20.08!! Going! Going!! Gone!!

Well I hope everyone had a smashing Christmas! I know I did.

Me mum, gawd bless her, she got me the art book of Howls Moving Castle to help me with my work... and me Dad got me Gears of War 2 to not help with the work. Awwww bless um.

So yeah, as well as a lot of gaming, I've been keeping busy with work. I've been trying to redesign one of my characters, TearGems. I've made about 5 concepts in total, trying different looks. I think I've finally got it sorted. I'm not gunna post any pictures, this is just an update.

I've been trying to sort out my presentation too. I'm currently re-writing the script, creating some background templates, animating a short clip, rendering, and video editing. Whew... Got a lot more to do though. If everything works accordingly I should be alright for hand in and presentation. If it goes according to sods law, page 32, section 5, paragraph 2, line 2, everything will go balls up -_-

Anyway!! Its about midnight. So I'm gonna go get the bubbly ready.

Here's to the new year!! Let's make it a good'n eh?

Presenting...

I've got to that stage where I've done all of what I can for this term. So I have started the presentation video do dah.

So for followers of this blog, I wont be posting on here for a little while, unless it's things I'm doing on the side... which I shouldn't be doing because I've got so much to do for the presentation.

For those who know me and remember my gawd-awful presentation from last year, you'll be glad to hear that I am once again trying to do a freaking voice recorded video! Huzzah I hear you cry -_- Give me a chance, I will try my hardest to make this thing work this time round! I'm going to voice it myself and shout so loud that the heavens will hear me!!! (Not saying that Nick and Abby did a shabby job on the last one. It was my fault for not increasing the sound)

This one's going to come from the heart! It's going to go out onto the screen loud and clear! and magical fairies will descend from the sky and bring chocolate to everyone! well... maybe not that part, but it'd be good for a few extra marks. ¬_¬

Also, why I'm going to spend a lot of time preparing this, I'm creating an opening animation to the story and character presenting part. It wont be anything major. It'll be set up like an interview. In fact I've already got about a third of the animation done. I just need to finish it up, render it, voice it, compile it, edit it, format it... and i think that just about does it.

So, from me, and all the hallucinogenic people I'm going to be seeing from overworking, have a festive holiday, happy christmas and a bloody good new year!

Characters in pic (C) Eiichiro Oda's One Piece

Following the crowd

Well since everyone else I'm watching is saying it, I might as well too...

"Wow!! I haven't updated this in a while!!"

I honestly don't know what came over me, one minute I was moving back home for the festive season and BOOM! No updates! So sorry.

Despite not updating, I have kept myself busy with my work schedule. I've now managed to complete the modelling, texture and rigging on my main protagonist - Iron. I'm hoping to have an little animation ready for my presentation to show off all the technical progress I'm making.

I have also changed a few of the designs on my other characters: ChibiKitteh and TearGems

I did try and make a simplified version of TearGems, but it looked stupid. So I finished up with this design.

On the topic of characters, I've done a little research into what the story's going to entail. I've got the main gist of it, I just now need to fit the characters into it somehow and build the world around them etc etc. For inspiration, I looked to the genius of films. Specifically "Little Nicky" The story of the devils son (Nicky) trying to save his father and the world from his brother's rein of terror. Also Constantine, a tale of an exorcist going to hell and back to prevent the son of Lucifer from reaching the human world. I have read that the film isn't accurate to the comic publications, so I might try and take a gander into those.

I managed to get hold of the demo of Derek Thompson's story boarding tutorials off Imagine magazine and all I can say is WOW!! He's got some handy methods for navigating Photoshop and quickly setting up a story board scenario. I sure hope MC can get a hold of his DVD cause it's most definitely worth the cash.

... Let's see... what else... I've also managed to get hold of some 'One Piece' Pencil test and Design pages. They're basically set out like storyboards and show frame by frame how the animation is directed. They have some pretty insane perspective shots.

I'm now working on getting all this research together for the presentation in January. Should be fun! ^_^

Protagonise this!

A few days ago I finished designing of the main protagonist in my game, Iron. I went for the in between of the comic artists I looked at.

I tried mixing in some of Yoshitoma Nara in, but it didn't look right. I'll try and add that style into another character...

Also, I have been working on a proper nice res. (neither low res. nor high res.) model for Iron.

It's still a work in progress, but here it is thus far -

I'm still working on the hair, feet, tail and several parts of the head. I'm hoping to have it finished by the end of the week AT LEAST!!

For creating the model, I studied the latest 'Sonic Unleashed' models, as they bare small similarities to mine... well... more then other models... >_> <_<

Oh! And on a side note! I've finally started using AfterEffects. Better late then never, eh? So far I've learnt how to slow down and speed up moments in video clips... hardcore! Next thing you know I'll be King of the world.

Animation and Sound studio

I was lucky enough to get into the Sound studio tutorial last friday and man, was it inspiring. There's a lot fo equipment on offer that I would love to use for the end of year show. They've got these lil portable microphone things (forgot the name of them), they have an awesome sound editing program called Logic 8 Pro, they have a sound proof studio with a voice recording studio right next to it! Brilliant.

I was planning, for my end of year show, to create an animated cut scene, and with this equipment I'll be able to increase the quality of it by leaps and bounds. The last time I tried to do sound recording for a presentation it was a nightmare! This new equipment should give me more courage in the future of this project.

Side Note - I'm looking into the newest Sonic the Hedgehog game for modelling referencing. Preferably the faces on the models.

Did you say the D word?

Yes! With a lil help from Adam (http://gadajl.blogspot.com/) I have managed to finally find some useful video...

DOCUMENTARIES!!!

*DUN DUN DUUUNNNNN!!!!*

Basically, Adam sprung into my room, like he usually does, and told me about this 'Channel 4 on Demand' thing that's on the web. I checked out the page, downloaded the program and can now watch old and new channel 4 programs at my will! Awesome! Much love to Adam.

I've found a few videos that are useful for animal research, but I'm yet to find a decent human anatomy one... I found one called 'The Anatomist' watched the first 10 minutes and nearly threw up... It was more about cutting bodies up then portraying how they worked. ¬_¬

The video archive is fairly large so there's bound to be something useful amungst it all.

I'm also going to have a look through some films, namely: IronMan, KungFu Panda, The Incredibles, Surfs Up, and maybe a few One Piece ones.

IronMan, because it'll have some good walk cycles with additional weight.
KungFu Panda... cause it related more to my work, character wise.
The Incredibles and Surfs Up, for animation inspiration
And One Piece for dynamic scene shots... for storyboarding... and because I like it.

I am a little behind as far as my work calendar goes, and I'm blaming 'Left 4 Dead' because of it. That game is so damn addictive especially when you've got three more players, that you know, fighting alongside you. Seriously! It's wonderful to get a FPS that pulls you together with people, rather then competing against one another.

more first concepts -

First one is ChibiKitteh. One of the smallest demon 'balancers'. His main ability is to emit large amplified blasts from his person. The blasts are created by his over-sized hearts that are within his body. The hearts don't pump blood, as his body doesn't require it.



Second is Teargems. An angelic 'balancer'. Her ability is to create extremely dense crystals from her eyes. The crystals are stronger then diamond and can be moulded at her will. When her tear pours become agitated the diamond formations will become more jagged and sharp.

Yoshitoma Nara

MC pointed out a really cool Japanese Pop artist. Yoshitoma Nara

"Today Nara has had tremendous international success. His innocent yet aggressive figures have been shown in over 17 one-person exhibitions, 20 group exhibitions and can be seen in over 27 public collections.

His paintings are "in the moment," often done in one night in order to fully capture fleeting feelings. Nara 's pieces express the importance of imagination, childhood and innocence while jarring viewers with a unique intensity. Once the viewer is caught by the aggressive gaze of his characters, it's hard not to feel the commotion Nara wished to express.

Part of a revival of pop art, Nara has an extremely large fan base in Japan and has an almost cult like following. Nara bends the distinctions between high and low art by offering a line of merchandise featuring his characters ranging from ash trays to t-shirts." - http://www.linzercola.com/narabio.html

His work certainly has a cute side to it. Most of his paintings are of small children with glares that could turn someone to stone. Nara's work is definitely something I'm taking for inspiration, especially for my JTB character.

Death, himself...!!!

My newest character design - JTB.

This isn't his finalized design, I am yet to string him through an artistic style like my other main protagonist, Iron.

JTB is a high ranking, balancer demon. His full name is 'Jimmie the Bullet', a name given to him because of his ability to travel at the speed of darkness. (Just a little under the speed of light) Despite his terrifying speed, he will offen stare coldly at anything that takes his interest for long periods of time. His favourite past-time is to listen to various forms of rock and metal music, and form a mosh pit... with himself. (Seriously, he moshes so fast that he bumps into himself)

You may have noticed a chain of bullets streaming out of his head. 75% of JTB's insides is bullets. JTB can consume bullets and keep stock of them inside his body. Once the bullets are inside, they are chained together and connected to the twin pistols attached to his head.

Quite an odd fellow... kinda reminds me of someone...

Eyez see you!!!

Eye control has been conquered! My powers are growing stronger!!! BUT I NEED MORE!!! MOOOORE!!!!!

I'm getting the hang of this...

Rigging is becoming easier and easier to do, thanks to much practise. Though, I've still got a lot to learn about it.

Just recently I created a very low poly model... and I mean LOW!!

It's like Nintendo 64 spec!!

I'm using this as a guinea pig for my inhumane experiments. It's not going to be taken through into next terms work!

This be the newest (and probably best) rig I've made. I've made improvements to the structure, feet, hands and head.

First, I learnt from 'Learning Maya for Game Designers' that the Pelvis should be the first joint made in the entirety of the skeletal structure. Usually I wouldn't bother worrying about the first joint, but it is apparently quite important.

Next learning curve was the feet. Last year I could never get my head around how to actually turn the damn feet around. But now the problems been solved! it's all about grouping the iK's... I wont go into detail. Just see for yourself -

OSU!! DAI SEI KOU!!! Looks simple, but it's been a major hassle for me. During this process I also learnt that when making a NURBs curve to control an iK Handle, it is best to PARENT Constraint instead of a POINT constraint, which is what I had been using.

So, I figured, if this method works for the feet, then it's bound to work for the head. The results came up positive -

And one of the last things with the rig was the double jointed legs. The first time I made this model's rig I put two iK Handles into the leg. This was unnecessary, as one iK Handle can handle the entire double joint. The only thing I had to alter was the position of the locator.

Weighting a low poly model is SO much easier and less hassle then a high one. The model I made last year took me about 2 weeks full attention to get the weights remotely accurate. This one, I finished in about 40 minutes. I had to laugh, otherwise I would have cried.

So, with everything moving as it should, I'll run a few animations just to remind myself what to do and so on.

I must say, I'm getting very pumped up for next term! I can't wait to try this stuff out for real and get a proper cut-scene created!! XD

Moster Derek

I was browsing through one of Jimmie's 'Imagine' magazines and came across a storyboard and monster artist - Derek Thompson. I did some searching around and he's got a blog on here too.

http://derekmonster.blogspot.com/

"Derek is a veteran of the entertainment industry, having worked professionally in comic books, video games and feature films for over 14 years." - Imagine Magazine

His work is pretty incredible. I'm tempted to get hold of his recent DVD release!

Concepts

Some may say it's too early to be concepting characters. BUT! If I'm going to be story boarding later on in the year, then I'm going to need to be prepared.

I've tried mixing around with styles for my main character, Iron. First I attempted Jamie Smart's smooth and blocky style.

I know what you're going to say! "Hang on! That character looks a lot like the one at the top of the page!" Yes, you're right. The character concept here and the one at the top of the page is Iron. I've been drawing this character for a while now, but have never added a different art style other then my own. Sinse he's my own character, I thought I might as well use him for this project and see if I can achieve a good, fitting look for him. Hense the art style research!

Next I tried Jhonen Vasquez's extreme jaggered style

And then tried mixing the two

I'll carry on doing concepts until I'm happy with one style. Once that's sorted I'll apply it to other characters.

More references

It truely amazes me when I discover a game that I've never even heard of. 'How the heck did that slip past?' I ask myself... I dunno, maybe I was drunk for the entirety of that year.

Anyway! This is Legend of Kay, which I believe was on the PS2.

After looking into some of the game screenshots I could see many characters resembling foxes, rabbits and birds, which gave me a strange feeling of deja vu... Yeah... StarFox.

But it doesn't matter, this game has more varriation of foxes, rabbits and birds then StarFox. So it should be more helpful in the long run.

These concept and screenshot references will be handy for making low res. character models. I'm not actually using this as artistic style research. This doesn't exactly fit in with my previous posts.

Images (c) Legend of Kay

Some Death Jr digital art

Images (C) Backbone Entertainment

Away. From. Knowledge.

It looks like the internets finally been fixed. IT'S ABOUT DAMN TIME!


So, I got a bit of catching up to do! And YES I have been doing work over this past couple of weeks! Hense why I'm about to spam this page silly >:)



Right! First off - I've been trying to look into a game that would be a key example of what I am working towards. Something that has an abstract cell shaded style, creature characters and being a 3rd person RPG...

Well luckily for me a game, only just recently released for the Wii, contained all of those things. It's called Death Jr, produced by Backbone Entertainment.

The story sounds simple yet interesting. I was expecting, having a game with Death's son in it, to be more about... well... death; harvesting the human pawns and ultimately do something to cause the Apocalypse, but no!

"It’s a poignant tale that is instructive to today’s youth about the dangers of global warming. Well, not really, but that’s a good one-liner for kids to tell their parents when asked.
DJ, Pandora and his gang are working on a science project in the woods by town collecting cocoons. DJ & Pandora stumble upon -- and accidentally release -- a creature from the one cocoon they shouldn’t have! Furi, the daughter of Mother Nature, has been released and interrupted in her transformation to the ultimate force of evil, or at least that’s what the “Enlarge your evil” marketing blurb promised on the box.
Furi is pissed at DJ and Pandora and goes on a rampage corrupting nature forces into vile creatures, and threatening DJ’s town and even DJ’s dad -- the Grim Reaper -- in the process. Naturally, it’s up to DJ and Pandora to set everything right and stop Furi’s evil transformation before it’s too late."

- Death Jr Producer, James Stanley

Amazing! Not much depth to the story, but very original.

And if that wasn't enough, I discovered that there are comic books of it too!

http://www.deathjr.com/comic.html

http://www.backboneentertainment.com/products/other_media/default.asp

I have got to get my hands on some of them! Until then, I'm keeping hold of Death Jr's concept art.

Well this sucks...

For some weird reason I can't connect to the Internet at my student house. Me and the lads have concluded that it is probably the router being absolutely shi... rubbish. It's not just me that it's effecting. Ken is also unable to connect for the same weird reason.

So, just to let y'all know, updates are going to be slow for this blog until the problem is fixed. :( For now, the only way I can access the net is at my parent's house.

In the meantime, I've been working a lot with Silo and Maya; taking notes, putting them into practise and generally trying to remember past experiences. So far I've created a low poly character model in Silo, transferred it to Maya, rigged it, weighted it and animated it. All within 3 days.

Looking back, I can see errors with the rig where I haven't parented certain joints, but it's all part of the research. I would post some pictures, but I haven't got them present. I'll try to post them later on.

The other day I also got some handy tips from the training guy (AHHH I can't remember his name) from Zoemode. He certainly had a way with words; I came out of the tutorial feeling boosted and motivated to accomplish more. (A feeling I haven't felt in a long time... well for about 3 years now) I've got a few plans in my head for the coming week. Most of which will involve me making an archive of movement, postures and expressions. I'm going to half-inch my mum and dad's camera and hopefully get some of my house mates to do some mo-cap.

Life drawing

Within the last week I've been going out with some mates to do life drawing in the streets of norwich. I think this is especially handy for me as I can study basic kinetic movements up close. On later ventures I will take a camera with me for further referencing.

The sketchings aren't anything special, but remember, we're drawing as people move, so we have to get as much down as possible in only a few glances. It certainly gets the olde brain active. I'd recommend others try, if only to keep your artistic flow.

On a side note - I've finally got Maya 8.5 on my new PC Weeeey!!! So now the proper research begins! and it begins with catching up!!!

AT LAST!!!

I haven't been able to post anything recently because of this damn 'bx-' error message kept coming up. Anyway! It's now sorted!

So I finished my learning agreement, work timetable and game treatment.

Learning agreement -

I haven't said anything about this up till now because I wasn't really that sure what I was aloud to get away with, but sinse it's been handed in now I guess it wont matter.

So, in a nutshell, I'll be looking at emotions, expressions, movement and characteristics of people and animals. So I'll be searching the net for gif.s, buy some Dvds and so on. Should be fun ^_^

I'm also going to look into getting 'After Effects' and 'Movie Storm', both programs are used for video editing don't you know.

As for artistic study - I was thinking of looking into abstract comic art like Jamie Smart's 'Ubu bubu'

and Jhonen Vasquez's 'Johnny the Homicidal Maniac'.

I think art like that has something to offer to the gaming world. It certainly hasn't been looked at before... and there might be a reason for that but never mind! I'm going to take a shot at it!

My game idea is pretty strung together at the moment... To be honnest I never really thought of it until university said 'YOU MUST HAVE THIS DONE!!!' Originally I wasn't going to focus on a game and just do work where I wanted to advance. But then I spose the work needs to have an idea behind it... other wise they can't really mark me for anything.

So anyway! The game is pretty standard concept. A cartoony action adventure, collecting items, solving puzzles... this sounds somewhat familiar. I'm hoping to set it in a demonic world and set the story around their everyday life... or death... or whatever they are. I'll post more about the story later in the term. Part of this game idea spawned from one of my mates who last year, did a game based around Lucifer.

I've already got a few concepts in mind. I'm just yet to sketch them in my art study style.

A bit of good news - I recently got myself and brand new PC!!!! And it is SUCH a godsend! I can actually draw in photoshop without lag! And I can watch videos without lag!! AND! (this is the best part) I CAN ACTUALLY SURF THE WEB!! I mean how awesome is that!! I'm looking forward to having a bash at 3D with no lag! It's going to be awesome!!