A moment for reflection.

Well this will probably be my last post now on my Games Design blog as the year, and the course draws to a close.

I'm happy to say I feel a lot has been achieved these past eighteen months, not only have I learnt to model and animate (as well as a wealth of different smaller bits) in both Maya and Blender, I have also learnt vector image creation in Illustrator and Flash as well as 2D animation in Flash. As well as this behind the scenes my 2D artwork has come on in leaps and bounds.

I forgot to post this earlier but my internship is also to become a permanent arrangement once the contract runs out, giving me a full time job!

University has taught me an awful lot these last few years, and though I am sad it is over I am also looking forwards to the day where I can relax at weekend, perhaps even play those things called games that I set set out to learn more about.

As a last goodbye I leave you with a link to my new job's website http://www.matmi.com/games_playgames.php where you will find several games I have worked upon. Though most are still unreleased I did participate in 'Dancestar Party Time', 'Feed Breaker', 'Knead for Speed', 'Iron Out' and most notably 'Mementos of Closeness' (where I did a large portion of the 2D artwork). I will continue to update the list as more are released.

The Almanac 5

Well I finally achieved what I set out to do this semester and got all five monsters up and running in my Almanac.

There was a bit of a panic at the last minute when someone pointed out that you have to 'build' unity projects, and that they only go to certain sizes, which led to a panicked week of resizing and repositioning EVERYTHING from scratch which was a pain.

I also took my tutors advice in adding some more visual parts to the Almanac information page rather than lots of boring fake statistics so it looks MILES better now.

Anyways below is the finished video of the Almanac:

Now all thats left is to finish up my prtesentation and start preparing for the degree show (as I already also did my dissertation).

Woo!

Updatey update

Lets see whats new....

Well compared to the Chimera the Dryad was a walk in the park (no pun intended). The full model and unity only took me one week altogether. I even managed to put some cool sparkley spore looking effects falling from her branches which is awesome.

Also I started work on the design for the Harpy so thatll be next:



How I hate Chimeras

Well I'm still struggling with this darned Chimera.

He was fairly easy to animate and such, but on importing into Unity disaster struck.

It seems that something in the weighting of the bones is messed up and so whenever he animates this happens:

All his verts decide to take a fun little dance around the screen and back... I'm not impressed at ALL.

Anyways, heres a video of derpfacelion Chimera animated to his derp-iest best:

EDIT

Okay never mind I fixed the stupid Chimera. It seems that somehow some of my verts were duplicates on top of each other but not actually merged together... so the reason the spikes were occuring was because the unattatched verts were flying about unweighted to bones properly.

Not actually sure how that happened since the model was made entirely by extruding.... but I suppose I've never been the conventional sort anyway.

Panic Over....

And Chimera done!


Onwards to Miss Dryad.

Chimera troubles

Well I must admit that monster 3 the Chimera has been giving me the real runaround.

Design wise I love it, textured model.... not so much.... but two weeks into working on it I've decided to stop fussing with the details on the texture and just move on to he animation and finishing it off. The problem I've found with this particuler model has been that the sheer amount of limbs meant an awful lot of seams.... which causes issues....

Hopefully monster 4 the Dryad will turn out nicer once I move onto it.

Chimera shots:

Happy Horse

Well this weekend has definitely been a productive one with the addition of monster 2 The Kelpie to my project, all finished and added to his own little entry in the Almanac:

I actually had a LOT of fun with this texture, I find underwater textures are really fun to make with adding all the little plants and crustaceans and such. It was also a fun model to light in Unity with all of the interesting green and blue hues and reminded me a lot of my first semester project.

I'm a little disappointed with how 'happy' this guy looks from certain angles....his stretched skin seal over his mouth didn't really work.... my textures always look nicer when they aren't actually on the model it seems lol. But overall I'm rather pleased with how he came out overall.

I also achieved a few little unity bits and bobs this weekend too, so that's one step closer to being done now too.

Back at last

Well this weekend was my first back at university for what will be my final semester.

Overall I''m pleased with my progress though many changes to the overall look of my GUI have been requested, some easy enough but others exceedingly not so and the rest of the weekend was spent tearing my hair out over the evil program known only as Unity.

Hopefully I will be able to add a nice page turning transition between entries in my Almanac, though I have yet to find how to implement the animation then transition to the GUI.

With the changes I've managed so far it certainly looks much nicer already, though I am feeling a bit panicky about getting the transition done as I'm more than clueless when it come to coding. However if I am somehow miraculously successful then it will make for a much nicer looking project.

Here's a few screenshots to show the changes made thus far to the design of the GUI:

(this took an excruciating amount of time to rearrange the text by eye to the right coordinates in pixels)

Also I have now finished modelling and UV mapping my second monster the Kelpie so hopefully it shouldn't take too long to texture and animate him and pop him into the Almanac, so were finally starting to gain a little bit of momentum.

Entry 1 - The Meduasa Snake

Well finally the first of my Almanac entries, The Medusa Snake, is complete!

A productive weekend for certain.

First of all here is the video of the animation I made for him, admittedly I'm a little unhappy with the 'popping' effect of the render due to the low poly count and high reflectivity of the material the texture is applied to. However there is little to be done about this; and it wont actually affect the final Almanac version so its not too much of an issue really, more a minor annoyance.

And here is a screenshot of how he appears in his Almanac entry:

Notice the slight coloured hues in the lights coming from various directions to give him a creepy look? The lessons of the first semester have not been forgotten!

Another feature added to this in unity is the fact that rotating the mouse allows the viewer to turn the monster model around and view it from any angle. I'm quite proud I got it to work... too a lot of messing about....

Medusa printers and only one shoe....

Just thought I'd post todays progress on my Almanac project. Today I finally got around to finishing Medusa's texture! Yay!

I also had an epic battle with my printer, cleaned out the wardrobe and found a very nice right shoe under my bed... but really that is irrelevant....

Back at last

Well it sure has been a while now hasn't it? But I'm back again with semester three closing in very soon next month.

Its been a busy few months for me since back in May thats for sure, with my new internship keeping me busy all the time but there has been a small amount of progress with work too. 

Over the last few months at my new job I have learnt an awful lot about both Flash and Blender and Blender has in fact taken over Maya in my new 3dmodelling software of choice due to the fact that it is sooooooooooooooo much less fussy than Maya is.

To tie in with the large amounts of low poly modelling and animation I have learnt over the past 4 months or so my final university semester is going to be the complete opposite of last semester's high poly animation challenge.

This time around I shall be compiling an Almanac of monsters (designed by me obviously) but modelled and animated with as few polys and bones as possible.

Basically working as simply as I can whilst still retaining the quality.

(For those of you who dont know what an Almanac is, think a Pokedex from pokemon)

I am compiling this Almanac in Unity which is proving fairly challanging, but the results so far have been quite positive.

Heres a screenshot of how it looks so far sans the monsters:

Currently I am midway through making the first of my monsters, The Medusa Snake; as pictured below:

Here is how the model looks currently as it stands:

At the moment I'm midway through UV mapping that twisty snakey hair, which is proving challenging to say the least! Hopefully though, with the long weekend provided by the bank holiday I shall have him UV'ed and textured soon enough.

Hopefully the next update wont be long, so until then I bid you all good day.

Give me one more day, just wait and see.

And finally heres my final Double Lariat animation, featuring Clara. Just to nicely round off the semester.

The power of Playblast

Well guys, I've just discovered the magic that is saving a video of the animation with controls visable via the Playblast feature. So I thought I'd upload a now firly final version of my 'Double Lariat' animation I had be working on on the side:

I deided since I'd put rather a lot of effort into this I should probably hand it in and show I've not been slacking off these last few weeks; though I have not completed the entire song/dance routine The reason for this is just how long it takes me to do even a few seconds of animation in comparison to how much time I have left  before hand in, (aka very little as my job completely rules out weekdays). SO I figured Id rather complete part of the animation well, than all of it badly.

The song used is the English lyric version of the song, which is being performed by Youtube's Rockleetist and can found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ToyuF4Hpxs (cute cat music video is cute)

Now you know your ABCs...

Well it took all night long to render, and ages to re-sync the audio with the animation afterwards (still not ENTIRELY happy with this but its much better than it was), but finally the ABC song is complete! Which is a great relief as I was getting sick of hearing it.

So yay for bank holidays and getting lots of work done!

Also I just realised I forgot her eyelashes... which is creepy... but its too late now as itd mess up my blendshapes, so oh well.

Here's the video, hope you like it:

Phonemes

Following my last post (which was yestday I believe) I have finished the blendshapes for my new girl as well as rigging her up. She can now make all of the phenome shapes with her mouth, blink ad look around, move her head neck and shoulders, and has a lovely new set of rigged pearly whites and a rigged tongue, to further enhance how realistic her pronunciation appears.

Still getting the hang of the lip syncing at the moment, but the alphabet song is coming along nicely; about half way actually.

One thing I didn't even think about initially was the fac that when speaking we do not return our mouths to the rest position after each letter. This really threw me at first and I didnt realise why it looked so off until I realised the H I of the ABC song was pronouced HEY CHIY.

I'm proud to say I remembered how to rig the eyes right this time so that they didnt fly about, though I had a few issuses for a moment with the hair flying about intead, but I quickly figured oujt it was just a case of forgetting to delete the history on the skull... and each curve of hair (I miss blender already); so it was a rather easy fix once I took a minute to think about it.

All the phenomes:

Close up of CDGJNRSYZ (Hard)

Close up of CDGNRSYZ (Soft)

Close up of F V

Close up of L

 Close up of M B V

Close up of Th

Close up of W Q

Hopefully on my next post I shall have the animated video of her singing the ABC song .

A E I O U

First of all today I finally got the time to finish up the hair on my newest lady. Still haven't named her so any suggestions would be nice.

Here she is all haired up:

And if you're wondering 'why white hair?', cause I think its cool; that's why.

Also I now have the simple blendshapes for the vowels A E I O and U working. Took a lot more effort with such a higher poly count but I think it looks quite nice. Some of them appear very similar, but thats simple because they actually ARE in real life; but trust me, there are subtle differences:

Rest

A/I

E

O

U

Next up is the rest of the consonants then some basic rigging and eventually the aim is to have her sing the ABC song. Not sure about expressions yet though. I'm not sure if they'll clash with the mouth movements too much or not...



Hair Hair Everywhere!!

Its my first day of not working at my weekend job, the sun is shining, and a miracle has occurred.

I have finally worked out how to get Maya hair working!!! Many months ago I attempted to work with Maya hair only to hit a dead end but NOW, now it does what I say at LAST!!!!

I'm not sure what it was that made me go back to this model, possibly just my own stubbornness; but nonetheless I felt the urge to revisit an old face model I had hoped to animate with blendshapes at one point, and clean it up.

Basically I worked out part of the problem was not enough UVs, and so I created another 'skull' mesh inside the head of the model I'd been using and bam; problem solved!  Next was getting the actual hair to do what I wanted... slightly harder. But with rooting through a few tutorials I've found that using EP curves and then assigning them to a hair group does the trick, and gives me loads of control over styling.

I'm feeling rather pleased with myself right now.

Inspiration - Corruption Garden

As some of the readers here may know (and tease me about regularly) I am a big fan of Vocaloid, the voice synthesis software packages which basically amount to a 'singer in a box'.

One of my favourite aspects of listening to Vocaloid songs is not only the sheer amount of different kinds of songs made, ranging from rock to ballads, creepy, pop, or just plain weird; but the real reason is that (even though some of the best get licenced to Sony or what-not for the games) pretty much ALL of the Vocaloid songs are fan-made. The music is written and performed by the fans, the lyrics are written by them and have to be heavily edited to get the right rhythms, notes and emotions, and the promotional videos are all made by the FANS; virtual unknowns who in some cases have built outstanding careers of the hobby. I find this very inspirational.

But every now and again a video comes along and blows your mind.

This is one of those videos.

Upon watching 'Corruption Garden' performed by Luka Megurine with music and lyrics by 'CAZ' and animated by 'Ikeda' (not a clue who that is but I tip my hat to them); all I could think was WOW!

This animation is so flawless it looks something straight from Square Enix, and the song is awesome to boot.

Whether your a fan of Vocaloid or not, the video alone is well worth a look just for its STUNNING animation.

Enjoy



Uni and intership progress

Well I hate to say it but as of the last two weeks I have pretty much nothing to show for myself in terms of uni work... the little work I have done is to start on my essay about 'Why various ceramicists showing us photos of various pots is relevant to my life'.

This has mainly been due to the fact I've been working at both my internship and weekend job simultaneously. However as of the end of this week I will no longer HAVE my weekend job and so will have weekends free to work (and play).

However, I have made, I feel, a great deal of progress in learning to use blender. I can now successfully model, UV map, Texture, Rig, Weight and Animate in blender, which... I'm starting to think is much easier to use than Maya. Though it probably wouldn't be much use for high poly work I'm definitely really starting to appreciate some of the perks of the program indeed.

Blender, the Mac to my Maya Pc

Well I recently started a new internship with a localish games/other digital media company which is why I'll probably be slowing up on the updates. Its taking a lot of time in terms of travel, but I definitely think that the payoff of what I learn/general experience will be more than worth the effort.

Today I started learning to use Blender, which basically is Maya... but with every possible change to the controls that could possibly be imagined. This is more than a little confusing I'll admit but I think I'm making goodish progress... though I'll probably find myself unable to use Maya by the end of the week when I come back to doing uni work, which is ironic having only just gotten the hang of it. But yeah... Blender seems a good enough little program, and its exciting to be learning some new skills already.

Overall my new internships very exciting, more than a little daunting too having never actually worked in design before I've only ever done art on whim before, rather than to order... and as everyone knows I'm not exactly the best person for overall ideas. Details I can do, but ideas = hopeless.

Hopefully though I'm making myself useful and everyone isn't just being overly polite lol (paranoia). Seems like a nice place to spend a year that's for sure, everyone is so friendly and the office is COOL looking.

Also I have two computer screens which is really rather awesome and I feel all techy and important like I know stuff... even though I don't.

So yeah, watch this space for updates on stuff I learn. Though obviously I'll not be posting any work or saying what I'm working on I might be able to link to cool sites or games or whatnot when they're launched I suppose, which might be nice.

A new angle on things

I said the Clara animation was finished, however I'm afraid I lied. Not only has it been extended slightly but I re-did the camera throughout the piece altogether. Hopefully it looks much better this way.

Stop bugging me

Just another update to show the (probably) finished version of Clara and Sheldon's interactions. Not been terribly well the last few days which delayed this a little.
Hope you enjoy it.

(Taken this video down now and replaced with newer on in next blog)

Clara Meets Sheldon

Okay so its been a while since I posted so I thought I'd do a quick update.
So far this week I've been a busy bumble bee working on some animation of Clara interacting with Sheldon the bug. This is what I have so far and I'm quite pleased with it!
However I do feel I'm struggling a tad with the next actions of the animation, having Clara turn and run. Simple as it sounds the 'turning' part is really giving me some trouble.

If I keyframe the controller that controls the entire skeleton turning then the feet also move around and I'm having LOTS of trouble having to individually keyframe them one frame at a time, only to find I messed something up and start the entire thing again from the start. But if I instead turn the 'body' controller which controls everything from the waist up, therefore leaving the feet static, then I get issues with the locators for the belt items, as well as the spine bending strangely and refusing to turn around as it should....

I'll work it out eventually, I'm guessing I have to simply go with the first method and keyframe every single frame for the turning process to keep the feet still which is very annoying, but what can you do.

Anyways, here's Clara and Sheldon so far, nothing spectacular with the quality, camera and background; but they'll be edited for the finished product.



A radius of 85cm is the distance...

... That Clara can dance?

Just a quick video today of what I've been up to. As well as putting limiters on Clara's rig I've been playing around with learning some basic animation. Timing is hard to work out, that's for sure, though its much easier with music.

So yeah, being the big geek I am I thought I'd try to get Clara to dance 'Double Lariat' as performed by Vocaloid Megurine Luka in the Project Diva game series. It's probably one of my favourite Luka songs, heck its probably one of my favourite Vocaloid songs too, and I'm a huge Vocaloid fan.

Reference Video:

My Version so far:

(sorry for the terrible quality of the video its simply a screen recording)

Rigged and Ready

Further to my earlier post Sheldon is now in fact completely rigged and ready to go, so here's a quick test to show him off in all his buggy glory....

Update of sorts, inspirational imagery and a bit of personal art.

Well then, its been quite a while (for me) since my last entry here now hasn't it? Been a bit of a busy week, partially with work, partially just life as usual.

Nearly finished rigging up my bug for animation now, just tweaking the joints where I've learnt how to put limiters on them (so very cool). So here's a quick screenshot to show how that's going so far:

Obviously he's much less sophisticated than Clara in the sense that he has just plain joints rather than controls, however being just a bug it wouldn't really be necessary to do otherwise.

Apart from that a friend showed me an image a few days ago that really blew my mind when I saw it (sadly I was on the way to work so didn't get a chance to post this sooner). This image was draw by someone as a celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the Legend of Zelda series. The thing about it that really made me happy was the inclusion of so very many characters from the lesser known games, particularly the oracle games, whom you don't see much art of around the net. So that cheered me up in an otherwise stressful week.

Also here's a video of the image being drawn which is really impressive to watch.

One day I swear I'm gonna draw that well. Wish I could buy this image for my wall...

Apart from that I took a little personal time to do some drawing after work this weekend. Though I'm really enjoying the 3D stuff I've been learning since I started the Masters 6 months ago now, I'm really starting to miss doing some straight up drawing, especially my own personal characters. My deviantart page (http://theblindprophetess.deviantart.com/ for the few of you who didn't follow me there already)  hasn't been this silent in years.

So yeah, started a quick portrait of my old character Sophia. Dunno when I'll finish that but after a rusty and frustrated start I'm feeling a tad more inspired than I did a few days back so that's nice.

Its also the first successful (if unfinished) picture I've done directly into photoshop without a pencil sketch so that's a nice little milestone.

Steam and metal

Well today's progress so far consists of adding particle effects and various small animations to bring the bug to life a little more before I start rigging it.

So here's a little video to show that so far:

Working out the bugs

So I've made quite a great deal of progress with my Steam-bug today and even gone as far as finishing the untextured model, so yay!

Here's how its looking so far:

EDIT

Its now a quarter to midnight and Mr bug aka Sheldon is all textured and pretty now:

Uninspired

Hmmm recently I cannot help but feel rather uninspired and I'm not sure why....

I think with the finishing of Clara's rig I'm feeling a little at a loose end and cant get into my new project.... design a bug .... basically to do something similar as the what I did testing out her facial rig by having her look at something.

Finding it increasingly more difficult to concentrate though which is most annoying. I guess its cause I expected to go onto a second character now so I could start work on the daring duo....

Oh well


Anyways, this is the design I came up with eventually. I decided that since I was working in the theme of steampunk, then the bug may as well be mechanical too:

Eyes Fixed

Well thanks to some advice by my tutor, and the advice of poly-face.com, I finally worked out the parenting issue that was plaguing the eyes of my Clara character so that she can finally look around and move her eyes at the same time, as shown in this video:

I'm so happy to get this finally fixed as it has been driving me bonkers for ages!

Creating Clara - Update 6

Still struggling to fix poor Clara's 'flying about' eyes, but despite any progress with that at all I've still managed to play about and make some small animations. Just a couple of poses, but even just these took me all day and were rather frustrating so I'm rather proud.

Creating Clara - Update 5

Well I'm having a frustrating week thus far I'll admit.

Finally successfully managed to rig and weight Clara to a satisfactory level... though I'm very annoyed with how badly the skirt moves, I didn't realise that a skirt would be so very much of a problem to weight as this but I can live with how it is right now I think....

What I'm not happy with are the eyes, although the controls for them work great when the head is static, If I move the head or upper body controls so that the head is no longer in its neutral or starting position (this includes leaning in any direction or tilting/turning) then we have a problem.
The eyes seem to move fine and stay in place in the head, but the minute the eye controls are adjusted they float into or out of the head in a very bizarre manner, granted still aiming at the controls, and I'm not quite sure how to fix it....

Going to have to ask my tutor about this when I'm next in on Friday, though that seems to waste an  awful lot of time, and for now just don't look at it and try my best not to cry.
It seems that thought the eye controls are parented to the full body controller and therefore move with the full body, they aren't parented to the head controller which is the problem... though simply parenting the eye controls to the head controls just does crazy things, as does trying to parent the eyes themselves to anything but the main model mesh.... I'm really hoping to not have to re-weight it all at the end of this :(

On the good side I've learnt how to used locators to make sure the tools on the belt stay pointing down towards gravity at all times so that's a somewhat good thing I guess.

One problem down and one to replace it, but what can you do eh?

Even though its still not quite perfect and I haven't actually gotten any animation done yet, or the eyes fixed to work, here's a short video to show how the rigging works so far:

Lackadaisy Expressions

Just a quick update but I forgot to post this a while back. While researching into facial expressions a while back, I stumbled upon this delightful tutorial written by the wonderful artist Tracy J. Butler who can be found at her site Lackadaisy. http://lackadaisy.foxprints.com/index.php

I take no credit for anything in this image, I just wanted to share this with people as its the best expressions tutorial I have come across in a long time, I hope others find it as helpful as I did.

Express yourself

Well over the last few days I think I've made some pretty good progress with my Clara project.

I've learnt how to use blendshapes and started putting some into place to use for facial animation and here's what I have so far:

Also I have gone through a list of essential expressions (using an Internet meme) and attempted to see just how many facial expressions I can make using the few blendshapes I have. I must say I'm rather pleased with the results:

Normal

Happy

Pleased/Excited 

Goofy

 Smug/Evil grin

Forced Smile

Serious

  

Sad

 Bereft

Pout

 Irritated

Angry

Disgust

Confusion

Sleepy

Fear

Kissy Face

 

I must admit, after a hard day at my part time job, sitting here making faces with my model and drinking my golden syrup-laced hot chocolate I'm feeling pretty dang awesome!