moar

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

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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

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.