What really is creativity?

I've realised I've been blogging about creativity when I haven't really exlored what it really means, according to Wikipedia creativity is, 'Creativity (or "creativeness") is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts.'
Which makes sense creativity be it for any task or project is always new and original other than emulating something else, something games i guess could learn from i guess

BUT

people who always say 'ooh games need to be more original more creative' etc don't often consider that new creative ideas are horrible half baked ideas often the result of somebody with a 'great idea', im pretty sure this applies to all aspects where creativity and design go hand in hand. The closest example i can think of is the Car industry and the Fiat multipla.
Despite being displayed in the Museum of Modern Art at New York, sales worldwide were absymal with Top Gear voting it the 'Ugliest Car' car of 1999 Fiat eventualy restyled it back into a more traditional looking design and sales started to increase.
Showing more than anything people want familiarity not a car you would find in a pretensious modern art house, evolution not revolution i guess.
But creativity to solve a problem is a truly mysterious thing some spark of inspiration that completely rewrites the book and has everyone copying you until the next big wave of creativity

Crafted with my very own hands

I finally got round to doing some sculpeying(?) today bought some tools yesterday and spent most of the day making something up then trying a different side then smushing the other.

Still its a welcome change from staring at a screen day in day out.
Piece is a lil' something for my organic project although im not sure if it looks like a rose or a particuarly nasty case of piles

I know somebody in Edge magazine...

Latest Edge has a feature up on gamecity showing the various events around the uh event - but whatsthis?!
Why its Game Art's very own David Sillitoe! Apologies for the picture quality they were taken at 6 in the morning with a 'orrible energy saving bulb

modelling update

I've realised I've not posted up any new information on me self portrait model, well I started a brand new head this one has ears, nostrils spherical eyes and a inner mouth among another things that make it look a bit more realistic and believable and not like Odo off DS9. The face geometry has been reduced while still retaining its shape and im experiementing with a mixture of poly modelled hair and alpha's. Current new model stands at 2443 tris which gives me a further 57 tris to play with for the hair.

Alas the hands still look like a cripples - i need to find a way to model all fingers within the budget

Creativity or mum knows best

My mums just recently well 'retired' i suppose from working with various austistic children in a number of primary schools seeing as how creativity seems to be so tied into the education system, for better or worse, I thought I'd pick her noggin for a few of her thoughts on the whole arrangement.

If general education can quash any creativity out of an individual, guiding them down a linear path preset when the UK was more industrial than it is today the effects this has upon an autistic child must be huge,
Many of the children had been expelled from state school, most of the time simply for struggling with the curriculm, and thrust into private school the parents assuming throwing money at it would solve the problem, coupled with the parents expectations and they way the curriculum is drilled into children the oppurtunity for any creativity is long lost

The curriculm often hindered development of learning let alone encouraging any creativity, one topic would be covered a week then you would move on to the next. This topic could not be revisited even if the child showed a genuine interest for it interestingly this would apply for all subjects across the board not just the 'proper' subjects of Maths, English etc.

Coupled with an extremely rigid curriculm guidelines enusring they must stick to that completely without going off on a tangent despite any positive benefits it would have upon learning, for example studying insects in grass it would be completely discouraged for the teacher to take the children out into the field opposite to draw the insects in the grass

So you can see currently the way this stuff is taight is so rigid and unbending it often hinders itself let alone any oppurtunity that may arise for creative or abstract thought

UnrealED: Praise indeed

Righty I've been idly playing around with the UnrealED toolset that comes with Gears of War and UT3 for aroun d two weeks so i'd thought I'd post my findings and musings on the whole thing,

The Same Subtractive blockworld editing is still present here but you can now choose to build a map using additive brushes, for previous versions this would have been madness it was hard enough getting a correctly dimensioned room without having to create it from 6 brushes, but the new geometry mode pulls up a 'mini-max' style interface that allows you to select the verts, poly and edges of a brush allowing you to quickly resize and shape it, there are even options for modifiers and soft selections and because ALL objects now clip to the same grid you don't spend time carefully snapping them all to the same grid scale

Another nod towards Max is the inclusion of a massive directional widget, this can be toggled for scale and rotation and is a nice change over selecting a brushes tiny verts, holding down shift to move and have it shoot off into the void because your fingers had slipped. These can be scaled in uniform or non-uniform directions

Building upon previous versions is the new asset browser through this dialog window you can view absolutely everything in the engine from animation to UT map music all of which fire up there respective viewers, its really nice to be able to load up a custom model and be able to look at it ingame without compiling (im looking at YOU source engine) then dump it into your map. Being able to view all of the assets that would make up a map in one place quickly and easly is a huge boon to the speed you work. It also displays the various entities in a map logically sorted in a folder tree allowing you to quickly alter a large number at a time

Additionally importing stuff into the engine couldn't be easier models can imported from .ase or .obj with all of the smoothing groups and other details normally lost still intact, additionally theres no hardlimit on the amount of polygons you can import so models in there millions are doable although why you would want to im not sure. Accepted texture formats are even broader the expected .tga and .bmp extensions are there but being able to import raw .psd files is a huge time saver.

But the best thing has to be the material editior, by simply plugging in some rough textures and connecting up some boxs you can quickly make some really nice looking shaders and all without any shader programming knowledge. Stuff like water, oil spills, blobs of jelly anything that would require knowledge writing complex shaders can be created in the material editior. Im pretty sure this is the tool that will make a good map stunning

I've not even mentioned the kismet scripting engine or any of the sound stuff but yeah colour me impressed

Im gonna post up some of the problems I've found with it later on, although to be honest there not many

Shucksheesh!

Finally managed to get my nowhere near complete Tombie into the Unreal 3 engine, left is ingame while right is the Editors built in model viewer with snazzy self-shadowing. Also the material system is freaking awesome, can see that becoming being pretty useful.

S'odd hit a snag in me modelling, for some reason the UV window shows up pure white, clicking anywhere or anything does nowt I've tried exporting the file then reimporting it in various formats but still the same, pretty annoying and im sure its a pretty easy problem to solve.

Also now im happy with me mesh I've decided to start working on the alternate versions first, this way hopefully will allow me to iron out any modelling or texturing issues for the final version - of which I've already uncovered loads so i guess its working.

The first texture variant im working on is a zombie version of me self or if you will a Tombie (Arf!)

Also: QWAYKE!1

Restart....

God damnit - Got back from Gamecity a few days ago now - might post up me thoughts but tbh too many people have done it and most have done it better than i could - plus no one is reading this...

ANYWAY my coat got nicked, the one i was modelling and my hair is longer and black so i've decided to start me model from scratch and learn from my mistakes

Education

Good grief Education, as someone who seems to have struggled with it most of my life im not sure im qualified to provide any real insight into it, but whatever.
Theres a school of thought that suggests modern teaching methods and the whole education system in general is crushing any creativity out of children from day one and moulding them to follow the 3 constants of maths, science and history, not sure about history in that one but you get the gist of it.

This stems back to Britains modern industrial roots where having an adept knowledge of maths or science provided a quick 'grab bag' of skills to surive in this exciting new world of cotton mills and pig iron fast foward to today where most of the UK's skill base is primarly service based and it still more or less applies today. But there is certainly a feeling of rank and prestige applied to certain subjects whereupon others are looked down upon as useless or even uneccesary for an education.

I'l' be honest and say that EVERY subject i took throughout primary school all the way up to Sixth form has done diddly squat in helping me with the course, all the skills and knowledge i apply on a day-to-day basis getting whatever relevant work done was learnt at home on my own not at school which im realsing more and more was a complete waste of time.

Even subjects I would have thought useful even neccesary such as art where rendered useless by the muted style in which they were taught 'Just express yourself children' a phrase i heard all to often is great for someone who just wants to play around with paint but not someone who wants to learn the fundemental basics of art this of course wasn't helped by a frankly shit teacher just counting the days to her retirement .

This concept terrfies me, if something you spend nearly decades of your life attending to apparently 'prepare you for the real world' dosen't even apply to your particular life, just some gormless business student, then whats the point?