Rush!

2010-02-18T12:53:00.003Z

Finding it pretty hard to keep up with the posting. Recently I haven't even been able to go to life drawing because of all the things getting in my way (e.g. Dissertation, Channel 4 project (i know, extracurricular but whatever, real life, etc.). That's actually a bit of a shame cause i'd like to be doing more life drawing atm, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

I rushed this post together for the benefit of the production meeting yesterday, but now I have time to actually write something, so I shall, although I have little to show due to the intense tedium of the work that i've been doing over the last two weeks.

Basically I spent the back end of one of the weeks redrafting my dissertation, and doing the inane bits and pieces like formatting, bibliography... fucking yawn. I cba talking about it but it's done, and I was reasonably happy with it. Gave it to my smart housemate to proof read one night and he said he enjoyed it, too, which I took as a good sign.

When that got finished I undertook the even more exciting task of painting weights! For those of you who don't know, creating characters goes like this. Design -> Model -> Rig -> Bind/Paint Weights. (UVs, Texturing and Blendshapes are also slotted in along the way.) The binding/weighting refers to the process of instructing certain parts of the model to be controlled by certain bones or joints of the rig. Probably superfluous mentioning this but whatever. It seems almost invisible - noone ever really pays any mind to the effort that has to be put in to such trivial parts of character creation to make it really successful. But basically this is what i've been up to for the past week.

Once you've roughed out the weights, your character roughly moves how he should, but every part of the model that bends in any way must be finely tweaked until it looks right. You'll get areas like these:

Notice the horrible areas of deformation like the shoulder etc, where the 'skin' doesn't move naturally. It overlaps as if it were cloth or something.. anything that's not skin. Anyway, these examples aren't even that extreme. Going back to Buckle it seems that for the most part he's actually weighted reasonably well, considering I didn't use any plugins like PoseDeformer (which i'll touch on later). So here's the stage he's at at the minute.

Not bad... not bad... I think the to do list atm is as follows:

Fix mouth (easy)
Fix peg-leg knee (hopefully easy with poseDeformer)
Potentially fix upper legs... (although i'm not sure aka I hope this isn't necessary)

Then Andy's left to do Swash and one day they'll be finished! I say one day because there's still a shit load left for him to do, the poor lad :( I sort of wish I could help out more but if I want to make anything that is really my own and do it well then I need to move on :/

Anyway, poseDeformer.

Michael Comet is a brilliant man who's spent who knows how long making reaallly handy scripts for Maya, and they're all for free! I came across the scripts through the Gnomon rigging videos that i've watched, and i've been using the CometTools for a while now, which includes handy things like easy shape creation and tools for playing with orients etc, but only in this past week have I started using poseDeformer which is just brilliant. What you do is move the character into a pose that deforms badly, run the script, follow the instructions, and you're allowed to move vertices, edges, basically model as you traditionally would until the pose looks nice and bob's your uncle! There's no point me going into any more depth but suffice to say it's insanely handy and i'll be using it on all future rigging projects :D

Link to his website here -----> http://www.comet-cartoons.com/

Do yourself a favour and check it out. You can also find poseDeformer compiles for all Maya versions with a quick google.

One last thing that i'll mention is that i've created a reverse rig on the main character :) Thanks to Georg for figuring it out, it's easier than it seems and just took me a little while creating a bunch of set driven keys to mess with constraints and bob is yet again your uncle. No example here but it'll allow the guy to swing from ropes and crap like Andy wished.

HHHHHHHOPPPEFULLY i'll have some pretty pictures up for next time! Some beautifully mudboxed boxer faces :D Actually sounds quite exciting. Anyway that'll do, ciao B)

Proost

2010-02-04T11:42:00.008Z

Blog time! Bit of a weird time to be doing it but I missed last friday :x Surprisingly I feel really far behind on the blogging already :O I've got quite a bit to show, and there won't be much writing cause it's presentation time today. In brief, since my last blog i've kinda completed my basemesh for the Boxer ready for mudbox, I fixed some problems with Andy's rig, and accepted EVEN MORE work in the form of drawing a sketchbook for Pete's channel 4 show :D

So here are the pics. In chronological order.

Here's a little picture I made that looks at the topology of my model. On the right you see the original model that I made, and as you can see it's pretty dense. From the start I didn't want to limit myself to make a low-poly model, but I thought this was far too dense, particularly in the chest, so I decided to start it from scratch again from the collar bone area. You can see the reworked model in the center with a much tidier and less dense mesh. I think it's a great improvement, especially as it gives a similar shape to what I want with much less geometry than the original.

You can also see where I played around with the original in Mudbox (although this demonstrates nothing, really) and where I started playing around with a really great plugin called nex, which you can use to draw polygons directly onto other models. I think this would be really handy in retopologising hi-poly models, and i'll almost definitely use it again in the future, although I didn't think it was necessary in this case, really.

Just for a second I'll go back to show the reference that i've been working from for this guy.

Some of this you've seen before, but that doesn't matter. Basically the problem that I encountered was the way that the guy varies so much. Of course this is my fault but due to this I found it quite difficult on deciding on a final look for the guy, when it came to drawing a turnaround of him. I settled on this, with the thought that I can change whatever I want as I go along.

I wasn't 100% happy with how these turned out, but they were decent, mostly proportion-wise. And again, I can change whatever I want as i'm my own boss! >:O

So back to the modeling. As I said I've finished the basemesh... sorta. So here it is!

I'm kinda happy with this guy, but since the beginning there's something that's just been... off. I think it's gotta be the face, which will be the thing that takes the most tweaking. Also as i've said to some tutors I think when I get round to doing the blendshapes, the extreme expressions should really bring him to life as in every drawing I've done he's been grinning or scowling or something like that, whereas here he looks dead boring.

I also think the proportions could use more work - although i'm not sure in which area, or perhaps if it's just the pose.

Although I am happy with certain parts of the model. I'm quite chuffed with the topology of the body, I think it's a decent density mesh with all of the definitions that I wanted. I'll add bits and pieces in mudbox but I think it's a really solid basemesh. Fingers crossed it'll deform well, too.

I'm also pretty happy with the accessories that i've modeled, eg. the gloves and the shoes. Check out these babies :P

took me like a day to model lolz. But yeah, this is where i'm at. Next week is back to Andy's models for weighting (urk) and the week after it's back to my guy! I'm a bit behind, I won't lie, and that's a nightmare. But i'm sure it'll all sort itself out in the end.

As a bonus here are some of the drawings that i've done for Pete!

Thankyou and goodnight!

woooo update!

2010-01-22T14:08:00.006Z

Back from christmas! Missed one blog post last week because I forgot that I've been keeping this thing lol. Didn't post over christmas either because I was working on the dissertation almost constantly... it was horrible. But i'm back now, dissertation is almost out of the way and i've started on my personal project finally :) Although as per usual it's harder work than I imagined. I'll go through what i've been up to for these two weeks that i've been back.

Initially I tried to get the weighting on Andy's pirates done, but as he wasn't finished finalising UVs yet I couldn't paint the weights. So i scrapped what i'd started and began concentrating on my project.

I thought it would be a good idea spending a day gathering reference images. In hindsight I do think it was a good thing, I've found a few images like these...

and these...

basically a mixture of really cool images and handy reference pictures for proportion/anatomy and style. So i've been using these in cojunction with the pictures that i've drawn of my character eg.

...to try and come up with a fully formed concept for my character. But this is harder than it seems.

With so much reference and so many differing levels of realism/stylisation etc etc it's hard to find a happy middle ground. I'm also realising that i'm probably my own toughest client. When modeling the pirates I only had what i'd been given to go with, and I specifically had in mind that I would put aside my own personal tastes and create characters for the client and not myself. When working for myself I just seem to constantly flipflop between stylistic choices. This is compounded by the technical aspects, also.

In maya you obviously work with polygon - vertices. The free-form sculpting tools available within Maya are not so great, to say the least, and so this has resulted in me getting stuck into detail far too early on, having too many vertices to work with and thus getting bogged down. Here's an image showing a few of the facial variations that i've come up with this week.

As you should be able to see from the images, forgiving the eerie look brought on by having missing eyes, the character just looked strange. The proportions were all out and there was just nothing going for him. The nose on the left face in particular looks rough, as well as the eye, which just looks unnatural. The face on the right is another prototype and the face in the center is what i've been left with (the level 0 mesh from mudbox after a few hours of tinkering.)

Here's the highest level mesh that I got to in Mudbox after a day of playing around and getting accustomed to the interface and it's quirks.

I sort of like this image, but it just doesn't have the zing that I want it to. But that's okay, i'm marking that down to experience. Of course I wouldn't just slip right into it, right? Nothing ever as easy as it seems in 3D land. As I didn't UV the guy before I mudboxed him I can't use this hi-poly sculpt for anything, anyway, which I think is probably a good thing. I took the lowest level mesh from this, though, which i've now taken back to Maya where I will create the entire base mesh for the guy. Here's the progress so far:

So i've not come out with a lot of visible progress this week. Hopefully this post will show you that i've actually been working some lol. It's been an interesting week, I think i'm getting somewhere though. I think really I want to make the guy a little more stylised. It's probably all in the eyes... who needs realism? Perhaps next week (or maybe the week after depending on what Andy's got me doing) i'll go crazy and make the guy super stylised. That could be fun. i'm babbling.

Next on the agenda is finishing the weights on Andy's pirates so that they're out of the way, then i'll get back to this dude and finish an entire base mesh. After that it's back to Mudbox for further modeling, (not before UVing) then back to Maya, tweaks, displacements, etc, and onto the rest of the crap. It'll be interesting to see where I end up. Oh well, i've run out of things to say that make sense, so until next week (Y).

nepoenpoepe

2009-12-11T17:06:00.004Z

Back on blogging-track! This week i've managed to rig two characters :D (not including painting weights, sadly, but I couldn't get started on this until Andy had finished a few things.) Pretty good progress though, I think. And rigging has been surprisingy easy to get back to terms with :D (apart from one horrible day which I will describe shortly). Here's a pictures of the first rig I completed on Swash:

Nothing much to talk about, a very basic rig. The only new things i'll be attempting this time round are a jaw bone, and an extra bone in the arm for forearm twist (although I need to sort this out...) but basically nothing mindblowing. I managed to finish it in almost 1 day, which is great time, but painting weights will be fairly time-consuming I think.

So, I finished Swash all fine and dandy and was really chuffed, and quickly went on to rigging Dodger, the main character. This was all going fine, too, until I got to making the IK/FK arms when it took a turn for the worst. I'd set them all up just like I did with Swash but one thing kept on going wrong. I'd move the IK arm, switch to FK arm and move it and rather than sticking to the location of the IK like it should do, the IK handle kept snapping to the new position of the joint, when the FK controls moved it. Sorry if that's a little confusing, but bear with me.

So I tried a million different things, tried switching restraints on and off, remaking the entire arm from scratch, creating new, test arms along side this one and NOTHING was working. So I wasted pretty much an entire day on this one stupid problem and couldn't figure it out so I decided to leave it. Came back the next day and still no joy for about an hour, but after trying every different thing I could think of FINALLY I got it.

It was this bugger! This tiny, seemingly unimportant looking button, which I have no recollection of turning on either in the menu you see here or the button in the option box menu when you create IK handles. But remember this! It could save you some time. Enable IK Snapping is bad! Glad I figured it out in the end :D and now Dodger's rig is finished too.

Just one more week to go, one more rig to make and then three characters weights to paint... I can't remember how long weights take, but i'm foolishly optimistic that I might still be able to complete it lol. We will see. Here are some cool pictures to finish the blog :) I'm really happy with how the characters have turned out and what's even better is that they seem to come from the same world and all relate, while still remaining individual. Wooo

til next week!

Damn

2009-12-04T12:36:00.002Z

I haven't posted in ages! And I ruined my one-a-week track record :( Oh well, it was going to happen some time. I won't dwell. Instead here's the stuff that i've actually managed to finish in the time that i've not been posting :D

There's swash. All done and nice and tidy in the outliner :) As far as i'm aware i've done everything that's necessary to have him move really nicely when he's finished rigging, but we'll only find out when it starts (which is hopefully very soon! possibly even today, but more than likely next week). I'm really quite happy with him, I think the face and body have a good amount of character in them, and the topology is pretty clean. Now it's up to Andy with the texturing and materials, which I hope he does a good job of. The only thing that i'm wondering about at the minute is Swash and the rest of the gangs eyes. I've always made the eyes quite er... stylised in the way that they have very hard edges on the rim of the eye, and pretty much all over the eyelid. I've not had to do any blendshapes or facial rigging in the past, so i'm unsure whether this is a good route to take. My instinct is telling me that they should (or maybe i'd just like them to be) a bit more natural looking, so i'm probably going to research this before I model my characters. (which i can't wait to do :D) Anyway, I can't really remember any of the problems that I had modeling Swash, but everything that I came across was solved with basic modeling techniques, so there's not much wisdom I can impart at this time :P So onto Buckle.

There we go, two haphazard turntables for Buckle. I'll probably have to present them nicely for the work submission before we leave, so maybe i'll get some pretty pictures up at some point. Something that i've learnt in this process is that it majorly speeds up your workflow if you can basically steal parts of other models and reuse them or reshape them to fit other characters. Every character i've made has the same ears, the same hands and the same feet. Just move around the topology until it suits you and bob's your uncle. I even reused swash's trousers for buckle, although it was quite tricky because of their difference in mass. Hands and ears were a godsend though, especially. I'm pretty happy with how this guy turned out, as well. I believe it's the first time that i've made an entire connected torso and head, and it wasn't so bad. It can be tricky in places like the arm/shoulder area where you have to choose between extruding the arm out or connecting a different piece of topology (of which i chose the latter) and then sorting out the topology, but i'm quite pleased with the results. I'm yet to see whether it will all work out in the end but i'm sure we'll manage it. Again, Andy will be texturing all of the models so now it's up to him! (Although i'm sure I won't be able to keep my nose out for long.)

Now all there's left for me to do is go ahead and rig. And I have two weeks left. And three characters <_<;;; That's a little worrying. Hopefully the vast (pleaaseee) majority of the rigging will somehow get done, though, and all with be well for us to leave for crimbo and get on with our dissertations (blarg).

Anyway i'm fairly happy with how all of this has gone. I'm happy with all of the models (Although i prefer the baddies to the good guy, but that was gonna happen due to the fact i modeled him first. And i'm sure texturing him will make him look pretty) and given that we've had a fair few lessons in between all of this stuff, along with the presentations, dissertation tutorials and all of that junk, i think i've done pretty well for time. I've definitely put the hours in anyway :) And i'm tired now but soon we'll have a lovely break, and then I can start on my guys :D :D

Seeya next week hopefully xx

New Posssssst

2009-11-13T16:01:00.005Z

This'll be a quickie cause I don't have much to say really, but I finished the main character! (pretty much) and I have some spare time to have a little blog.

The week has felt kind of slow, and the model still feels kind of unfinished, but i've felt this before and i'm pretty sure it's because it IS unfinished - really. There's still the UVing, Texturing and Rigging before it'll be complete and ready to animate. But the modeling in largely done. There are parts which i'm not sure will work, but the only way we will find out is by starting the rigging. I've been pretty careful and tested things a few times so I really hope there are no major problems, cause there'll definately be some minor ones. I guess let's get on with the pictures!

Front and side of his current state. Put some coloured lambert materials on for fun.

Boots which i'm sorta proud of, so simple but effective. Here i learnt the power of building models with a very strong idea of what they'll be used for. Since i knew the boots where to be wrinkled in such a way, i made the topology according to this and making sexy wrinkles was real easy.

closeup of the face (still with temporary hair cause we don't really know what's happening with this) and i'm showing off the detatchable eyebrows for... some reason. They were originally part of the same object as the face, but I had a chat to georg and he said that it's cool if you can get away with detatched. Hopefully we will.

Remodeled the hands at the request of andy. I was happy with the old ones but I like the new ones too. They look much neater at least, and the thumb is better. Also showing off the cuffs i made, again I'm not sure why really, they're pretty simple...

Sorta Finished Main Character from Jacob Golding on Vimeo.

finally here's a video. This post feels really self-indulgent for some reason lol. I really like vimeo, anyway. Nice and clean and HD and all that jazz.

Still a few things left to do with the model such as making proper hair and maybe a few more tiny details and of course rigging, then it's all up to Andy!

That'll do, weird post but it's sunday and sorta late. See you Friday!

Bergerac

2009-11-08T19:37:00.004Z

Hoi, back again, busy day today. Finished reading a book that has to be returned tomorrow, have to write up notes for it, do housework, write this blog, do a spider chart... erg, still loads to go. Blog time anyway.

So this week was the week of the presentation and so it consumed practically all of my time. I created a video to present my idea to the panel and everyone and it was quite a time consuming process, but i'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Here's the vid firstly:

Third Year Digital Animation Project Pitch from Jacob Golding on Vimeo.

Please ignore the horrible writing (I hate writing!), and the cheesiness which was partially intended. It was quite fun getting back into Premiere. Since it's a fairly easy piece of software to get into and it's always fun learning/relearning stuff. Managed to make some fairly quick but nice looking animations for the transitions of the pictures and stuff which I think helps the style of the characters and everything as a whole. The music helps a lot too, if you're wondering it's Helix Nebula by a band called Anamanaguchi. Good tune. Er.. yeah, anyway. Did the pitch, shitting myself for the initial introduction thing which I mumbled my way through nervously, played the vid then answered some questions in a much more relaxed manner for whatever reason.

The criticism that I got back was mainly to do with the depth of the story. I think I always have, hopefully not always will, have had this problem with creating really interesting stories. If i'm honest I like art for art's sake, and I like to feel the story in the art... but I guess this doesn't cut it when you're pitching stories to people. But that's not my area anyway, i'm just the art guy. Whatever, i'm not making enough sense for this to be worth writing about. It was alright though, and while the week is gone for little reward, i'm happy with the little vid that I produced, and having all the characters together on the screen made me at least feel like i'd done a fair bit of work these past few weeks/months. Especially considering my (lack of) speed.

On to the MODELING!

I think I might've spent Monday from last week working on the model before the rest of the time was eaten by the pitch. Not entirely sure what I worked on at that time, and i'm sad that I didn't fulfil my hopes that I would have a finished model by this time, but I can show what I have, and it's far more impressive than an eyeball and whatever! Anyway, this is my progress:

There are some nice wireframes for all of you that care, too (NOONE!).

Still have a lot of work to do, hands will probably be a pain, and i have the legs and that, and also I want to rework the topology in the face and shoulders because I want these really to be stellar, how they look and how they animate. The area i'm most concerned with is the shoulders at the minute, so i'll show you some of the research that i've been carrying out recently, which is surprisingly a fair bit and looks quite neat now that i've put some pictures together. Here we go:

Okay this is what I've got with the model in it's current stages. I did a little test because of the problems that i've come up against in the past (how pro is that? ;)). Definitely not happy with the deformation at this point, but a big factor is the fact that these arms won't even be seen - they'll be hid the entire time underneath sleeves. The only reason i'm modeling this much is because it may be needed to collide with the n cloth on the sleeves if andy ever gets around to putting it in. SO these may actually be fine, but in the sake of learning i'm going to try to make them really nice anyway. It'll benefit me when I come to creating the rest of my characters anyway. I was a bit confused as to how to topologise it for maximum goodness, so I did some research...

This is a highly accomplished (i think) rig in it's nubile stages from the gnomon people. Something I noticed here, when compared to my model, even this guy, in a slightly further stage of rigging than my guy, he still gets the deformation on the top of the shoulder. This means I'm probably on the right track, i just need to tweak, and of course, a very large stage of the rigging process - paint the weights well. Also i believe this model in it's completed stage uses blendshapes on the shoulders, this is something i've little knowledge in... anyway, i digress.

These images are from this amazing tutorial on the area. I'd forgotten about this place until Georg reminded me, and actually i'm always coming back to this particular one. It's really great. So here are two pictures, very helpful. I'll probably try to copy this topology when I get back to work on monday.

Here's the link to it, anyway. And also you need a login. Anyway: http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials/chapter_2_building_a_cage

That's it folks! Got lots to do. Toodles.

Breaxxbaxx

2009-11-01T13:26:00.004Z

Forgot about this on friday! And i'm hungover now er so this post is gonna be super short. Edit: Lolz, it's about 5 hours after I started this post, I am now post-hangover as well, so I can put more energy into this. Good stúf. Bit of chatter first. I feel like i've had a mini holiday, since I missed Friday due to a different hangover <_< I've been doing that a lot recently, missing the Friday, not always because of hangovers, but anyway I should stop doing that. I work hard when i'm in uni but at home i'm a lazy bum and I love it. Gotta be pulling 5 day weeks to keep up the pace, i'm slightly slipping behind with the schedule that I sorted out. Nothing major though. This week i'll pull it together. woop woop.

So yeah, I did actually plan on working at home on Friday but annoyingly my version of Maya didn't even accept the files cause in uni we're on 2010, and at home I have 2008. This means I can't make screenshots like I planned either, but I'll get you some (hopefully) finished model shots of the main character of Andy's short in my next bloggy. For now, i'll chat a little guff about the experiences I've had this past week getting back into modeling.

Getting back into Maya was surprisingly easy. The majority of the shortcuts seem to be lodged in my brain quite firmly, that's good. And with my new, clean way of working I've had little problems recently. Had one crash but I only lost probably 20 mins of work or even less. My sense of topology is better too, but there's definitely room for improvement. The problem here is that i just literally don't have the experience necessary to work out certain problems. While I do find solutions, i'm positive there are better and faster ways of doing things.

I've officially started working for Andy, on 'Corked' now, in case I didn't mention, where i'll be modeling possibly all three of the characters, and also rigging them. I'm happy to be helping out, and since I have a creative outlet with my project, I can work to his designs exactly without meddling with any of the design choices. The only input I have is in the form of the hopefully careful and stylish modeling. I've really been trying to keep as faithful as possible to the designs, and being most perfectionist because I really want these characters to pop. Also in this process I get to see more what it'd be like working in an actual company as a modeler, as you have little creative freedom in certain jobs.

From a technical point of view, this week the troubles that I've been having are with the face in perspective. I mean I got a good likeness to the original turnarounds in the Front viewport fairly early on, and from the Side it was pretty accurate too. So both views look good, but in perspective something would look a little weird, something just wasn't working and I couldn't put my finger on it. It's weird, and there's no definite answer to the problem that I can think of, but I believe all that's necessary is to just continue modeling, and with a better idea of 3D space it should come. In this instance I just tweaked and tweaked until the guy started to look cool. He looks pretty sweet at the minute actually, his head is fully finished. But sadly there are no pics atm! Instead i'll show you the only pics I do have, in reference to the earzzzz. In a sec though. I'll just quickly say that I had trouble with the eyes of the character, too. They are really large in the turnarounds and look great, but after modeling they seemed to bulge. Need more experience in this area too. Again I just tweaked until they were better.

So ear stuff. Pics:

Here you see the half completed face and two ears. Notice i've not joined up the different parts of the face, I used this technique this time round and it worked really well for me. Easier than plapping in edge loops and having them run around the entire area of the face when you're fiddling around with difficult areas than the ear and the nose etc. The ear that I created first is the one on the left, and I started this with the outside loop, the part of the ear that folds over, and I worked my way in. With the second (and much more successful ear) I started on the inside, in the bowl or whatever it's called, and worked out. Both techniques could be used i'm sure, but I found the second one gave much nicer effects in my case. A much more organic looking and still stylised ear (even though it's not actually anatomically correct!). Also note that the lobe is poking out like that because of Andy's design choice, and as I said i'm being 100% faithful :D I like the ears anyway, might nick em for my later characters!

Here are the turnarounds i'm working from too, in case you wanted to see em. THIS IS NOT MY WORK! Credit to Andy

Oh, also I finished my evil baddie :D And I gave him possibly the best background yet? I think I may frame all my characters cause it just adds a really finished touch compared to the colour reaching the edges of the page. Also played with the frame with the evil lurking arms coming out at you. Here he is, disgusting and slimy:

For inspiration this week I don't think it would be art. It may be a bit umm.. flowery? I dunno, but I just watched Ray Mears in Canada on Iplayer (which I won't link because they take it all down, silly bastards), but I found that really inspirational, the way they were talking about how all of the animals and the trees rely on each other and also death to continue the CIRCLE OF LIFEEEEEEEE. (They didn't say that, but something more sensible) Anyway it was really inspirational and calming sort of. Anyway sorry for talking bollocks, I get like this when i'm hungover, I think it's the remains of the alcohol in my system. Until next week folks!

Gold Guns Girls

2009-10-23T17:10:00.003+01:00

Hiya. Back again on a Friday oh yeaah (I might brag about this every week... It'll be a sad day when I miss my first weekly blog.) Been getting on with business this week. Finished my Mascot, and i've even almost finished off my bad guy. It's really strange how I work. I probably took a week and a half on the Mascot (if not more... I don't want to think about it though) and then I go and blast out a fairly detailed painting of another character in almost 2 days. Why is this? Anyway, that's all that i've been up to work-wise as far as I can remember. I'm hoping *fingers crossssed* that the studio will all be lovely and shiny and working by the time I get in on Monday morning. Even though I can work perfectly fine without Windows 7 etc, I just feel a little left out with computers that aren't what they're meant to be. I'm contemplating buying Windows 7 myself actually, since it's only 30 quid for us students and the amount of praise i've been hearing (and it's shiny). Anyway let's get onto the pikchars::::

Mascot, of course. To be honest i'm really happy with the way that this one came out. I think it may actually be my favourite at the minute. Re-doing the entire thing definitely paid dividends. The reason I like it is probably because of the rendering that I achieved on the armour, notice the shine on the breast plates etc lol. It may be a strange reason but it's just that I managed to achieve pretty much exactly the material that I wanted to portray, and that's pretty cool for me. It's something that i've been trying to push for in most of my paintings and this time it worked out. I feel like a lot of the materials I paint look exactly the same, and I achieved something this time round. I also like the background. It should be obvious that i've been experimenting with the backgrounds on all of these paintings, and also that i've really been into the dissolve layer function. The desaturated green towards the lower half of the painting doesn't really make the character stand out as it possibly should, but I find it creates an interesting effect. Also, not to keep blabbing on but I purposely left the lower half of the character loose. Even if it was mostly because I had been painting the Mascot for farrrr too long, it was also interesting for me to see whether your eye was drawn to the detail in the upper half of the body or not. I still can't decide, but i'm happy with it anyway (maybe all apart from the rendering on the legs, light source is a little confusing there...) Woo!

This is the Baddie! He needs a name still though. Actually this is the sketch, just in case you cared at all.

And here's where i'm at now. Character is pretty much done, and the background is half done. I did something differently with this painting. Should be fairly easy to spot, but I tried out a more menacing, dramatic lighting, compared to the fairly soft, top down lighting in the other pieces. I think I managed this alright, although my lack of knowledge/experience with the sort of thing made me a little uncertain of a few things. I think his face may be a fair bit more dramatically lit than the rest of the body. First time anyway so I guess it's alright. With this guy I tried to make him both goofy and a little bit grotesque. That's the reason for the lighting, the pale arms, dodgy face etc. Worked alright I think, definitely handy as a painting exercise too. He's not completely finished, but I should be able to deal with him in an hour or something on monday, lovely jubbly. Might even start modeling for Andy!

That's it for work, not including sparse dissertation readings (that're actually very very interesting surprisingly, thanks to great writers), so now for some inspiration i've come across this week.

Making of N0X-2292 (part 1) from Slipgatecentral on Vimeo.

Making of N0X-2292 (part 2) from Slipgatecentral on Vimeo.

The above videos are just bloody god damned hell amazing. Really blew my mind when I first watched them. It's strange really, and a little sad, for reasons I will explain. This model was submitted to Dominance War IV and when I was browsing through the winners, I almost completely disregarded it along with a friend, because it seemed to be similar to things we'd seen before, namely in Metal Gear Solid and stuff. So i never paid it much attention, found a few other things which I thought were better, and forgot about it. Then later in the week I came across these videos, and as I said they blew me away. The INSANE level of detail that the model has, and the fact that it is almost entirely built in Maya is crazy. Watch the videos and you'll see what i'm on about. The 'rigs' are just great too, even though they aren't technically rigs. They move beautifully, just like real machines would, and this is a skill which I am completely devoid of. Maybe I should study some mechanics. The other great thing is the amount of time and effort this guy has gone through making the video. Not just to showcase his work but to educate others along the way, and I think that's just great. A big thanks to this guy, I am really inspired. His website is here: slipgatecentral.livejournal.com and vimeo page here: http://vimeo.com/slipgatecentral Where you can find a few more great videos.

That's it for this week. See you soon xx

brap brap.

2009-10-18T23:11:00.003+01:00

Almost let it slip there! Wasn't in uni for very long on Friday so I didn't have time to do a blog, but I pulled it out of the bag and here I am on sunday night (H).

This Wednesday (?) we had our presentation thingy. Was a tiny bit nervous and did a fairly poor presentation but it wasn't marked or anything, and was more of a 'look at this stuff' then a pitch or anything like that, so no biggie. But after that, a previous chat with Georg and a post chat with Andy, i've now come to the conclusion that i'm no longer making a film. But i'm really positive about what i'm doing in place, which is creating some awesome models! This way I can make sure that I really produce some cracking models, and have noone to blame but myself if I don't pull it out of the bag. I plan to come to terms with Mudbox along the way, really get down to some good texturing and maybe even produce some fairly complex rigs, for the experience and for the benefit of animators. A new thought i've also been considering is that since these models are for a computer game, then perhaps I should attempt to make hi-res AND lo-res versions. Although I have very little idea what i'd be letting myself in for with this, I think it'd be a massive bonus for my portfolio.

Anyway i'll cut this really short cause it's super late. Here are the paintings i've been working on this week. I've been painting the Mascot, this was the first sketch, which i did in the middle of summer:

Pretty bland I guess. That led to this:

But I was not feeling it at all, so I ended up scrapping it completely and starting again. Here is where I currently am:

Definitely an improvement, but something still irks me. I almost feel as if I don't know my style yet, which is probably true. But i'll keep working on it and i'm sure something will appear. I do like his shiny armour at least. And i'm pretty sure the first attempt failed because I remember during drawing it, my heart wasn't in it, was low on motivation etc. I'm in a much better mindset right now, and really can't wait to make some models! :D

Good night, i'm tired.

Ello ello!

2009-10-09T15:32:00.003+01:00

Yessssssss, keeping up my routine (H). So what's been happening this week? Well I finished the Nerds, including a background which took far longer than it should have, and i've also managed to clean up all of the other pictures :D The laptop ones you know, and they look much better with nice finished backgrounds. Just finished the Brawlers a minute ago. Apart from that, nothing much else... although! Blogs aren't being graded anymore! I cannae believe it. Just as i'm getting back into it :( At least they will apparently count as a nice production report though, and if I maintain this blog throughout the year and submit it as a production report I would expect to get a first for that bit. I would be very angry if not. I enjoy this rambling anyway, so i'll keep it up.

little note for me so I don't forget: http://danielprimed.com/

So here are my workings from the week:

Finished nerdies.

Finished Businesspeople (or Lawyers?) Looking a little evil here... there was talk about turning them into badguys...

First finished version of the Brawlers, although I felt the background was a bit dark, so...

I lightened it up a little...

Then i plapped the word BRA WLE RS in the background, which I think looks pretty cool, although i'm not sure which version i'll eventually settle for. Thinking about making a little scroll or something too to put on all of the paintings for the character class names.

In other news, there's talk of me not actually making a finished film :/ Instead, I would be producing some beautiful fully animateable models, and also helping out on another student's film. This idea came about from a chat with Georg, because I really am giving myself one hell of a task if I want to fully realise the film I have in my head. I still believe (possibly wrongly) that I could do it... but the only thing i'm not sold on is the animating, and the story. I know I could make some really nice models if given the time, but then if I really push myself and do that, and end up having them playing out an awful script that noone cares about... would maybe even cheapen them. Perhaps it would be better simply to create the models. I'm gonna have a big think about it, perhaps test out a schedule and chat to the tutors and stuff and i'll get back to you :D I do feel like I would be sad to see the film go, but at the end of the day i'm not planning on becoming a film director or indie animator or any of that jazz. Right now it seems my area will be concepts or modeling, and I can hone these skills without creating a finished film (although I do feel that it would be quite a beneficial experience to see a film through from start to finish.) That's enough rambling anyway. I'll see you next week :]

This Is Not A Post.

2009-10-02T14:44:00.003+01:00

Ello. Looks like I managed to post again just as I planned :D. Alright what've I done this week... Well first i've managed to complete another character and a half :D I reckon that's pretty good going. Will give pix in a minute. We officially start the third year next Monday, then the Monday after that we have to present our stuff to the class. So my plan for next week is to firstly complete this Nerd pic with background et al, and then get to work on the two pictures that I painted on the lappy which are still a bit ropey. That way i'll have a nice collection of pictures to show and hopefully get some good feedback from. Basically I think i'm feeling pretty good about my work at the minute. I've not done a huge amount but at least i've done some, and what I have done I'm reasonably happy with. Let's think... I think I have maybe...3 more character class paintings to do. I could cut that down. Then I have the bad guys, I might be able to stick those both on the same painting, or just do two singulars... then I have location concept stuff, but I could get away with more sketchy stuff for that. And then I can get on with turn arounds and on to modeling. That sounds like kind of a lot, but if i'm smart and only do what's necessary then I could get modeling in no time :D

Anyway no more blabbing. That's pretty much all that's happened this week, apart from that time when I fell on my face in front of all the freshers. That was cool. Here's my painting anyway. Unfinished of course but the guy is done and the girl's face is kinda done. Will sort a bg out next week :)

There we go, see you next week. No wait, here's some awesome music to leave you with. Listen to these if you want to live (such great music):
http://hypem.com/track/918951/Volcano+Choir+-+Island+IS
http://hypem.com/track/919680/Basement+Jaxx+-+My+Turn
http://hypem.com/track/920321/Florence+and+the+Machine+-+You+ve+Got+the+Love+The+xx+Remix+

kbye1

New Post.

2009-09-24T17:03:00.005+01:00

Herro. This is a short one. Just to say i'm alive, back in falmouth, getting back into the swing of things and I have some work to show. There'll be a massive post soon when the studio and my brian are sorted out so that I can scan all of the bits and pieces I have lying around. Little post is better than no post!

So i've finished 3 paintings, each containing 2 characters. So that's sort of 6 paintings! (If i'm kind to myself.) That's alright really, I reckon. I got some sketches and stuff done too and a very rough story board. As ever i'm sort of happy with my paintings but still wish I was better. Practic makes perfect though right? I think i've realised that i'm not as skilled as I would like to think. I think I have the eye for things, but when I start the painting I get stuck often, or have to cop out and make things look cartoony. I want to change this by doing some studies when I can, and also try paintings where I'm tied down by absolutely nothing. No deadlines, no sketches, I think i'd make some nice stuff if it were entirely experimental. Cause even though I have free reign with this project, I am still limited by the fact that these paintings have a purpose, they are concept art. They need to be readable and show snapshots of the characters. I mean I wouldn't feel comfortable leaving areas completely unfinished or go off on a tangent somewhere and have inconsistensies in the series of images. Talking crap now.

Anyway. I've 'finished' the 3rd of my paintings just moments ago. I spent today on the background...which was possibly a massive waste of time, but I've not been sure what angle I would take for the background, and i've been waiting til i've completed more because I would like some sort of cohesion with the pieces. So here're the Bards. I think i'll keep that traditional RPG class name because they are quite modern looking characters sorta. I have 3 variants because i've been going a bit nuts and i'm not sure which one looks best. Here's the first:

These are the colours and stuff that I put down myself.

Here's the second:

This is with an overlay, but I think it's my favourite of the three as it stands today.

Finally, here's the third:

This one's mental, so I'm pretty sure it won't get used, but I like it anyway. Also i've not tweaked it, it's just the same overlay as before but on Exclusion or something.

There's a chance I may even go in a completely different direction when I've got the whole set of images together, too. I think i'll leave the other two completed Illus background-less until i've done the rest, and tweak them when i'm done. Speaking of those, i've never actually uploaded them... I think I will now, even though I feel that they need quite a lot of polisihing before they are finished. So let's call them work in progress.

Brawlers:

Businesspeople:

Both need level adjustments because I painted them on a wonky laptop screen which threw the balance completely. The laptop also had a lower resolution which I think is obvious when you compare these to the bard pictures. I won't make any excuses anyway, it should be fairly simple to sort out what I want to do. It's just finding the time and effort.

I seem to be working quite slow lately, but at least i'm enjoying it.

I'll leave you with some images that I downloaded earlier, I'm gonna get into the habit of downloading the awesome that I find when I find it, then i'll post it up here. I think these images may be one of the reasons I went a bit mental with the background of the bard images, so they should fit here quite nicely.

Jesus christ, how good are they? I absolutely love the play with the colours. Sort of very experimental but at the same time they're valid concept art I think, if even only for the atmosphere that is created. Anyway I love them, check out the guy who painted them's blog over here -----> http://crayonboxofdoom.blogspot.com/

london postings.

2009-07-29T19:45:00.004+01:00

Almost exactly a month after my previous post, I return. I'm not sure whether I should apologise for the lack of posting or if it's sort of warranted due to my situation... I think i'll go with the former for now, and say sorry for being crap. I haven't decided yet whether i'm doing badly or not. This is possibly because I decided to abandom my schedule for the summer, and therefore don't really know where I could/should/would be. Initially I had planned to complete all concept art and have my models animation ready for my return to falmouth. I ended up forgetting that, not due to unfeasability (although this more than likely would've been the case) but more to allow myself a little (a LOT) more freedom as far as concept art goes after a chat with Andy on the situation. In hindsight i've definitely created less work by not abiding to my former schedule, but just like the Talking Dog project I probably would've failed the schedule and just gotten myself worried. None of this is really making sense, but my feelings right now are fine. I've just completed my first full character concept, I have 2 months til I return to uni, one til I return to falmouth, and i feel comfortable.

Like I said, i've not decided yet whether i've been working enough. But I have been working, even though i've not been posting. If you've not yet guessed, this will probably be a ridiculously long post :P Quickly, my current situation is as follows. I'm living in my girlfriend's house in London, painting when she's at work and relaxing the rest of the time. I'll be here for the next 4-5 weeks until the 25th when I leave for Leeds Festival. I'll be returning home to Wales right after, around the 1st of Sept, then heading straight to Fal shortly after that. I'm thinking my return to fal will be when the work really starts to get going. I'm painting here but I find that I thrive in the studio environment and when I return I will be completely focused on work. I'm really looking forward to that, and REALLY want to make something I can be proud to show at the end of the year.

Workwise: I'm fairly happy with the concepts i've been producing. I found it difficult to knock them out when I was in Wales but I just about managed it, and have started the painting. I'm not sure how I feel about my first completed concept yet, but at the very least it's not bad, passable. I think i'll have a more cohesive idea when everything starts coming together. (Read through to the bottom to check him out :D)

INSPIRATION

Alright here's a little section on the things that've been exciting me recently. I've been compiling some images but sadly I left them on my computer at home, but I'll chuck them up when I get the chance. For now check this out.

Illustrative Rendering in Team Fortress 2 ---LINK

Team Fortress 2 is a game that i've never actually played. I've only seen videos but nevertheless I think it's a brilliant game, but solely from a visual standpoint. And judging by the hype the people love it for the gameplay, too. When searching for concept art from the game on a whim, I came across the brilliant article above ^^^. If you take a read through it covers most visual aspects of the game, in a reasonable amount of detail. I'd love to find out more about the modeling and rigging procedures but I'm thrilled to get any sort of insight into the production of REAL games.

GAYYYYY I literally just wrote a load of other crap and the blog fucked it up -.- ugh. Oh well, look at the pretty pictures -.-

Also read this: http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4338&page=2

and this is important: The look needed to be inspirational and it needed to project "fun" rather than "hardcore."

Quoted from the above page. This is what I want!!

lovely stuff. Check out the links for moar.

Gotta cut this short, BRB!

EDIT: Kind of lost my thread, I know I posted this ages ago and I stopped cause I was interrupted by 3 girls who were also staying in Hannah's house at the same time as me. They came home and were living in the living room where the computer is.. blahblah. It really is quite difficult to post here, so i'm not gonna give myself a hard time about this being the second time that i've visited here lol. I'll just carry on with chatting crap.

I was initially going to use this post to chat about the artists that i'd been admiring on Conceptart.org along with that article above and some other game concept art, but shinier things have caught my eye since then, so i'll talk about the other stuff another time :D But make sure to check out that link^ awesome stuff.

Final Fantasy XIV Online

This is one of the games that i'm most hyped for currently. (I really buy into hype lol.. can't help myself, I even think that sometimes I enjoy the hype more than the actual games.) I am an avid fan of the Final Fantasy Series and I ploughed far too many hours into Square Enix's last online FF. Obviously i'm going to be dying to play the next one. Well, sort of. Massively Multiplayer Online RPGS (MMORPGS) are double edged swords. Horribly addictive but brilliantly rewarding, they can eat your life if you're not careful. But i digress, i'll just chat about this from an aesthetic standpoint.

There is little known about the game at this point, but recently the WEBSITE was updated with a nice little bit of information, and some beautiful artwork.

These are some of the character models, you can get some higher res pictures on the site itself, but anyway I bloody love them. Sadly this is probably my inner fanboy talking but I can't silence him D: I won't bother pouring over them but I just love them, and the rest of the aesthetic of the game. Make sure to check the link and check out the landscapes as well. Beautiful stuff.

Here's a gameplay vid which excites me even more!

However shakily recorded and pixelated it might be, just looked at that green grass and the blue shadows of the mountains. Amazing. The gameplay may look a little static which might be strange to those not used tothe genre, but look at the animation of the Dodo enemies. LOOK at the detail of the environment! I love it all, it'd be amazing to be creating that one day...

Finally, here are some of the paintings that i've been doing while in London. None are finished but let me know what you think. Many more will be popping up when I return to falmouth! :D

Hmmm... looking at those pictures on this computer does not please me at all... they look horrible. I can only hope that that is a result of the compression from uploading and not what they actually look like on a non-laptop computer. :////

EDIT: Taken them down cause they look so bad!

Hey there.

2009-06-30T19:41:00.005+01:00

Hello invisible blog readers. I'm back in Wales and stuffs been happening, let's talk.

The most noteable thing is that i've not really done a whooole lot of work i suppose, but it's not all so bad, well, that's because i'm in a good mood today, but whatever. I went out last night with my friends, got drunk, came home this morning and was really in the mood to draw. So i tried out a new technique, as i've had little success trying to get some drawings done the other ways. I put on The Warriors, a film which i've wanted to watch for a while, and one that I don't care about so much as to have to watch all of it, and sketched away. It was awesome. And the film just gave me so many ideas, I bloody love the visual style of the film, the gangs, everything really.

Christ, how awesome is that poster? I'm gonna buy it :D

Here are some stills I found online.

Some of The Warriors. Look how awesome their hair is!

The badass riffs leader, dunno his name but I like his face and his shades. The shades are super reflective... i like this...

This guy has a massive chin, I think that's why they hired him to be the baddy.

On the site that I went on about The Warriors there was a section called Costume. Of course I clicked it because I love their look and stuff, and I was surprised to find the costume designs for the characters. I was even more surprised though, to find that the drawings are actually pretty crappy. I've seen this before, where I love the finished piece but the initial designs are pretty bad. Last time I noticed was on the space marine for the Starcraft game. Anyway, I just thought it was interesting so here you go.

Lastly, here's the list of all of the awesome gangs in the film, or the ones conceived at least. I'll post it in its entirety for the sheer brilliance of how many there are.

The Alleycats,
The Amsterdam All-Stars,
The Baseball Furies,
The Black Hands,
The Blackjacks,
The Big Trains,
The Boppers,
The Boyle Avenue Runners,
The Charlemagnes,
The Colt 45's,
The Dealers,
The Delaney Rovers,
The Dingos,
The E Street Shufflers,
The Easy Aces,
The Electric Eliminators,
The Eighth Avenue Apaches,
The Fastballs,
The Fifth Street Bombers,
The Filmores,
The Firetasters,
The Five Points,
The Gerrards,
The Gladiators,
The Go Hards,
The Gun Hill Dancers,
The Gramercy Riffs,
The High Hats,
The High Rollers,
The Homeboys,
The Hoplites,
The Howitzers,
The Huks,
The Hurricanes,
The Imps,
The Jesters,
The Jones Street Boys,
The Judas Bunch,
The Jupiters,
The Knockdowns,
The Knuckles,
The Lizzies,
The Locos,
The Magicians,
The Meatpackers,
The Moonrunners,
The Napoleons,
The Nickel Steaks,
The Nightriders,
The Ninth Avenue Razors,
The Orphans,
The Panzers,
The Phillies,
The Plainsmen,
The Punks,
The Queen's Bridge Mutilators,
The Real Boys,
The Red Hook Shooters,
The Roadmasters,
The Rogues,
The Romans,
The Runaways,
The Saracens,
The Saratogas,
The Savage Huns,
The Shanghai Sultans,
The Southern Cross,
The Speedwagons,
The Stevedores,
The Stilletos,
The Stonebreakers,
The Terriers,
The Turks,
The Turnbull AC's,
The Van Cortlandt Rangers,
The Warriors,
The Whispers,
The Xenophones,
The Xylophones,
The Yo-Yo's,
The Youngbloods,
The Zodiacs,
The Zulus.

lolz.

Basically what i'd love to borrow from The Warriors is the overflowing character that the gangs have. Am I overstating the film? I dunno but I love them anyway. God i'm talking crap today.

Just a little info about what i've been up to and i'm done. I've not updated since I came back from uni for a few reasons. One is that i've found it hard to get work done, but using my new found technique I think the rest will go beautifully :D I've also actually been away from my house a lot too, though. I went to Tenby and Swansea, each for two days with friends. Good times were had. I feel positive for the rest of my holidays, and I feel full of passion for my project as well :) That'll do for now, laters x

EDIT: Actually, one more thing. Look how awesome the Misfits look in this video. More character that I love. I might give one of the musicians a misfits t-shirt :D

Final Post from Uni :o

2009-06-19T16:14:00.002+01:00

Here's a quickie post to upload the last of the pictures i've created this week and say goodbye from Cornwall (to be swiftly followed by a hello from Wales). Here're the doodles.

Illustration thumbnails. May make a nice little illu for every class in the game depending on the time I allow myself... schedule is a bit sketchy, in two minds on how long to spend on concepts and painting but yeah. Barely worth uploading really. Just scribbles.

Mike Sketch, don't like it a whole lot, I tend to draw mike hit and miss. He looks a little too serious in this picture, although I knew I was doing it when I was drawing it. I'm drawing myself into a rut really, just wanted to be free and do what I wanted for a bit. Think i'm gonna give myself more freedom from now on, i'll be happier and i'm sure the project will benefit. Bit of a shitty scan.

Sketch of the emo/wicca/idunno character. Quite like this one actually, I like the character too. Shame he won't be in the film, I don't think he'd really give it much though. He's more of a moody cool character than a really energetic char that could lift the film another notch. May keep hold of him for the future though (yes, him lol. Quite girly looking I know.)

Finally a little doodle of the mascot. I like this guy. Might try to develop it further but I like the idea of animal armour. (Maybe he could have a set!!)

Apart from that I had a chat and some feedback from Andy and the Script writer etc. Was quite happy with it, what I got from it was to basically consolidate my ideas, if I want it to be set in the real world then just get rid of magic. But instead replace it with over exagerated real-life scenarios, e.g. The Poet can blow a ton of smoke from his cigarette to confuse the enemy/make him cough/whatever yaknow. I'm glad I was told this because now I can really start to focus on something. I think it may be tough making enough real life thingies interesting, but at least I know what I need to think about now. I'm really looking forward to it. Kind of running out of steam with the drawings atm :/ Keep getting distracted etc. Have a strange feeling in my stomach as well. Not really good but I reeeally have to try keep it up over the summer. I'll have plenty of time on my own at home anyway hopefully, So I should be able to churn some shit out. Alright that's enough. Goodbye Tremough for another 3 months. xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Even more stuff!

2009-06-16T17:04:00.004+01:00

Cut to the chase.

Through some doodling today I think I may have come up with my main character and more of a storyline :D So this is Lightning Mike (Junior). A name I actually stole from Andy's mouth haha. He called one of the media center guys Lightning Mike and i thought it was an awesome name and didn't forget it. So this is him, and obviously all characters need motivation to be doing whatever they're doing. So in the Nazi vein of things an idea I thought of is that the Nerd Lord guy could've taken away all of the people he didn't like/thought to be a threat to his kingdom, locked them away somewhere, and these people included the loved ones of some of the cast. Lightning Mike Senior would've been taken away for being.. too awesome or something. He's a pro boxer and who Lightning Mike Jnr. aspires to. So yeah there's a bunch of underdogs going for the Nerd Lord, and here's the main guy. Typing like a retard for some reason but i'm drawing alright so whatever. He's pretty snazzy, slick-back hair. Go-getter.

Some doodles from yesterday, trying to figure out a brawler at first then I started drawing musicians/bards. I really like the guy on the right, just the type of crazy character i'm going for. He can shred but he can also prance around like an idiot with a flute. The other one is weird lol. I can't wait to get some of these guys modeled. Mudbox trial has run out on these comps though :/ What'll I do over summer eh...

Doodles from today of the Nerd LORD. I don't want him to be reminiscent of the Nerd character at all, and I want him to be sort of shrivelled, instantly evil/corrupt looking, but sort of goofy at the same time. I really like the little thumbnail that might be difficult to notice at the bottom right of the page, with him sitting in a gigantic chair. I'll definitely try to use this if possible. I'm thinking also of a massive map of the world under a glass table in front of him... maybe with playing pieces... it could be some sort of gadget also. *still need to think about magic in more detail...* the doodles aren't amazing but look better with a splash of colour, I think this guy will come to fruition in 3d mainly. It's a start anyway.

Finally there's this. I did it because I'm in a crisis about who to include in the film, I just won't have time to make something really nice if i try to make 120398 characters like I want to. My main concerns include:

Just how many characters can I get away with? 4? 5? I'm thinking 5 good guys max. Then there's the evil guy, A guard and variations and bystanders if necessary. Oh, also bad guys they need to slice up... ugh....
I don't feel I have any 'strong' girl characters in the fray just yet, the silhouettes are okay but i've not done a sketch of a girl I like yet.
Lightning Mike is in cause he's the main guy. Mascot is in cause I need a tank. I'm attatched to the Nerd and I like the Musician. The Poet has a nice and different silhouette. Basically I like all the male chars in the frame, and that makes up 5 on it's own.
Do I need a healer? When I think about it I don't often see healers in exciting trailers but all my girls are healers and I want a girl in there for variation x_x

I guess all will be answered in time. I'd really like some people to bat ideas back and forth with though. Times like this I'd like it if us 2nd years commented on each others blogs, then I wouldn't have to bug my friends :P

I'm out. V

Stúf

2009-06-15T16:08:00.004+01:00

Been away from the blog for about a week, half due to laziness (street fighter), but the other half of the time i've been roughing out a timetable for the next year. I don't have it with me but christ is my year going to be hectic. This compounded by the fact that we just saw a bunch of Goblines (sp?) stuff in the cinema and it's all bloody amazing. Damn those frogs. It just makes me want to make something of the same calibre even more, though. I think I can, it'll just take inhuman amounts of effort. I guess all I can do is try my best and hope I can pull it out of the bag. I think i'll need some people's help, as well though. Right now I have no supporters but we'll see...

For now here are most of the doodles i've collected since my last post:

Some doodles for a proposed Musician/Bard class for the game. I like the guy with the hair over his eyes but he'd be more of a reserved character type than I think i'd like for the musician. I think he should be a little wacky, wide-mouthed sort of guy so that he can rock out on geetar but jump about like an idiot playing the flute just as easily.

I like the girl on this page, she's pretty cute. Possibility for a female version of the emo looking guy I drew a while ago. Possibly the white mage girl but I still like the old thumb I did for her a little while ago.

Some stuff mainly for the cheerleader/brawler. Can't get the balance I want between pretty/sweet and crazy strength. Pretty weak sketches I think.

Horrible design page on my businessman. The nasty figure on the left was me getting used to my phat pencil, didn't go well. The faces are kind of amusing but at this moment I'm thinking I might go with a chinese/japanese businessman character instead. He's meant to be a tank. The tank takes the hits etc, and a popular tank class in the games I play is Ninja, therefore he'd be mainly evading hits instead of being a meatshield. This kind of lends itself to the Japanese heritage yaknow. I think it'd be quite amusing too. Something I feel is really important is making sure all of the classes have a unique silhouette/characteristic. Otherwise the game would just be weird and wouldn't work.

A better design page on me old Journalist. I'm sad to say the Journalist, (the guy that started the entire project) might be leaving us and evolving into a Poet. Simply because of the horrendously cheesy phrase I thought up 'A license to Quill'. So our uptight Journalist may be becoming a smoozy charming french poet. He'd be a damage dealer, posibiliy have some sort of charm/smoke abilities up his sleeves. I'm sorta digging him.

That'll do for now. See you soon =^_^=;;;

Quickie

2009-06-08T13:55:00.004+01:00

Real quick new post (keeping up steam w00t) since I just formatted a bunch of pictures for blogging. Here they are with descriptions:

Okay I was doing some general doodling to get some ideas for character classes and this guy turned up. He looks sort of magical but he's not nerdy enough to be a nerdmage. A while ago I thought of using goths or weird kids as a way of integrating magic into the game so I might try to develop this further. I really like the design anyway. One thing I'm a little concerned about is keeping the designs of a similar style. I don't think it'll be too much of a problem though as long as I keep it in mind and continue using the same style when i'm making them in 3d. I like this guy anyway.

EDIT: EARTHCHILD! That name just came to me and I like it! Maybe they can be the enfeeblers :D

Continued doodling in the magical theme, and I came up with this girl. Thinking she could possibly be the female version of whatever class the above guy is. I'm digging the colour I used to highlight her also. The other ones are pretty crappy.

Here's some brainstorming for overall character classes. I won't go into detail, found it kinda difficult though. I'd like a nicely balanced set of classes, maybe 2 different classes to fill each role (Tank, Damage Dealer, Healer, Enfeebler, Maybe i'll explain those later.) Obviously it doesn't matter a huge amount since i'm not actually creating the game, but still I'd like to pretend that I actually would be creating the gameplay system one day. It'll lend to a very balanced cast if I do it which is also handy. This needs more thought anyway.

Continuing from the last post where I had that idea (which I think may play quite a large role in the film) about having sort of a police state, I started doing some doodles last night for the guards. My aim is to have them pretty goofy and quite clearly the understudies.. or footsoldiers if you will (or at least some of them, I could have variations in the guards, some more goofy, some mean looking guys. but this is modeling time permitting of course.) The names that i'm throwing around are either 'Enforcer', or, as a little in-joke to gamers, 'X-bots', which is a name that Microsoft fanboys sometimes get called. (Pretty gay but again if i'm basing the bad guy on bill gates then it makes sense.)

That's pretty much all for now but I have finally had some ideas for the name of the piece. I've found it sooooorta difficult coming up with a good one but it's not like i've been thinking about it alot. Had a little think last night and I started thinking "World... world... Other World? Other Land? ...Fatherland? Farther Land."

So that lame example was my train of thought, but I think Farther Land is the best idea that i've come up with so far. It kind of has the same ring as something like Neverland, reinforcing the fantasy element, and I did a little google to find that 'Fatherland' was a novel by some guy about what if the Germans won WW2. This kind of makes sense as well, since my fictional country will have been taken over, also. So i'm not sure if i'll go with it yet, but I can see it working possibly. One thing that i've noticed with names anyway, is that when you're introduced to something, you don't necessarily think into the name straight away. I can't think of any examples right now but in my experience I always just accept names for what they are and sometimes come back to them and think 'what a weird name' or 'actually that's quite interesting/cool'.

I'll leave it there. Keep it real (H).

hihi

2009-06-05T13:34:00.009+01:00

So i've been sitting on my arse for the majority of this morning, looking at things online like trailers from the recent E3 gaming event, watching some Gnomon videos and other stuff, and I figured it's time to stop looking and start doing. I do find there to be a strange balance between watching things and doing things, like i'll watch a video on HOW to model some character or whatever for hours, I've probably watched a hundred different tutorials, but very rarely do I actually sit down to do these things for myself. It feels like i'm learning/working just by watching the things, and I love to do it, but I'm not actually doing anything reeeeeeally productive by just having a gander. Anyway, I may as well present the best things that i've seen in the last few days on here, i'll try to be objective and relate it to my project as well. I'll also talk about the story of my Third year project, I think (which, by the way, i'm having trouble thinking up a witty name for. I thought 'The Cast-offs' on my last project was kind of a clever name, I'd like something at least that clever. I think i'll go the retro gaming name route as well, think Shining Force, Power Stone, something like that. Sort of cheesy but i hope the irony will be visible.)

One more thing, I think I should really try to make this blog a little more formal. I enjoy being able to write here without feeling like i'm being marked, but I think if I just keep it a little tidier and more educational...maybe? Maybe people who read this might actually be able to learn something from my mistakes and stuff. I'll give that a try. So this blog will be showing my work, of course, a place to verbalise my research for the upcoming project, and hopefully be helpful as well. I'll tag all of my posts as well if I have the time, so if anyone ever actually reads this crap then it'll be easier to navigate.

To Start: Some Research/Indulgence - E3 2009 Game Trailers.

Final Fantasy XIII

Video Games | Final Fantasy XIII | E3 09: Trailer

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

One of my favourite series, one of the only games that i will DEFINITELY be buying when it comes out, pretty amazing in game cut-scenes. All great stuff. The things that I particularly like in this trailer are:

-The colours: I really love the bit with the mecha guys and the blues, whites and reds. Every time I see it i think how great that shot is.

-The enemies: I think these are designed really beautifully, they look exotic but are designed well enough to look feasible and real. Particularly like those blue things, Sahagin maybe. Even the robo soldier guys with the glowing red eyes- they've been done a million times but still seem sort of fresh in this incarnation.

-The summon animation (pink glowing lotus flower: I have absolutely no idea how they make these things, but they look awesome.

Some things that I don't like so much:

-The references to the story/factions: I don't like to admit it but the story seems sort of contrived. It's probably always the case in the FF games, and i'll probably forget about this when i'm immersed in the actual game, but I don't like their references to the il'Cie or whatever they're called, seem a little cringe making at a push.

-Some of the character designs: Lightning (The main girl) is alright, I like the black dude, his chocobo is awesome :D, the young kid with the hair is kinda cool (maybe I think that because of the good voice acting he has?), The woman with glasses is pretty hot, but apart from those people, the rest seem sort of generic, or maybe the designs don't appeal to me. Particularly the hat guy, he's not really cool atm. Balthier and Fran plz, they're smooth as.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Video Games | Star Wars: The Old Republic | E3 09: Jedi vs Sith Cinematic

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

This is pretty fucking epic. I'll cut to the chase.

Good:

The pacing: I think this trailer is paced really nicely. Slow to start, really fast in the middle, slow at the end. I particularly love the Jedi's death transitioning into the space ship thingies, and the very end with the Sith guy walking towards the camera, he looks pretty damned evil and sort of awesome.

The humour: There's not much at all, but I love kicking the Jar Jar Binks guy in the face :D

Boba style trooper peeps: Got a thing for those troopers, they look awesome.

Bad:

Not much to say really, I don't really like the bunny eared girls and the animation is a littttttle worse than some of the trailers maybe, but this is really nit picking.

I think i'll stop analysing now and just rant a little.

Final Fantasy XIV Online

Video Games | Final Fantasy XIV Online | E3 09: Debut Trailer

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Where the hell did this come from!? A game I really wasn't expecting to see at E3, or for like at least another couple of years to even be announced, and here it is coming in 2010. I was an big time fan of FFXI, the last MMO that square released, like BIG BIG fan. Put in more hours than i'd like to admit to. Finally stopped playing when I came to university because you need so much free time to play the games, or in fact any MMO. They are ridiculously addictive, and while I think I really shouldn't get into another MMO ever (I secretly plan to play MMOs when i'm a grandad and retired) I can't help but get excited for this. It's just such a cool thing, and getting into MMOs right at the start is awesome because it's literally an entire world to explore, not just with characters in a game that aren't real, but you get to explore them with your real life friends, make friends in game and basically pretend to be wizards together (you can see why i'm doing what i am for my third year project...). But enough nerdery on that subject.

The Last Guardian

Video Games | The Last Guardian | E3 09: Debut Trailer

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

The Last Guardian... kinda cool name. BUT WTF! THEY CHANGED MY GRIFFIN! If you look back to one of my recent posts I was getting so excited about this game because of the awesome teaser with the cute but kinda realistic griffin thing AND THEY CHANGED IT. This has honestly lowered my expectations for the game. He was perfect as he was... sigh. And they didn't really change the feathers, they still look a little funky.

That'll do for the game trailer stuff. I think this may even be helping me a little, I will be creating a game trailer after all. I've also discovered these really cool, free to watch gnomon event coverage thingies. I watched the making of the Warhammer Online trailer, it was kinda cool, not super helpful but I love to get any insight into how game studios actually work, and getting to look at the bare bones of the actual models they use and stuff like that. Here's a link: http://www.gnomonschool.com/events/events.php Check them out for sure.

I also managed to watch the new Next Gen Character Modeling tutorial from the Gnomon Workshop. I've only really skimmed over it, and watched the section about normal mapping and retopologising in full, but I'm sort of let down. It looks awesome on the surface but it's pretty much just the guy modeling in Zbrush the whole way through. Not that this isn't cool, but it's not really what I was expecting. But then again maybe since this is the way he actually creates his characters that are in the games, maybe I should be focusing on this... I do need to start getting to grips with Mudbox. I'll try and fit it in when I can in the studio, as I can't even run the stupid thing on this computer :/

Right now i'm really interested in how to make things deform correctly, and I find myself more and more interested in rigging... weird. I find it really difficult to find good tutorials online, and even the gnomon website is sparse on rigging videos. I guess i'm interested in it because I've sort of come to terms with modeling now, and I think that the only thing I need to do to make awesome models now is sit in front of the screen for a billion hours and work away. I also need to learn mudbox, but rigging is something I feel i've scratched the surface of, but there are SO many techniques and cool little tricks that i'd like to learn- to make these models which I create completely water-tight, have every range of motion and expression that is necessary for them to have, and not to have to do inconvenient little tweaks during the animating and stuff. It's a big shame when the animators (Hi Andy) have to limit themselves because the rig isn't perfect. I want perfection! I'm aiming for these great rigs in my third year project. Fingers crossed.

Let's chat some shit about the old Third Year Project. (TYP?)

Third Year Project

I'll kick it off with the Illustration that I managed to do for the proposal on Wednesday.

I'm actually really happy with this looking at it now. It's not mind-blowing but I kind of like the colour scheme, I think it looks interesting enough. The only thing that i'm worried about is that it doesn't really reflect the look or mood that i'm going for with my animation at all. In a way it sort of captures the light-hearted theme that i'll be going for, but not the aesthetic style very much. I now like the idea of making the characters have very strong colour schemes though, I think i'll try that out. They all seem to have quite distinguishable silhouettes as well, and I hear that's good for games. I knocked it up in a few hours as well, so, sweet. I like getting things done so quickly, but I feel I sort of make compromises sometimes and I don't like doing that. Anyway, that's it. I'm not really happy with my actual proposal either, I'm not sure it'll sell me and the idea. Hopefully the art will help with that. I'll wait for the feedback anyway. I feel quite committed to the project though, and i'm quite passionate about it so hopefully it'll come through. Here are a few extra doodles that I managed to scan in too. Not reflective of the final look, just exploration and experimentation.

I like the hoody guy, looks moody and cool, but quirky. The other girl is from street fighter haha.

This guy is sort of troll like, maybe orcish. Gives me ideas.

Now i'm going to talk about the STORY of the project in a little more depth. This'll just be a brainstorm of sorts, along with laying down my ideas somewhere other than my head.

Story Stuff!

So here's what I have so far:

Maniacal billionaire takes over a country (-how? I'm thinking he buys it/bribes people of power to let him have it. Something along those lines.)
He turns it into a real life RPG country (-how does he do this? I think maybe he'll have employed enforcers of his RPG rule, he takes everything from the people that doesn't fit with his ideal, maybe uses propaganda, that could be cool for some art. I'm now thinking Nazis, SS, Gestapo and i'm liking it lol, is it bad to say that?) I'd like these enforcers to be sort of clumsy hired goons. Some sort of cool and humourous armour/uniform. These will be great for a generic enemy to beat on.
The majority of people are made miserable by this change, they are allowed to have no ambitions, they have no mod cons, they're turned into peasants sort of. This raises a question - is he allowing people to be adventurers? This i've not thought about...
He puts orcs and other beasties around the place -this allows me to add some humour into the world by way of making a bunch of nerdy jokes, reusing and redesigning my favourite computer game bosses and having them as in-game bosses, this ties in a previous idea i had for the project about making a game game..thing. (Anyway these may be robotic, otherwise i'm gonna just have to go for the crazy approach and have him bio-engineering or maybe he found a spell book or something. Actually I don't mind the idea of him finding a spell book, but that sort of removes from reality. I'd like it so that this really seems modern, and I don't mean futuristic, but reflective of modern day.
Anyway This also raises the question of magic. You need magic in games, I think i'd prefer to go for the man made angle, having magic coming from some sort of machine. If the billionaire is a bill gates type character he could potentially in my world have created this sort of technology.
I'm thinking the crazy guy will have dotted equipment/loot around the world. He does this to make it more like a game, and this allows my in-game characters to have a way to upgrade equipment and such.
The billionaire lives in his little castle as the ruler of the land. Maybe the people just think he wants to be king, but I want him to think of himself as the final boss of his real life game. And when, inevitably at the end of the game the adventurers approach him to return the world to the way it was, he's ready for them and there's a spectacular finale.

Here's what I think I need:

To lock down reasons why the people are unhappy. What are they made to do/become? Why do they rebel?
Am I using a single main character for the entire game, with partners who come and go?
If so they all need their own good stories and motivation.

I guess those are the main things right now, so i will attempt to make some decisions on those things in the next little while. I think i've got a few good little ideas, but there's a lot more to work out.

I think i'll leave this blog at that. I feel bad for writing so much haha. Poor readers (if you exist).

Once again, if you have any suggestions or ideas please leave me a comment, especially concerning the third year project stuff. Byeeeeeeeee

Wee Postage.

2009-06-01T18:23:00.005+01:00

Had a nice kinda free day today and managed to get on an art-roll. Drew up 3 rough concepts for characters for my Third Year Project (which I still need a title for...) and i'm pretty happy with all of them :D. Of course they'll go through a million iterations yet (hopefully) but I think i'm having a good start. Here they are:

Nerd

This class (remember, all names and everything are work in progress and will change.) i'm thinking will be like the Mage, or maybe the Calculator/Mathematician ala Final Fantasy Tactics. High Intelligence (As you can see i've added a silly stat chart), Low Strength and HP, the usual magey stuff.

Journalist

I sort of went for the Swordsman angle here, spurred on by the cheesy line 'wield your pen like a sword' <_< >_> I know. I'm so using that in my design bible though lollers. So yeah, Agile, Dextrous, I'd like to make him Charismatic also but I think he's got enough stats as it is.

Mascot

Every RPG needs a tank (well, not really but whatever). A guy to absorb the damage and keep the little mageys from harms way. I was thinking of a sportsman, and i've been drawing stupid panda related stuff for a while, which sort of filtered down into this. I like his happy/goofy look, will try to develop him further. Mascot might be a bit of a random name, it was used in Final Fantasy X-2 as the 'ultimate' class, but I never actually unlocked it. I just related it from the american football route. Anywho, like I said all WIP. (And sort of bad scans, sorry about that. I'll tidy them all up if i decide to paint 'em :])

And to round off this little post, here are some paintings I did (two in two days, an absolute record) for the Talking Dog project in a mad rush on the final day. We've actually FINISHED a rough cut of the film now :D woooooooooooooooooooo. I'll talk about it in more detail next blog or something. Here are the paintings anyway (quite rough, as instructed by andy, but they aren't too bad I don't think.)

(sneaky jim reference lolz)

DONE! lata.

Turns over new leaf

2009-05-29T01:23:00.003+01:00

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.

Listening to: Bloc Party - Ion Square (Joel's Bright Lights Don't Bore Me Yet version) <3

p.s. Please comment if you have anything to say. I promise i'll reply :D

Poor Bloggy...

2009-05-20T15:15:00.000+01:00

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

STRIP

2009-04-16T12:52:00.000+01:00

erjiweorji

2009-03-25T00:33:00.001Z

THAT is a reeaaaaaally (really) rough turnaround of the stripper, which I will start modeling asap. Since we broke up for easter i've sort of lost a little motivation, I guess I really need the working environment. But this can also be seen as taking a break, this is our break after all. Scary shit is afoot though. We still don't even know how to rig! We had a shot at it but we are afloat in a sea of ignorance. /drama. But yeah, we still have no rigged characters and are therefore unable to animate, and I worry that we will not have finished them til even as late as the end of next week. Or later. blerg, then we have all the other shit too. This is getting really messy and is quite worrying, but as with everything i'm sure we'll pull it together. It won't be no phoenix project either, not while i'm included. but yeah, strippers.

Stuff what's happened.

2009-03-17T22:04:00.000Z

First off. I lost my bag :( bawwwww. This event meant that along with my sketchbooks, I had lost the book that I was meant to be writing my first literature review on x_x

'twas a nightmare, I'm not sure if I lost it on the bus (who don't pick up their phone btw) or in the taxi I got home from Tesco, but it was an obscure firm who I didn't check the name of :/. The ordeal is pretty much over now though, I'm not too sad I lost my sketchbook, I mean, it did have a ton of my drawings in, but i'm not a very nostalgic person so I sort of see it as a chance to start again. The main problem was the book thing (How much do they charge when you lose a book?)

I was 70 something pages through the book when it happened, and had it all nicely scheduled out so that i'd read about 60 pages a day up til sunday when i'd write my essay, but instead I had a panicked look around the shops in Truro for this obscure book that nowhere had. After that I came home and searched allllllllll night long for first of all a collection of essays which was way harder than it should have been, and finally settling on illegally downloading a different book by the same author. That was Saturday night, and the deadline was Monday... that meant that I spent just over 8 hours full-on reading this book- no breaks at all, not even for food, I had to rush it down, followed by a 1 hour break and 3 hours writing the bloody thing.

It's all over now though, and i'm fairly happy with the review, although it was a little short.

Had a lovely day today continuing the modeling of Karl. He's the guy I've assigned myself to model, I couldn't wait to get from the concepting stage to the modeling one. I've actually been too hasty, in that I've not even drawn turn-arounds of all of the characters that i'm meant to.

Here's my guy for now, Karl, the cool black guy.

Turn-arounds:

Various Screen-grabs:

I'm really getting into modeling now, I feel like i'm settling in (even on topological terms) and all that i've left to do now (on a strictly modeling stage) is continue to improve my knowledge on the tools and techniques that i've already started to grasp, this, along with speeding up significantly. That AND a literal ton of other things like rigging, blendshapes, shaders, lighting, balhaerlhalh etc etc etc etc.

I'm having fun though, and that's the main thing. I quite happily sat there for pretty much 7 hours today plodding along with work. It's also a great thing that I don't have a big distraction right now either (i'm looking at you, street fighter). Today's been a great day work-wise, also the sky when I left the studio was really something special, I wish I had a camera with me at the time.

Alright alright. More updates to come, I may possibly post the rest of the turn-arounds when they're done, all i've left to draw is the stripper and the waitress possibly. mewoemow peace out.

p.s. If you're actually reading this crap, whoever you are, leave me a comment. I keep meaning to write this but always forget. I just wonder if anyone actually reads these words :o I promise i'll reply.

p.p.s. Broken Social Scene sound promising *pirates*

Wooooooooo

2009-03-08T16:47:00.000Z

So we got the voice actor's takes on the robots, and the rest of them and... eh. I don't like them. The black dude's voice is quite cool, but too 'big' sounding for the character that we'd concepted. The white guy's voice... christ, this is the worst thing about it I think. Not only does he sound NOTHING like what we'd imagined, but he's really irritating. I'm not sure whether that'll affect the humour, I don't know if you can laugh at irritating characters or what...

Regardless, we're pressing on. Luckily the guy who created the thing is allowing people to do the second sketch now, so we're doing this instead. It'll be a ton easier to do than the first sketch, but still a lot of work. Omgs we have a lot of work on nowadays. It's a bit ridiculous, we have nothing for weeks (or so it seems) and then it just falls on you. But i'm not really complaining (I am, but whatever) I did ask for more work in my head. Tbh I would rather if the work was more to do with what I'm interested in. Here's a little breakdown.

-Main Robots Project
--Alright so this is pretty interesting, aside from the fact that the voice acting kind of messed things up, we get to make interesting characters. Create them in Maya, which i've wanted to do forever, rig, texture, etc etc etc. I think this'll help us a ton in getting to know Maya and how to actually make finished articles in it. And it gives us a kick up the arse and some motivation to actually do something. I'll also get the chance to paint, too, which I always enjoy, but i'm not sure to what capacity right now. Definitely no time for finished, polished character concepts but there will be time for backgrounds and such. Still a bit up in the air right now though.

-Literature Projects
--...ergh, these are nasty. Very hard work and fairly time consuming, and apart from the fact that they're helping us work towards our dissertation, I don't think they're really teaching me anything that'll really help me in getting a job or whatever. I'm just thankful Andy's cut down on essays up until now to a minimum. It's not exactly how it seems though, I am in fact really interested in a lot of what i've read, what the authors have to say and stuff. I'd love to be able to read and write things in the way that they do, it feels really intellectual (some say pretentious) and right now I feel stupid most of the time reading these things when i'm looking up words every second and re-reading sentences time after time after time. So it's a bit of a mixed bag. I enjoy it, but it's just taking me away from what I feel I really need to do i.e. improve my art to a point where I can make a living from it. I don't feel i'm there yet. After all, I won't be writing essays for money when i've graduated.

-Editing Project
--This seems like a bit of fun, might teach us something and I dont' think it'll take me much more than a day of solid work, so I don't mind this one too much... should be interesting seeing the final results. I really appreciate the lenient deadline too. Hmm... speaking of that I think we have a week left lolzors. Maybe 2.

-Compositing Project
--To be honest I haven't looked at this one too much. I'm not sure how much work it'll be, but i'm not really interested in it.

I've been doing some more designs for the characters in the robot thing, (can't upload from home, no scanner) I think we've got them pretty much down, even with the set backs. Tomorrow we'll draw the final designs, turn arounds for modeling and get to work! I can't wait for one to be finished in maya, it's going to be so cool. Even if the voices are shit :P

I wonder what we're letting ourselves in for... how much work is this actually going to involve? Also, what am I going to be able to do myself? Will I be stuck painting the whole time? FIND OUT IN NEXT WEEKS EPISODE!

Just a quick Robots post

2009-03-02T11:24:00.001Z

Here are a few designs from our new and exciting project. We (Me, Andy, Sam, Dan and Sean) are taking on 'That's because you're a robot'. HUGE undertaking but anyway, I don't have time to chat. Here are just the designs that I've done this far.

These are my first real attempts at designing the characters, in short I believe their bodies are way too detailed, and the black guy's face is a bit boring and probably too detailed also. I do like how the tough guy has a square head and the black guy has a spherical one, seems sort of iconic. Easy to distinguish blahblah. Basically all I like here is that and the white guy's face.

This is another doodle of the white guy, with a little side crud thingy, and some more doodles. (I've run out of sketchbook btw lolz). Anyway, I sort of like the body but the face isn't so great. Also, I want the tough guy to have a disproportionately large upper body.

Some black guy portraits. These one's i'm pretty happy with. He looks smooth, has personality, and is sort of quirky and I like that. Seem to be able to make a decent angry face as well. Indicative of the modeling necessary (oh noes :///)

Yeah gotta go. Will make a large post later about this and the literature balls.

oh noes.

2009-02-08T14:04:00.000Z

First blog post of the new term. Long overdue too :/

This term has really not been going well. I'd say the last two projects (character animation and environment modeling) have probably been the worst two projects that i've completed for a long long time. Easily university, maybe even through art college as well. And it's not right, really. It's been strange. In short, the reason that I did poorly in both projects is simple; I started the character animation late, maybe a week or two before I did any real work on it, and had two days to finish the modeling project- which i did not. I think if i'd given the modeling project some time I would've actually created something really nice, but I was already too deep into the mess that was the character animation.

I kind of recall looking forward to the animation project (I guess this is why we're meant to keep our blogs updated regularly ~_~). Initially I thought we had a character modeling project, which would have been right up my alley, but then I believe it changed to animation but I still thought i'd give it a really good go. From the off it just didn't click with me. I read through the guide that George said would be great for us, and enjoyed the read. It said to keyframe the poses so I went ahead and did this, albeit very slowly. Actually, not just very slowly. VERY VERY slowly :/ I remember spending practically an entire day on the first pose. I guess I wasn't in the right state of mind. I know I take forever on everything, but not this long.. surely... I don't want to blame it on being a 'perfectionist' either. I don't really like calling myself that because it implies perfection, which I haven't achieved (...yet? lolz?) but I guess it's what I am.

I'm getting closer and closer to completely ruling out actual animation altogether and while I don't want to, I didn't really get any other signs from this project other than it's not for me. I mean i've never enjoyed the process of animation. Thinking back to the Library Project I absolutely hated working in flash, and even as early as those tiny box men we did at the very start of the course. I've never loved it. The only difference with the flash project, was that I got a sense of accomplishment at the end of it when I had a sorta-nice piece of finished animation. Here I was left with shoddy, unfinished animation and a bitter taste. (Melodrama anyone? :P)

I feel like I COULD animate. I feel like I could get to terms with the timing, (even in this abomination there was tiny flickers where I made a good piece of animation, and it is really rewarding) but i'm in a crap situation, which is only down to what I enjoy really, and I don't think i'll be changing. I mean I hated inbetweening in flash, all those 'tiny little stupid drawings' or whatever I called them after i'd finished. And maya promises to remove the need of us making those. Great! But not when you're left with an absolute mine-field of key frames and a graph editor that looks like (i'm leaving this incomplete to save my integrity :P). Crap, basically, and sooo hard for me to wrap my head around. You move one little thing and the whole shambles collapses. This is where I tripped up. I'd come to uni for the day (and it's not like I'm not there often, I'm practically always there til 4-5+ every day) make a few new poses, come up with a problem which was just so tedious that I cowered and procrastinated for the next few hours. It's horrible and feels like I may be losing the motivation that I've maintained since the end of last year, but I don't think that's it. Most days i'd relished the chance to put down the mouse and start a new drawing challenge with Justin and the others.

Anyway, getting to the point I feel like there is only one way out of this mess, and one reason that could be making me feel like this. And that is that I was possibly thrown into the deep end just a little too fast. I'm not sure whether I learnt anything from this project, but I think if I had just been able to manage my keyframes more efficiently, if i'd had the knowledge to be able to keep everything under CONTROOOOL. Maybe I wouldn't run into these brick walls and I could be happier. Actually, what the fuck am I talking about? This isn't the end of anything, this was my FIRST time animating a human, of course i'm not going to be any good. I literally just realised that lol. I'm stupid. Maybe I just learned something.

One thing I do know for sure, at least for now is that I love drawing and painting far more than I do animating. Forget ruling it out forever, but I am really crossing my fingers and hoping that we'll get some tasty projects next, that I can really sink my teeth into. I'm sad that I've just done terribly in two projects that will count towards my final degree and I definitely need to make up for it.

Here's my shoddy 'finished'-lol animation.

God yeah, that's another thing- Couldn't even get the bastard 'smash' sound to work after he's thrown the test tubes! The playblast would only play either the lip sync or the smash.. gah.

From the modeling project, here's the reference that I used:

And my piece-o'-crap. (Which I actually enjoyed making o_O just wish I could've finished it :()

PEACE OUT BROTHAS AND SISTAS.

p.s. Dolphin Olympics 2 is win ^_^

Oh and OMG I CAN'T WAIT FOR STREET FIGHTER IV! Only 12 days left! Seriously. Look at this. Drool. THIS is what makes me want to animate. Srs. srs.

Term One Recap and Crap Talkings

2008-12-19T21:26:00.000Z

Alright, lets do this. I tend to go through phases. Only in my head, where I start thinking about posting a blog and think of all the stuff I could write, but then I come online and the moment has passed and I can't be arsed. This seems to happen more and more with things I want to do but which also require a little effort. Luckily I've had a lot of free time online today and have found myself in the mood to do a blog post.

Anyway stop talking bollocks. First lets recap the term, starting where I left off.

So I finished my forth character of the bunch and two background concepts, as I said in my last post, and on top of that I completed pretty much everything else that I said I needed to do, disregarding baddies (I settled for one little sketch that i'd done, and noone seemed to mind. Apart from Justin? He wanted more baddies lol.). My Powerpoint was fairly standard, although I can never help but make everything just how I like it. I was really happy with my design bible when it was finished and all printed up. Forgiving some very minor printing errors and the fact I needed the pages stuck together, it looked pretty sharp and the effort that i'd put in paid off. I don't mind a nice bit of graphic design. Although my stuff is relatively basic, it interests me somewhat. Also, during this process I learnt more about photoshop brushes and making your own, which was cool. Onto pitches.

I thought my initial pitch with Andy was alright, but that's probably because he's too nice to us :P so I was vaguely confident about the real pitch, but I came away from it kind of disappointed. I was happy that it was all over, but it left a slightly unpleasant taste in my mouth. I felt my delivery was sort of cold, a little too nervous and a bit of a mess, but when I got the written feedback from Andy and Sarah?? Terrible memory sorry, It really helped me figure some things out and I think my next pitch will be a million times better for it.

The BBC lady thought my idea was too complicated for what it was, and after a second of disagreement after being told this, it all made sense and I realised that all that crap about the war didn't need to be contained in my pitch at all. What i should have done was talk solely about the kids, their surroundings, and be really passionate about the whole thing. Not go off on some tangent about stuff that wouldn't even have been in the show like the big baddy.

I believe this confusion on my part was because I had originally planned what is now the last episode (where they kill the 'bots and everyone's shocked and they're whisked away to be cadets or whatever) to originally be the first episode, and the rest of the series being their adventures outside the cube. If you follow. I'm not proof reading this crap.

Anyway, that's enough about the personal project. In summary: It was fun, I really enjoyed the process and being given loads of time to do whatever I wanted with. I'm fond of some of my characters and through this task I think I have a better idea of time management, improved skillz and I think my future pitches will benefit greatly.

Just realised this is gonna be a looooooooooong post. Noone will read this :P

EXETER PR0JECT!

This project got a little lost in the grand scheme of things as far as my participation goes, sadly. I really would've liked to have had more of a hand in things, and it's not like I didn't offer myself up for as many parts as I thought I could handle. I said i'd be part of the 3D team and the background design team, but noone ever approached me after the initial meeting about anything background related. I was all up for it at the start, but i'm not going to lie because i'm sure if I had talked to Alex, Mike or anyone else on the team I'm sure I could've got myself a part in it, but that's such a hard thing to do when you already have your hands full with a personal project.

The only thing that I got given in the end was the clock tower in 3D. No pictures because of those nobs in the media store who took my hard drive off me (Wtf is the point of a hard drive you can only keep in one place???? grr) This was way harder than I expected, but I fumbled my way through it and after plenty of pain I finally got it done. I really think it helped improve my knowledge of maya quite substantially. I'm glad I did it. Texturing too. While being really gay, it helped me learn a bit.

That's all the term stuff covered I believe, now onto something i've been doing in my spare time. This guy!

Probably doesn't look much, but a considerable amount of effort has gone into him. This is actually his second incarnation, I pretty much completely did his head then decided it was all wrong, so i've started again and this is where I am. I'm having fun making him, but it's taking me a long, long time.

I'm becoming more and more aware that in industry, maya's used very little ...if at all in making Hi-poly models. I'm gonna continue to make this guy in Maya, just so that I can learn more skills and stuff, but I really want to start getting to terms with Zbrush and a workflow which will enable me to create models just like companies would make when creating a game. (Here's an amazing link where a pro character artist has sculpted an awesome hi-poly model in zbrush and converted it to a low poly game character. I feel this is ultimately what I should be progressing towards, although to be honest i'm not completely sure this is how it's done, I still have a slightly naive outlook on the business crud.)

Blerg anyway. I can't really think of anything else work wise, and this is a huge post so i'll start wrapping up.

I've had a few ideas for little projects in the future, and i'll post em here in case I forget one day. Firstly i've thought of a fun idea for a hack n' slash game, (which would never work as a real game due to copyright issues, but awesome to work on I think) it'd be sort of a parody of every famous computer game out there. The enemies and bosses would be characters from existing computer games, i'd think up some ridiculous plot and completely construe what the characters are actually like. Lots of in-jokes and sillyness, but for one I think it'd be awesome fun redesigning and ruining the classic and current computer game characters, and fits perfectly into a project on the work side of things. I could make concepts and models, it'd be great or something. Hmm.. I did have more ideas but thinking of them again they aren't up to much. I guess that's my only idea for now.

The very last thing I want to talk about (yay!) is what I want to learn. Sam Pascizzle recently bought into an online Gnomon event, and was ridiculously kind enough to lend me his account to get in on the goods too. Thanks again! Burying myself in these videos has sent me a bit nuts and I can't stop thinking of what I want to, and what I NEED to learn if I want to make a living for myself doing things I love. Of late I haven't been sketching as much as I was at the start of the term. It's sad but my job just took all my free time away from me, and what little time I had I spent relaxing. Hopefully next term i'll have enough money so that I don't have to work and can get back to really learning as hard as I can.

Things I want:

---To have a strong knowledge of anatomy. Incredibly important. I've found after picking up the pencil again, I remember that I feel like I don't know the body well enough to draw what I want to freely. I can't let myself just draw characters most of the time because I just get caught up on the figure, and I can't let myself just draw shoddy shapes. I want a really strong understanding of the figure which will allow me to really get into just drawing the characters without having to worry about the technicalities. I'd love to have someone teach me about this, I find it very difficult to learn by myself. My plan right now is to draw as much as I can over Christmas, and if i'm still as motivated when I get back to uni i'll go to the library and see if they have any good books which will help me out.

---To learn the ins and outs of Maya, and to be able to create models of all levels of detail. I think I just need to make more models. But do I spend forever creating highly detailed things in Maya or should I just do the base models in Maya and send them to Zbrush and push my skills in that? These questions probably won't ever get answered.

There're more but they aren't as important. Basically these are the two things in my work life right now. 3D and 2D. Digital 2D too but I understand that somewhat, and I know the only thing I can do to progress there is to do more and more paintings. But those two puzzles are what's bugging me right now. Anatomy and 3D stuff in general. And splitting my time up between them is hard. Everything's hard. I'm worried about how little time we have left until we're thrown out into the business world, and I really hope that what's left of university will give me the time and the oppurtunity to further my skills to a place which will allow me to go into work where I want to work! I want to be a concept artist/character artist/character modeler but i've a long long way to go. WORKMOREWORKMOREWORKMOREDRAWWWWWWWWWWW

definitely been writing for too long. I had 62% for this term by the way. I think that's about right. I don't agree that the exeter project was made for advanced maya stuff though.

Helloo.

2008-11-27T21:09:00.000Z

Blog's a little slow, eh? Think this'll be simply a text post for now. Can't be arsed with pictures, maybe tomorrow. Err so what's happening. Design for Animation's coming along. Speedily finished two backgrounds to a reasonable standard, Four characters are finished, although as usual I don't like the last one i painted. Wow i really haven't updated this for a while. Things left to do are aplenty; Draw several baddies, One more background, a front cover, make Design Bible, er.. Plots, etc etc... Make a powerpoint. /Cry. I'll get it done though, or at least, most of it.

Other thing is the Exeter thing........ I think i'll update this tomorrow rofls, otherwise it'll just be a sub-standard post. BRING ON CHRISTMAS!

woo

2008-11-12T14:15:00.001Z

Finished my first/third guy :D I've hated him for so long, but weirdly... I almost like him now. It literally happened in the last 10 minutes when I was finishing the painting/playing with the colour levels and saturation. Strange. I think it's cause he just helped me realise the importance of playing about with the image when you're done with it. Helps give the image much more impact. I've heard people saying that but doing it yourself really changes things. Once again he looks pretty different to the other two characters in my opinion, but I think that may be indicative of the things that i'm learning as i continue on with this project. The first guy I finished took me forever, I was getting too bogged down in the details and only realised half way through. The next character is much less detailed but more dynamic. I think I might need to do some colour correction though. And comparing them all together right now makes me wonder whether I went overboard with the colour stuff on my latest finished character... lol. Oh well, I'm learning and that's what's important. How long have I been doing these? Seems like forever, I don't even want to know...

Really need to nail my story and character bios asap. I feel kind of bad that I'm creating these characters with little in mind but aesthetics. I don't think that's the way to go about it. Thinking about it, I have a problem where I try not to get myself into trouble by thinking of character traits and personalities too early on, as to not end up having to omit them because i'm not good enough to convey the emotions properly when it comes to the actual painting. I just start sketching with a vague idea in mind and see what I come up with, then plan around that... Totally the wrong thing to do I'm pretty sure. I'll need to set this straight at some point. I find it reaaaaaally difficult conveying subtle character nuances, or even really obvious ones sometimes. I hope with experience i'll have a better handle over emotion and stuff like that, so I can have a strong idea in mind and blast it out straight away.

Think that's all I have to blab on about right now... Although I do have some sketches. Lemme scan em.

There's a potential fourth character and a potential bad guy. Both very simple sketches. I'm having trouble deciding what to do for my fourth char... I'm gonna have to think about it for a while I think. Do I go for a crazy character? Silent and brooding? Tough guy? bleh.

Anyway, here's my finished third guy, who is... I think.. The main character in the group, although he doesn't deserve to be because he's given me so much hassle :P.

p.s. I'm not ill anymore :D :D

hi again

2008-11-05T15:36:00.000Z

stuff that's happening: I'm getting on with my Design for Animation project reasonably well, I think. The first character took me foreverish to paint, but I'm happy with him, then when making my first steps on the second (but original) character, I got really stuck and didn't like how he looked. So I sketched up a third character, a girl this time, and somehow i was pretty happy with it straight from the off, and i did it sooo fast compared to usual. I can't remember where but I think I did some of it on the bus? I dunno, terrible memory. Anyway, I scanned her in and surprisingly it carried on in exactly the same fashion. I flew through it and finished her in just two days I believe. Shockingly quick. I think i may be loosening up just a little. I still won't leave something that i'm unhappy with or looks messy, but I'm learning to paint in less detail, because when you're zoomed in to 700% the detail is not only lost when you zoom out, but most of the time doesn't even look very good. Anywho. I've restarted the original guy today and am finally making some headway. I've managed to get a face from scratch that I'm pretty happy with, and the body's all drawn out ready for me. Just have to whip that up, but after a few hours painting today i'm kind of burnt out cause i'm REALLY FUCKING ILL. Christ it's annoying. hopefully it'll leave me alone sooner rather than later, and I can continue working in peace. Oh, also I'm scared my characters are looking too anime-y. That's not cool, I want this to be fresh...

Maya's going alright, I feel comfortable with the interface but I need to get my head around the theory (or whatever you call it) eg, correct edge loops, topology, workflow, etc. When I get that all that'll be left to do is modelmodelmodel until I'm speedier and able to make tasty characters. I'm kind of anxious to get more into the 3D stuff, but as the design for animation project deadline is looming, all of my efforts are going towards that at the minute.

Something i've noticed is that I always do things by the book... and I don't mean being honest but rather I never try to invent something new. Of course I try my best to make exciting characters with interesting clothes and stuff, but I get the feeling that it's all been done before. Most of the time I like my work, but I want to be original. I find my stuff almost derivitive sometimes. And that doesn't please me. I think next time I get the chance i'm going to go completely crazy and make the most abstract and original thing that I can think of... Maybe. It'll be a difficult hurdle to jump.

I like blogging. My head hurts. Beardman is cool. Out. No wait, here are my pix:

(WIP)

Later.

moar

2008-10-21T10:19:00.001+01:00

Took me longer to re-blog than I expected. Anyway, I have lots to say.

I want to talk about games. Recently, the Tokyo Games Show has been blowing me away with trailers with amazing CG scenes. The few that stand out to me are Starcraft II, Diablo III, Bayonetta, Prince of Persia and Dead Space. I'll talk about em a bit.

Starcraft II - I'm in love with the cinematic trailer for this game. Everything is practically perfect; the model, the attention to detail, the animation, the atmosphere, drama, etc, etc, etc. I've watched this a ton of times and it still amazes me. Here it is in Standard Definition but do yourself a favour and watch in HD.

Diablo III - Another Blizzard title, and surprisingly I've never been a Blizzard fan, even their most recent games like WoW, but I'm loving their art direction right now. (Maybe this is why I don't see anything wrong with how this game looks; a lot of hardcore fans of the second in the series hate how the new game looks, due to it not being as dark as the second.) The thing that I love the most about this game at this point is the concept art. There's a huge gallery on their official website www.blizzard.com/diablo3/ and practically every piece is brillilant. There's a mix of different artists and styles too which is really interesting. Here's one of my favourites, but check them all out.

Bayonetta - Now this is a really interesting new game. It first caught my attention with it's awesome CG trailer which I absolutely loved, but the CG looked so good that when it came to showing a little of the actual gameplay I felt let down. But I went to it's official website - http://www.sega.com/platinumgames/bayonetta/EnglishUK/index2.html and it kind of restored my faith in the game. It turns out that it's created by the same guy that made the Devil May Cry and Viewtiful Joe series'. Two games which I love and not only that, he talks about
“Pushing 3D Action to a New Dimension”. And I know everyone says that they'll be doing things differently and breaking the mould, and even though the gameplay in the trailer looks like every other action game ever made, I still kind of have faith. I think maybe i'm just being naive, but whatever, it's exciting. Disregarding the game itself, when looked at from a purely aesthetical stand-point, the CG in the trailer is brilliance anyway. I especially love the crotch-pan :D. Here it is.

Prince of Persia: This game has looked amazing all throughout development. From the super stylish concept art:

To the most recent trailer, which I believe is completely made of in-game footage, and still looks amazing. The gameplay looks really interesting, where you basically control two characters and I love the change in direction they're taking with the series. Everything looks brilliant. Here's the trailer.

Finally; Dead Space: This game only very recently came to my attention, and it looks amazing (i've so overused that word in this post). A Survival horror game, which again, i'm not really a big fan of, but the art direction is so up my alley that I can't help but adore it. Who knows if i'll ever play it because it looks so god damned scary, (They really nailed the atmosphere, and they have some sort of fear-gauge so the closer you get to enemies, the more tense the music gets) but the trailers really won me over.

His glowing spine shows his health! Genius

---

Err okay that took longer than expected. Guess i'll leave it there for now. Will probably update when i've finished my first character concept. Almost there, time for work :)

Oh yeah, I also want to talk about the bus...

chopchopchop

2008-10-12T15:57:00.000+01:00

Hello again! Getting straight down to business, the first week of ten in this term is over, (Ten isn't nearly enough) and we've three new projects on the go.

The first is the Design for Animation thing, and I think I've concreted my idea. Originally it was between two;
1. A computer game with a sort of steam punk style, where for some reason a massive chunk of history was missing, maybe 500 years or something, and noone realised. Say like a black hole happened or something to that effect that erased an amount of time, so everyone wore historical looking clothes and stuff but there was still a lot of technology around for everyone to use. And you'd travel the world, so it'd be quite a rich environment with all the different cultures and stuff I think.
2. A cartoon series (Undecided on the target audience...) that evolved from a sketch i did of a scrawny kid wearing one piece of oversized futuristic armour. The armour he was wearing was an old piece of his fathers, who was some sort of armour-wearing guy, like in the armed forces of the future. The piece was unused, maybe hanging around in their garage so the kid takes it for himself. A few of the boy's friends do the same thing, each of them with different pieces of old equipment that has been left around, and the story grows from there.

Anyway, I decided to go with the second option, not only because in the game there would be soooo many plotholes due to my limited knowledge of history and blahblah, but I also get bad vibes from it, I think it'd turn out kind of soulless, whereas i think the series has a ton of potential and loads of areas to explore, and I feel quite passionate about the ideas I have for it. I have tons of ideas floating for this project but I think i'll label them in a later post, or this one with be mega-gigantic.

The second project is the Sound Design thing. At first I was slightly skeptical but it's very clear that we all need to work on our sound design, and while we're still doing solo/small group projects and have to make our own sound, I think it's easily justifiable that we do this project. As far as ideas go, I'm thinking of a grimey, rusted submarine somewhere, where a burly, jaded war veteran kinda guy sits smoking a cigarette, drinking strong alcohol(?), maybe listening to the radio (although i need to be careful with songs/lyrics so it doesn't get too literal) just wishing away the hours. There's been no action in weeks or months, when the siren goes off and he bolts out of his lair and up the metal ladder to...somewhere. That'd be where it ends, probably after a dramatic silence with only the siren. Maybe he's warning the captain, or waking his friends, or something, I dunno.

The third 'project' is the Animated Exeter/Advanced Maya stuff. I'm kind of irked that this is being pushed on us, it was said to have been optional at first and it all seems a bit messy at the moment. I still don't know enough about Maya to be making things that I'd be proud to show, especially to an animation festival of all places (are the idents even going to be made in Maya??).
It seems we've all been put into groups to come up with ideas and pre-production stuff in the time that I anticipated to be focusing on Maya. Even if we (The advanced Maya people) had to make the idents in Maya, I'd be much happier if Georg trained us up while the people who wanted to do the pre-production thought up the ideas for the stuff. I'd be happier still if we didn't have to worry about making things with minimal skill and just concentrated on improving ourselves on that one afternoon per week that is meant to be dedicated to it. All that said, though, I'm very excited that we have Georg to tutor us now, he seems to be knowledgeable in everything that I want to learn and a very nice person to learn from, and even with the way it's all set out I'm sure that I'll learn a good bit. Fingers crossed anyway. If not i'll have to bug Georg and fit as much learning of Maya into my free time as I can.

Now i'm just going to ramble about stuff of little importance, so continue reading only if you have absolutely nothing of interest to do.
I've had myself a job in Falmouth for the last two weeks, and it's haaaarrrrrrrd. I work in the kitchen of a pub/restaurant washing dishes, running for the chefs and doing all the crappy jobs and it's very tiring, especially with early starts the next day. I still feel as if i've not settled down yet here in falmouth, what with my job and only being one week into the course, It's all a little hectic and i'm yet to decide if I can take it all on and have the spare time I feel that's necessary to learn, party and be happy. We will see.
As far as art goes I've been drawing/painting more over these last few months than I probably ever have, and while i'm far from prolific, I know I put a lot of effort into it. I feel as if i'm learning even when I'm just looking at art, or thinking about it. I'm still learning anatomy and my eye is always at work when I look at people. Same with colour, trying to learn to paint in photoshop has opened up a whole new world of struggle, and i'm always observing how light lands on things. Films are great for this. Am I right to think this way? I've had the same sketchbook since last term and while I feel that i'm putting a lot into my art it's not nearing completion yet. I like how it's going, though. Again, time will tell. I need more of a routine to emerge in my life so I can properly dedicate time to painting/modeling(maybe?) my arse off and getting somewhere with my art.
Anyway, I actually completed my first digital illustration (If you can call it that) this summer, and i'm still reasonably happy with it. I think i'll end this post with him. I've got much more to say but this post is already too long. I like blogging so expect more soon!

Here you go:
Click for bigger version.

Note to self: Remember Straw Dogs for next post.

Group Project Logs

2008-06-04T11:44:00.000+01:00

Here's a log of which roles I played in the various different group projects we've been assigned throughout the first year

Pixelation Project
I believe this was the first group project we had to do, although it was a minor one. I didn't actually feature in the video, or really play a big part, but there was a lot of us in the group and the entire thing was created in one day. My part in this video was some work with the camera, taking the stills, positioning and moving props around and small bits and pieces like that. I believe James and Sean edited it and added the titles etc afterwards.
Role: Camera work, Bits and Bobs.

Exhibition Project
In this project Sean and I decided to create an exhibition for the work of the Animator Jan Svankmajer. We came together on numerous occasions to discuss thoughts and ideas for the project, and spent a few days working on the plan for the exhibition and the pieces that we would show in it. We worked up a final booklet to showcase the exhibition, which I created in photoshop while Sean helped make decisions about the look of it. Deciding on the writing inside the booklet was very much a joint process.
Role: Ideas/Brainstorming with Sean, Creating look of Booklet in Photoshop, Co-writing Booklet with Sean.

Student Project
I was mainly in the Pre-production team for this project. I initially went through the script with the rest of the team and brainstormed ideas for the characters we would create from it. We then went away and each drew a few rough pages of ideas and a final look for the characters we were assigned to by the project manager, Holly. In my case this was the Ant character. When all the characters were designed, most of the team went away to storyboard, while I had the job of creating backgrounds for most of the animations. I created 5 in all and handed them over to the team to animate.
Role: Pre-production (Brainstorming/Ideas, Character Design), Background Design in Photoshop.

Alien Background

Beetle Background

Dolphin Background

Ant Background

Rhino Background

Library Project
I moved onto this project straight after completing the backgrounds for the Student Project, and was assigned the opening scene of the animation. My job was to Animate the character over the top of the rough render of the 3D scenes, which I completed yesterday :D
Role: 2D Animator, Scene One.

Original Video - More videos at TinyPic
(Ignore the rough background and crappy quality)

stuff

2008-06-03T11:10:00.000+01:00

Time for an update, I think. So yesterday was the third(?) day of intense flash animation for me and... I didn't like it. I was sick of flash already and found myself getting increasingly frustrated with it, not necessarily for a certain reason but I was in a bad mood with it. I kept going though, and I'm actually very pleased with the results. I did the scene where the guy is swallowed by the book, and even though I had to deal with nasty camera angles/movements and perspective, I did it and looking at it today i like it. I think that's the thing with flash and other 2D animating stuff, you fiddle around drawing a million drawings and nudge them along in tiny incriments, clearly punishing yourself horribly because you hate yourself or something, then in the end you get a lovely moving thing.

Yeah so I hated it yesterday, I wondered why I was doing this when I would much rather be keyframing some model that was already made and didn't need me to draw out every single frame. And I'm not sure whether it's the rewarding feeling I got from looking at the scene this morning, or the fact i'm listening to my favourite band whilst doing today's scene, or maybe because I haven't done anything complicated today, but by some freak brain accident I've actually been enjoying it and am considering doing some animating in my own time??!??? It feels therapeutic, helps forget my hangover.

I just tried to make a movie of my last scene but I'm not sure how, so I won't upload it, but here's a crappy mockup of how the final thing will look to make my blog more beautiful:

Doneee... on this project

2008-05-28T11:36:00.000+01:00

Here are the final two backgrounds :D. Miraculously the beetle one only took me a few hours and is one of my favourite backgrounds. Nice and simple and fun to draw. The Alien background may look familiar... that's because I completely cheated, flipped the Ant background, erased some trees and fixed it up a bit and called it anew :P I really had to get onto the Library project, though, (which i'm starting today) so it's allowed.

In this Library project, my job is flash animating... which even though I hate flash I don't really mind, i'm looking forward to making some good animations, although maybe when I actually start i'll become slightly less enthusiastic. Anyway, time to start flashing. The painting was fun, now the hard work begins.

updateupdate

2008-05-22T17:16:00.001+01:00

k just 'finished' the Rhino BG a few hours ago:

I'm not really happy with how it turned out to be honest. I was really happy with it in the rough stages, and I think it was possibly stronger than it is now at that point. I threw quite a few snazzy textures and crap on the painting, initially to add the grit and dirt to the roads and walls, but I think in the end they were there more to cover up my poor painting than to directly add to the painting itself. And after three completely covers, playing around with photoshop I finally realised that I never had Opacity set to pen pressure... which would have made things a ton easier for me. Stupid. I feel quite worn out right now, so i've allowed myself a break for an hour or two. Can't decide whether to play in photoshop or maya, but i'm doing something for fun rather than for the project. I think i'll start my next (and possibly last? or second to last) painting in the morning. That's the dung beetle one, which is looking quite simple to complete; just a little patch of dirt and a background. Hopefully it'll be as easy as it looks. Andy's been doing a few of the backgrounds since he's animating some of the characters in flash, and while this eases the load for me, it's probably not the best idea for unity of style.

I've been looking at a lot of amazing paintings by digital and traditional artists today and i'm not sure whether they inspire or discourage me. I guess a bit of both, I definitely feel an urge to improve and while i'm not super optimistic at the moment I think i'm on the right tracks right now. Still working hard in class and when I get home I just look up more and more paintings and 3D stuff. Both mediums compliment each other really well too I think. It feels like 3D modeling is a lot more technical than painting, less emphasis on your artistic ability and more your mind for space. Or something like that. So when I'm not feeling particularly creative I can work with the mechanics of the stuff, and vice versa. It's hard to fit everything in but i'm sure that's a good thing, it means I won't be stopping for a while.

Also i'm quite into this blogging thing too, i'm quite a loudmouth really.

p.s. Bugger off Han :P

Wooo

2008-05-20T14:54:00.000+01:00

Everything's going well with the new project; I've finished two of the eight? (*gulp*) backgrounds, and my third is coming along well, as of the last few minutes. I've been free to get on with my paintings and have been putting alot of time into them, most nights i'm in til past 6, but the atmosphere is really nice and I haven't really been feeling frustrated at all. The Dolphin background caused me a little annoyance with it's colour scheme and architectural details (it's really annoying drawing straight/curved lines all the time) but i managed to finish it, and while i'm not entirely pleased with the results, it'll do for the time being. Here are my backgrounds so far, Ant, Dolphin (completed apart from the Water. At present i'm unsure whether or not it will be animated. I do have a rough sketch of the water which looks much nicer than the plain blue, but I'm not going to waste my time finalising it if it'll just be painted over in the end anyway) and Rhino (rough) respectively. Click for larger images:

My favourite so far is the Ant, closely followed by the Rhino which might beat out the Ant if I do it well enough. The Dolphin painting doesn't sit well with me, maybe because it wasn't a lot of fun to paint all of those steps and poles. The colour scheme's a bit bright for me too, but really it had to be since it's an aquarium type place. I think it'll be okay as the actual background when it all comes together though, i'm not worried.

I think i'm doing reasonably well on time, I was never going to finish one per day like i'd have liked to, but that's quite unreasonable to ask of myself considering I usually take forever. I am learning to let myself loosen up a little though, which helps quite a bit. I'm getting each painting completely in about 2.5 days at the minute, which will do for me. I'm not sure what's going to happen next week when I'm meant to switch to the Library project and I inevitably haven't finished all of the backgrounds, but i'll cross that bridge when I come to it. At the minute i'm happy just to plod along having fun in photoshop :D I don't think i've learnt a lot more than I knew as far as photoshop goes before I started the project, but the practice helps a lot, and I think i'm wising up my colour choices and challenging my eye for composition. All in all i'm very much enjoying this project so far :)

new haps

2008-05-14T18:36:00.000+01:00

Another week, another project. With the new setup (4 teams on 4 projects and mixing and matching) it's a bit strange but we've just finished the ideas phase and it's going okay. When we work in teams like this it's a little difficult fitting everyones ideas and expectations together, but as long as you come to a compromise it's not so bad. I'm a bit of a control freak so it's a little difficult for me. I'd like to be able to do everything myself but obviously I can't, I just have to have faith in the others lol.

I've given myself the hefty task of doing the backgrounds for the student project. This'll definitely keep me busy and surely improve my photoshop skills which is nice. Especially situations like this where you won't always be doing something which you want to be doing. In this case i'm skipping storyboarding for background design and this suits me fine. My only worry is taking forever on these things which is a very likely outcome, but i'm aware of my time restrictions and in one day i've managed to rough out the first background and have started polishing it already, which is probably a record for me. Maybe i'll upload some pictures in a few days.

Apart from the project, for the past week or two i've really been trying to study human anatomy. I've got the basic landmarks on the front of a human down and it's quite satisfying. It's something i've wanted to learn for probably about 2 years now, something which I think is extremely important if I want to improve as an artist, and i'm happy to have started. Up until now it's just seemed a bit daunting but when I was bored the other day I started reading a book by Andrew Loomis that I downloaded a while ago. It's a very good book and inspired me to finally start learning seriously. The book's out of print or something, so it's free and legal to download and distribute, and i've uploaded it incase anyone else would like to have a read. I'd highly reccomend it. Anyway, I think i should be able to keep up this learning and hopefully soon enough i should be able to draw completely accurate people :D Download down there.

ANDREW LOOMIS FIGURE DRAWING PDF

The Flour Sack

2008-04-30T19:49:00.001+01:00

Just a quick post about my progress with the flour sack. This is HARD WORK. I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way, in fact I think i'm enjoying it, but it's almost 8 o'clock and i've been in the studio all week and i'm about half way done. It's going well though, I feel like the sack has some character, even though he's only walked a few steps at the minute. The technical side of it is a bit messy; i'm sure i'm doing quite a few things wrong (or at least going about doing them the hard way, my graph editor is hilariously messy) but these are mistakes i'll just have to make until I learn how to do them the right way. I'm happy with the amount that i'm learning at the minute, and i'm just about managing to pull the animation off the way I want to. I'm feeling very motivated, not just in this task but in general and it's lasted for a week or so already and still going, rather than the occasional flicker. I'm trying to do and learn as much as I can, I know I need to be like this to get a good job and all that crap. Hopefully it'll last. Anyway, Here's the sack so far:

UPDATE 01/05/08: Spent today getting as much done as possible after the storyboard session (which I actually enjoyed :o) and i've come a little way. Today was the most frustrating day for me so far, but only because of a short period of time where I completely messed up my character's ears in the section I was working on. They completely spazzed out and I couldn't figure out why, which led me to restart from a previous save, losing a short part of my work. I don't really mind, it's probably better off for losing it. Now my character is ready to jump, but i'm undecided which route to choose. Either the sack will puff up his chest and bravely jump off, or close his non-present eyes tight and throw himself off the edge. The first option is quite a change in the personality of the character, which is why i'm hesitant to choose it, but to be frank it's probably easier and I only have one day left. The second is more in-keeping with the sack's cowardly character but i've had some problems with the ears and they'd have to be used quite a lot showing the 'scrunched up' reluctancy of him. Since I only have one more day to complete him i'll probably choose the first option and deal with the inconsistencies. He is only a sack after all. They can't be that intelligent.

UPDATE 2/05/08: Done :D It's not bad either, I decided to go with the superman off the edge and it looks okay. The anticipation is a little dodgy (I couldn't get a really big squish before the jump without it looking funny) but I put that down to the rig being poor/me being poor at controlling the rig properly. Same with the ears, I would've liked to have animated them a little more or a little better, but I just found the ears in particular so difficult. Two out of the three rings around the ears seemed to have very little control over the ear itself, and the other seemed a little irrational. Due to this I kept the ear movements down to a minimum but what I have is okay. Surprisingly I haven't really felt forced to complete this animation. There have been times (but only very few) where I felt frustrated with it, but apart from that it's been reasonably pleasant, and i've just got on with it at my own pace. I still have time which I could use to tinker around with it, but I think i'll call it a day and wait for my next project :) Here's the finished animation:

Bouncing Balls!

2008-04-30T18:39:00.000+01:00

So we finally got around to delving further into Maya and it turned out to be quite difficult indeed. We were given the task to create 3 animated balls; a football, a bowling ball and a pingpong ball.

The first ball I created -after quite a few hours fiddling in maya- pleased me at first, but after having a few other peoples opinions and coming back to it after a little while away from the computer, it seemed overly bouncy and unrealistic. You can see this version below.

I then proceeded to create the exact opposite, an underly bouncy football.

It was difficult finding a mid-ground, especially since I was completely new to the graph editor and the entire animating side of Maya. On top of the technical difficulties there was the question of how much stretch and squash to put in -how much realism I wanted- something I hadn't realised before. Usually you just draw the ball a few times and that's it; the way you can tweak things right until the end in maya was a new experience. The day after I created these two animations, we had a talk with Peter Bailey. Aside from being a really nice guy, his visit was handy because watching him animating in maya taught me a few things, specifically how you control handles in the graph editor. This was a great help in refining the bounce of my balls. I spent the rest of the day playing around and created a ball I was quite pleased with (which i won't upload because I think two progress shots is enough for anyone).

I spent the entire next day in the studio, first off I tweaked my football into something i'm very happy with, then in a significantly smaller amount of time managed to create my Pingpong and Bowling ball animations. I found it much easier when i'd found my bearings in the graph editor. All 3 animations are below, hopefully you'll be able to tell which is which without me explaining, or i'm a complete failure.

Overall i've enjoyed this assignment. It was definitely intimidating and a little disheartening at first, but as time went on and I learnt the tools a little better, things became much easier and I've made some animations which I'm really pleased with. The only scary thing is how complicated animating a simple bloody ball was lolz, it won't deter me though, I look forward to the next maya task :D

Storyboard and Scriptwriting

2008-04-30T09:46:00.002+01:00

When we were given these tasks over easter, I thought nothing of it, they seemed relatively easy and we had an entire month to finish them off, which is quite generous. When it got round the the actual doing, though, they (or at least the scriptwriting) too a little more time and thought than expected.

I attempted the scriptwriting first, a story about a Leaf which had been in my head for quite a while. Well, the Character had been in my head, and it's basically just a leaf, so I thought up a little story for it as I went along. I wanted to do something different, something alternative to the normal start/middle/end story format, but this was a lot harder than I thought, and my finished result is actually quite a normal story, just in an unusual circumstance. Something I found difficult was the directions, especially since my characters were all static. I ended up writing the story first and transplanting the directions in later, which i'm not sure is the best approach. I think they may have suffered slightly because I was trying to keep the script length down to a page and a half. I wanted to make the script snappy and witty like the writing that I admire, (eg. Chuck Phalanuik stuff, minus the violence) but since I don't do much writing it wasn't easy, (and obviously came nowhere near to his standard) but I'm reasonably happy with the final outcome.

The storyboard was much easier than the Script, and was what saved me when I had writers block. Also since Andy said they don't have to be works of art, it freed me up a little, allowing me to concentrate on the action in the poses of the characters and the camera angles that I wanted. This was nice but after seeing a few other peoples storyboards i'm wondering whether or not I went too loose (which is weird for me). Nevertheless I had fun thinking about the film language, and think I got some pretty cool shots here and there. It's an interesting way of thinking for sure.

All in all it was a very interesting task to be set, but I hope we don't have to do it again any time soon, I'd rather concentrate on areas that I plan to progress in (i'm pretty sure i'm not going to be a scriptwriter in the future, lol).

Ident Placeholder

2008-04-30T09:46:00.001+01:00

greoqirj

After Effectz

2008-01-27T00:48:00.000Z

This turned out to be probably my favorite Tuesday of the course so far, I couldn't really say why, I've never really been interested in after effects and the things that we created weren't anything that I'd looked forward to creating, but I just felt as if the course was moving in a very positive direction and had a very pleasant day.

We started off with some warm-ups in Photoshop, which led up to some simple After Effects tasks which, whilst being quite simple to perform, gave me the sense that I was learning things which would be really valuable to me and all without having to labour over it too much. It seems like everyone is now a little more attuned to how we are meant to be working in these sessions on the computers, which I think helps with the overall attitude of the class, or maybe it was just the fact that we were given documents with the tutorials on them, rather than being talked through every step (Something which I was really grateful for after the Maya sessions). This was all topped off with the tutor being very cheery and helpful, completing a very light and pleasant day's work.

Flash Workshop #1

2008-01-27T00:22:00.001Z

I've always been aware of Flash and it's uses in animating as i'm online 79.3% of the time and Flash seems to be very popular with the online community as a quick and easy way to create animations in your home, but I've never really been a fan of it. Apart from a very small percentage of Flash animations, i've never really enjoyed the style. Mainly because of the overuse of the pen (i think?) tool, and the way in which it seemingly ignores the stroke that you've just drawn and decides to make it look however it pleases. Due to this I never really bothered to use it at all, and didn't really look forward to the session. However, to my surprise I found the session to be much more enjoyable than i'd previously expected.

After a reasonably short and sweet introduction to the program by Andy, we were pretty much left to our own devices. At this stage with my previous mindset towards flash I may have just nipped off home, but I found myself getting caught up in the program and made a little animation of a winged man falling off a cliff, which I don't think I saved or I would've uploaded it. The session's changed my outlook on Flash as a program, and I'll happily use it in the future for my animating needs.

Maya Stuff!

2007-11-25T18:14:00.001Z

I was really pleased to be getting into working onto computers finally, not that I didn't enjoy working in 2D but just for the fact that It was a newer and more exciting medium. Over the summer I decided to download the free version of Maya to give it a whirl, and managed to make one temple structure by following an online tutorial and then kind of deserted it again. Nevertheless, that allowed me to get through the tutorial we had on Tuesday quite easily as I had learned the basics by myself already. Basics definitely means basics though, (Forget you Cherie with your fancy bowl of stuff on a table next to your chair :P) at some points I still got myself a little confused, and without messing around over the summer I could see myself getting quite lost, like a few did. As Rosie mentioned in her blog I did think that the room layout is less than brilliant for this kind of thing, as our tutor (What was his name again?) had trouble reaching everyone with his voice. Richard did well helping the stragglers though.

I really look forward to continuing this type of work, even if the project we've been given is one of the strangest I've ever received (Drawing random chairs anyone?). Hopefully it'll get me a little more fluid in Maya, at least to the point where I can continue to create things and improve by myself. Digital 3D (more specifically the modeling of characters and such) is one of the areas where I can see myself specialising in, as it allows for some really intricate, laboured work, something that I've been craving for since we joined the course.

My experience in Maya in it's entirety.

Character interaction.

2007-11-25T17:54:00.000Z

This seemed like a really fun animation to try out, making the expressionless characters interact quite explicitly sounded like quite a challenge and something I thought I may be able to do well with. I already found myself doing things quite differently just because of my experience with the last animation, such as only sketching down the items in the picture that are moving. Why waste time sketching things for no reason? I can just do that at the end with my black pencil. I was really grateful not having to sketch a stupid door every frame, too. I think I've improved very slightly with my timing since the last animation too, at least I've learned some things like with jumping to show the highest point rather than just imply it... If you follow.

Okay just fucked my blog up because of bad html that was actually faces, so this paragraph died.

EDIT: Today I finished the animation. Well, all but going over it in black pencil, and i'm quite pleased with the result. The fluidity is much better than my previous piece, and I think the characters interact reasonably well. I ended up cutting out a large piece of the animation which I would've liked to have put in because I thought it would be too time-consuming (and I was right) but apart from that pretty large hitch, everything went pretty well. I would have liked to have spent longer on it, but i've learned from the experience and next time i'll do it properly.

Angry Man.

2007-11-25T17:33:00.000Z

This angry man was the first animation that I made on the course that required me to put a lot of effort into (Missed the jumping man, whoops). I enjoyed the challenge, trying to make all the actions that the character performed to have some sort of anger contained in them, but I found myself battling with the tedium more than the technical aspect towards the end. I think I probably spend too long and put too much effort into each drawing. When we were shown everyones animations together it seemed that the line quality and anything else that I tend to obsess over slightly is almost completely invisible in the final work, but still I find it really difficult to loosen up and go without. I'm still more of an illustrator than an animation for sure.

I thought my final outcome was okay, not brilliant. I really need more experience in the timing of the actions, and to learn some of the secrets of animating. Along with pushing my concentration span as well. The animation would have benefited greatly if i had just tested it every once in a while, but as time got on i just wanted to get it done. With my next animation i'll definitely test it as I go, I can't expect to get it right the first time. Not yet at least.

Will try to get my animation up in this space when I can.

Interblag.

New Stuff!

For Steve

Postings

Normal Mapping Workflow in Mudbox and Maya.

New Term!

Friday post.

Evening.

Normal... Moping (I am literally (not literally)) on fire with the puns today.

Rush!

Proost

woooo update!

nepoenpoepe

Damn

New Posssssst

Bergerac

Breaxxbaxx

Gold Guns Girls

brap brap.

Ello ello!

This Is Not A Post.

New Post.

london postings.

Hey there.

Final Post from Uni :o

Even more stuff!

Stúf

Quickie

hihi

Wee Postage.

*Turns over new leaf*

Poor Bloggy...

STRIP

erjiweorji

Stuff what's happened.

Wooooooooo

Just a quick Robots post

oh noes.

Term One Recap and Crap Talkings

Helloo.

woo

hi again

moar

chopchopchop

Group Project Logs

stuff

Doneee... on this project

updateupdate

Wooo

new haps

The Flour Sack

Bouncing Balls!

Storyboard and Scriptwriting

Ident Placeholder

After Effectz

Flash Workshop #1

Maya Stuff!

Character interaction.

Angry Man.

Turns over new leaf