No pictures no

This is pretty interesting its a pdf briefly explaining the filmic techniques and examples learnt from making TF2 to Left 4 Dead, certainly idea's and examples we could use for le GROOP PROJKETtm

Ok ok ok, I've so restarted it again, the other scene just wasn't working the way i wanted it to so I decided to filp the view back to the house again, lighting is always a priority and it was falling flat as hard as i tried on the other one

Also this is my one hundrenth post - im gonna buy TWO pasties tommorow, treat myself

garden update 2

Starting to think about the lighting, at this stage im thinking the silohuettes of assets are more important than any textural detail

garden update

Quick update, was away over the weekend so I've got 2 days to catch up - thinking more about the general mood of the piece, realised I had been completely honed in on one piece while putting off the larger details, so it was good to take a step back.

Been heavily influenced tree-wise by Left 4 dead which has the best alpha'd foliage I've ever seen - gonna post a few shots when i can

Van Cough

Pretty nice I thought, instantly thought of the upcoming group project, looking foward to picking through the textures and seeing how he's done things

Snippy snippy

This is my second attempt at the environment so far, only spent two days on it so far so i think im doing ok - was considering chopping it in two to make it a bit more focused and to help frame everything together - need to talk to Heather tommorow i think

Blergh

High & low poly of the interiors are done, just need to unwrap it, bake it all out and slap a generic metal texture on it then run to the hills - swoosh!

Van update thingy

Starting to come into shape, don't want to spend more than a few days on this before finishing it up, have a few quick idea's for the damage state which should hopefully still look pretty decent - exterior is more or less finished apart from the obvious grill, headlamps etc and I've started on the interior high poly tonight

Baking a cake

Low poly is progressing pretty nicely, was hoping to come close to the polycount but its looking im gonna miss it by a quite a margin. Thought I'd jump ahead a bit and see how the normal map is baking out - slapped on a generic rust texture to try and give myself an idea of how the diffuse will act.
Need to start thinking about a decent specular and actually finishing up the low poly

Van update

Started the low poly tonight, snapping the verts to the high poly mesh - its pretty mesmeresing for some reason just zone off into a trance

At his stage im concentrating on getting the silohuette smooth enough and relying on the high poly bake for any minor details

Update your blogs grabnamit

I need something to read : (


...and yesh im gonna be updating this soonish

Don't I know you?

Bad enough he's a slave, even worse he's scripted to run towards you where his head explodes - was mighty unerving seeing myself explode again and again and again best I could do in the end was to shoot him my self

Fisherman chap WIP

A mish-mash of high and low poly meshes with poorly mudboxed slacks thrown in for good measure, working on the head at the mo. Thinking the hands might be too large although its too hard to gauge without a head at the mo, need to think of more accesories a fisherman would have about him to make it look a bit more current gen

WIP Van-thing update thing

High poly van for baking normals - still a fair amount to do bit worried detail will be lost in the normal map, deja vu I've posted this before will post my fisherman chap and the early stuff on my new(!) environment later. Possibly

Environment: Stately home wip2

Created some low poly assets and baked out some normals for the corresponding high poly versions, went around Leicester with Dave today taking SCHNAPS of everything - of course most of the photo's I've taken are blurred horribly but then again they are my own sourced textures so there'll just have to do - bleh

Environment: Stately home wip1

Working on the Stately home option for the environment piece, decided to create high poly versions for most of the models to make it a lil easier deriving decent diffuse.normal maps etc, I went to a National Trust property and it was nigh on impossible to take any pics, all the ones i did take were blurry. I did however buy the guide book - which has one small pic of what im doing.

Working on the fireplace at the mo will post in a few days when i have some more stuff

Kardboard King

Ok, its pretty funny but certainly not funny enough for dicks on youtube to go about bitching about it and frankly some of the comments are more than a little disturbing, stuff like his age went way out the window there...

Although I have to admit i did have a wee burst of laughter when he started tea-bagging an invisible corpse and i realised he was running through the games animations for every weapon he picked up - give him some clay and the boy will go far

Train of thought

Been playing with the material editor in ue3, trying to follow up with this idea a few of us had, the model on the right just uses a standard diff/normal shader while the one on the left uses - witchcraft...

I've noticed a few things in producing this shader in how to correctly produce a texture, its heavily reliant on the underlying diffuse texture being quite flat with fairly consistent solid blocks of colour that maybe alter to reflect shadow and the like. The texture in use, a 256 no less, was heavily pixellated and had many high area's of noise with give some area's an almost 'frosted glass' effect. To get the desired 50's look simpler diff and normal textures may be required with any other details physically modelled in

'The desired look'

Oh yeah and i moved the one on the left as a crappy way of showing how a charecter model would look with it applied without baking it all in - gonna try applying it to an actual charecter tomoz

A happy cake

So I've just got ahold of the pictures of my glorious queens building cake made among a few more cakes by Louise and Caz, lookit!

It made the entire process worthwhile, if i was rewarded with a delicious themed cake for whatever i did i'd be a different man and most probaly diabetic

Group project can can

Ah finally, tommorow the group project will be over and my constant cycle of working for 2 days straight and lightly resting on the third is at an end - hoorah.

I was planning on typing up a big essay type thing but frankly i now despise this fsking project and how its sapped me away from doing any decent art and im tired and still need to slip in some relaxing Bioshock before i go to bed, so I'll start with the positive and end with the negative, like a battery(!)

Okies,

Positves -

+ I learnt the Unreal3 engine! this is probaly the biggest pro that dosen't involve ppl or social structures and the like and means i can bring that knowledge onto the third year and my final project

+While the quality of my modelling may not have improved the speed has, something which would take me an hour or so now takes me around 15 mins to create and unwrap

+This weird culture ppl have of creating a single model, say the van or tree and then spending weeks tweaking it has finally been smashed after they realise they had to do 10 models or whatever in a week

+I've learnt a fair bit about colour theory and techniques constantly refering to the colour wheel chris gave us

+Using the engine meant i could try stuff like lighting and compistion of scenes,in greater clarity and detail something i would have really struggled to do in 2d

+Having created all of the surface and wall textures I think im pretty good at making textures and creating tiling surfaces, in fact making textures was something i found i really enjoyed and im already looking foward to making loads for the third year project - bit sad really

+I found that a models silohuette and general colour is more important than any niggly details on the texture, once its in the engine and lit most of the detail is lost anyway

+Although a bit of shambles this time around, I've learnt how to better prepare myself for potential future group projects and what might go wrong

+I would either be mad or a complete and utter bastard now if it wasn't for Ben reining me in now and again

Negatives,

-Peoples imagination and enthusiasm getting in the way of realism and logic only for them to realise later they were too ambitious

-Spending weeks doing concepts before we had a solid art style guide so they in effect became useless after one was picked

-How i reshaped and modeified the entire shape of the Queens building and never had anyone, perhaps the 2d leads, give me guidance or say perhaps its actually a bit cack

-The group working in a hugely linear fashion, spending weeks working purely on 2d concepts and completely ignoring any 3d concepts and experiments and then completely dropping 2d and working purely on 3d - the two should have evolved and bounced off each other i feel

-A solid art style not really ever being decided which lead to problems in what to include on the asset lists and all the way down to the final lighting for the level - guesswork is no subsitite for proper research

-People working in a completely fractured way and not coming into a centralised location such as the lab where something as simple as a model could be passed back and forth in a few minutes as opposed to a few days

-Peoples constant reluctance to come into the lab even when texted

-The importing process being completely ignored again and again with me and Ben having to resize textures, reset pivot points and so on over and over again

-The same model resized does not a new model make

-people purely interested in where there teeny weeny model was and why it wasn't in yet and never taking an interest in the the bigger picture and why it wasn't in yet

-How even though it was never my job i ended up creating and concepting the entire lighting for the level as well as the layout of all the models, something i felt the art leads potentially should have helped me with

-Reluctance on the part of some people to just get on with it, expecting input from myself for something that wasn't my area before they would do anything



And finally i think the biggest negative is how massively the whole project has dug into my 2d, 3D engines and modelling and so forth are something i pickup pretty quickly but art is something i really want to improve upon and i found myself constantly having to go back to tweaking this and that in the engine because people expected it, leaving me literally no time for the 2d
side of the course which more disheartens and saddens me than irritates me

So it became a bit of a bitching fest there but whatever thats what makes me tick, while i certainly would not like to repeat the experience again I've learnt an absolute wealth of information i can take into my third year and later life

Not a penis

Just been going through my computer looking at some old stuff and i came across this half complete texture for that crab thingy i was working on, suddently hit me its leg looks like something else altogether

Engineer: Dispensing an erector!

Okies been spending an odd day or two trying to learn the source engine so i could make, hopefully, a half decent Tf2 map. I've got a plan scrawled down on paper so im just following that at the mo while encountering a fair few of Hammers bugs. The pics show the Red spawn with paths branching off to the A and B points. All wip although im pretty happy with the lighting
Also: sorry Dave but i had to use it :0

This is schilly..

Well Vista's bettered itself this time, didn't think it could get higher than 33 hours but its smashed the previous record with a close 5 day record(!)

A matter of pride

Goooo!

Righty, blog time

With this group project I've been thinking more and more about how people interact with each other and the methods in which they deal with various problems and now because getting a job and getting myself known is playing more and more on my mind what potential future employee's would think of there attitudes and there ability to work in a group.

Im becoming increasingly worried about, not my ability, but promoting myself and the methods in which to do it - i would never consider myself a loud person and if theres one thing that irritates me more about people its people who blow there own trumpet even spouting off complete crap as it makes them look more knowledgeable even while im thinking to myself its complete crap this is usually solved by me wondering around from person to person explaining why said person was wrong - i would never directly confront them, one because they would simply talk over me and turn it into an inane argument and two, because it would affect there pride if i said there wrong in front of there 'audience'.

This system works fine in a closed environment but when your trying to promote yourself to outside parties namely Blitz and certain people within Blitz, Mike can fairly easily censor what work they see and who's work is shown ultimately destroying the gap between me and a potential employee again its the same thing when people's work is shown on the projector, my stuff is never shown and it really degrades my pride when i ask myself 'well why isnt it there?' and know full well its probaly the same work shown to various parties and I come up with no decent reasons apart from I don't shout about my work, of course I could just get into contact with them myself but then the people who have had a headstart from Mike promoting them are more likely to get a position

Im certainly planning on making a big deal of the work I've done, Im far too self critical at the moment and i do need to thrown myself to the lions as it were. I've done a crap load of work for this group project so hopefully it should reflect in how Mike views me and in turn hopefully get mentioned when its most neccesary

I've not forgotten rather its been a constant knife-like stabbing reminder

Guh, been so preoccupied with getting this group project into a workable shape I've completely neglected my blog - well no more!
Hopefully gonna have a few sporadic blog posts when I've grown tired of the Queens building, which after pretty much wrestling it from the more lax team members is thankfully alot less than it was but i digress, blogs follow in 3, 2, 1...

Group: Cross those T's

Love the way the small things are easily the most irritating heres a quick lil bullet list of things currently getting mein goat:

• ppl endlessly criticising the blockout for not being exactly to scale despite all the plans available being both out of proportion to themselves and each other
• ppl completely ignoring the blockout, produced to ensure the scale is correct, when creating there models and then expecting you to scale the entire blockout to a single prop object completely missing the whole point of the thing
• Two or more ppl with apparently encyclopedic knowledge of the Queens building bickering over how many inches a door frame should be, both expecting you to make there changes and trying to appeal to both of them
• Persons with below average modelling skills constantly criticising ppl who even though are currently less than stellar clearly want to improve themselves, simply because it makes them look better and they think we won't notice all the work they haven't done
• ppl going off in a huff for whatever reason and completely severing communication with the group ensuring no work can be passed to and fro
  
• Complete lack of leadership
• ppl accusing other ppl of 'doing all the work' and 'why do you get to do that?' and when given the oppurtunity to do some of there own work never do and the other ppl have to do it while it goes in a loop of ppl moaning about the work load, the load being redistrubited, ppl not doing the work forcing the other ppl to do it and looping back

Theres plenty more but I'd thought I'd leave it there for now had to type some of it down before i went insane, if anyones reading this see's it as a personal attack it certainly wasn't met in the form of a threat to a person or even in jest but simply because i have to get off some steam for this fsking project

Root worm

Quick post for this dominance war thingy and to take advantage of bloggers superior image hosting

Just decided to post up some work i've done recently for fun - small psp spec demon done on and off over 2 days

There are no rules

Righty think im long overdue for some course related ramblings, so I've been thinking about what makes a piece of work good or bad and i think its more to do with personal interpretation than most people think.

Its as much as what you learn practice wise and from what you pick up on your own than simply being told this is right/this is wrong if I wanted to persue a more technically minded career say mechanical drawing as an example, there would be a set of rules i would have to adhere to make the piece of work i produced professionaly viable but in art ,while yes there are guidelines, these are looser and much less enforced I doubt Lowry would have produced his warped cityscapes with the tiny stickmen if he had to use perfect perspective studies for example

Art is as much as creating a mood or feeling as it is about emulating life, the same applies to games which while some ape reality as closely as they can others are far more abstract, concerned more with creating a specific mood or feelings through a specific use of colour and sound.

The best example i can think of is Patapon on the psp, a rythm game that has you controlling tiny stickmen to a specific beat to travel there world defeating monsters something which would never exist if games were forced to adhere to a specific set of rules

Swooooosh!

Aaaaaaah Vista guess i won't be playing UT2004 anytime soon...

Quick speedpaints

Some speedpaints i did trying to pay attention to light and colour - all between 5 and 10 mins

There not dolls there figurines

Kay just found this perusing the interwebs - this is just example why the TF2 art style is freaking awesome and more studio's need to to do stuff a little more outlandish - Also to celebrate the new blogging topic, GOODNESS MAKES THIS GOOD





More

Queens building concept

Concept for a potential reimagining of the Queens building - Ice cave

All those in favour say 'Aye'

I've been thinking about the upcoming Queens building project and specifically how the groups are gonna work towards creative input and hopefully output.
Creative thought is, as far as i can tell, is having an untested idea and taking a risk on that idea with the following reward and failure because of it.

If the groups are managed by a commitee with everyone voting on and agreeing to a change or suggestion then all the ideas and suggesions will be medicore and simply follow the current trend however if the ideas are wrangled by a single leading person then i imagine the ideas would be a bit more outlandish although that dosen't neccesarrly mean there going to be solid gold 'creative marvels' actually im pretty much convinced its gonna be some loud mouth convinced we should model the whole of Leicster in the 16th century in SPACE and will defend it horribly because it was his/her idea.

A real creative idea seems to be one that despite the complexity of implementing it, although im assuming the more complex the idea the better it has to be for it to grab everyone, everyone will automatically agree that yeah thats a good idea that would work - lets do it!

Im really interested to hear about all the groups 'kerazzy' ideas and how there gonna hold it all together

Do said skills pay the bills?

Righty i think its time for another creativity post i think,

the other day somebody said, and i won't name names although this certainly seems to be split down the middle of the group that sharing knowledge be it for modelling or drawing or any other key skill for the course is a bad idea as that person would then become, effectively in the lecturers eyes as good as the person who originally taught them this seems to terrify some people who like a clear and level pegging between certain groups and people.

Which got me wondering why it worried them so much, obviously theres the element of grades being threatened if more people are at the same level but its almost as if they've learnt up to a certain level and refuse to go any higher.

New skills and knowledge means more opputunity for creative output, instead of the same tired stuff being churned out learning new techniques even if there crap the first time around is much more appealing.

Additionally if more and more people are learning more and more it simply means you have to constantly push yourself and we don't end up in a creative rut

Carters theme

Its 7:27 in the morning, i've not gone to sleep and the only thing keeping me going apart from not wanting to look a fool for this presentation is this amazingly catchy intro theme which i've been playing over and over again,

Never bet on Duke

So i've just seen the new Duke Nukem Forever teaser im convinced its only shooter that seems to be working backwards in terms of gameplay looking at the older trailer http://youtube.com/watch?v=omOPjBoClw0 it has all the staples of a modern fps- scripted triggers, pseudo pysics (logs down a hill!!), vehicle sections, AI sidekicks and a crappy storyline that takes itself far too seriously.

Looking at the newest trailer okays its a teaser but still, theres no mention of any of the above just 'kerazzy' graphics (again) and alot of blood oh and a amazingly homo-erotic scene of Duke weightlifting with sweaty abs. A game like Duke Nukem just dosen't work now, sure it was funny when he was stuffing dollar notes into strippers and being casually sexist in the early 90's but that beast died when half life was released colour me not impressed - no sir no