no skills required

Quick, pointless animation I did using the plaster filter in Photoshop.
I completed Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard last night. It is by far the shittest game I have played for a very long time. Mine and Steve's running commentary/analysis would have most hopefully made the developers cry.
The one thing that made the process bearable was the knowledge that, should I break into the industry, there is no way I could possibly make anything as pathetic. By the end I was physically feeling sick of it, not even joking, not even exaggerating.
Luckily I got a preowned copy for a fiver and it kept crashing. When this happened I was greatly uplifted. I don't think this is the response the developers were hoping for. Nor the relief of knowing that I will never have to play it again once the credits rolled.
It's supposed to be a parody blah blah blah but it was not funny in the slightest. Never has the term "one-liner" made so much literal sense. All we heard was "This is getting riduculous" over and over and over and over and over. And over. We noticed a hundred, if not more, missed opportunities for humour or commentary on video games whilst playing through, none of which were realised.
I did watch the credits, purely to make a mental hitlist of the fucking idiots. I noticed to my unsurprise that there were only two memebers of the testing department.
It's been almost 12 hours and I'm still wound up by the game. Characters using variations of quotes from Die Hard and Star Wars in the final boss battle got to me the most.
There were some cut-scene sections set in "the real world", but they weren't, they were CG as well. How. Fucking. Stupid. Can. You. Get????????? Surely it would be far cheaper, not too mention far more engaging and funny, to just have live action scenes. JESUS.
Seriously Vicious Cycle never make a game again. I know it said Matt Hazard will return... but don't you fucking dare.
BYE.

Yesssss

Finally handed in my essay today, a week late but I'm happy with it. Think I've exhausted my capacity to analyse Captain Price's moustache.

Anyway enough of that bullshit here's some pictures of my CGI Maya character for the interaction project. He's made up of mainly basic shapes and colours so took very little time to model and texture. Definitely a success in my opinion. BYE.

Captain Price locked up in a Russian Castle...

just struck me as possibly one of the best game pitches in history.

Interaction

I went to a cross course meeting today about a chance to work with people from other courses on a project during the upcoming reading weeks.
I am now part of a group with Charlotte from my class and two Matts from Film and Video (1st year I think).
The idea is to produce a potentially multimedia piece based on the them of interaction.
We bounced around a few ideas before settling on a looping relay with one live action character, one cgi character and one 2D character.
I am going to be doing the 3D character in Maya, while Charlotte does the flash animation and the boys deal with the live action stuff and directing and editing etc I guess.
I think I am going to use my Okami/Tekken character I drew a while ago as he is shaped quite simply and, I think, expresses a fair bit of character in his design:
Hopefully this will turn out to be a good portfolio piece and a bit of fun at least.

Also in other major news: last night I decided to do a digital sketchbook because I need to practise on the wacom and I never bother with a paper sketchbook. Not gonna write any moreBYE.

Ben Newman Part 2

Here's the real Ben Newman: http://bennewmanart.blogspot.com/ .
Lot's of nearly naked womans, I think the image of the ginger rednecks is in the most recent ImagineFX.

Ben Newman

Following Dave's words on best practise I decided to look at the credits of the Timesplitters games and, in particular, the character designers, modellers etc.
A chap called Ben Newman is the lead character artist so I googled him and found the website of a Bristol based illustrator with the same name. Judging by his bio its not the same guy but I really like his pictures and thought he deserved a post so here's the link: http://www.bennewman.co.uk/work.php?id=306
Love that art style. There's a famous bloke who does film opening credit scenes, whose name I could probably find out quite easily, in a similar style.
Anyway, more on the hunt for best practise coming soon. Funnily enough while working on the Maya I started looking at the character models in the Museum in Modern Warfare 2 to see how they were made up so I guess this is along the same lines.

Final Cut FMV

Here's our trailer. Unfortunately compressed rather a fucking lot due to things. Mainly ones I don't understand.
Pretty pleased with it. Music is 'Police in Helicopter' by Congo Natty and Topcat.
So the game idea:
Melvin is a mouse that can turn into an old man. He lives in a big ol' house on top of a huge indestructable pole with only his magical flying pet tiger Sihir for company. When he got Sihir, Melvin mistakenly thought he was a Sumatran tiger so gave him an Indonesian name, he is in fact a Bengal tiger.
Melvin never leaves his home, not because he likes being lonely but because he likes being human, which he can only do in his house.
One day Melvin hears some very loud and irritating sawing coming from below his house. He discovers the noise is coming from a mysterious hooded figure sawing at the base of his pole.
Quite content with his lonliness Melvin is rather annoyed, as you would be, at both the noise and the Hooded Figure's apparent intentions of getting him to come down. Nevertheless he decides to ignore the fruitless sawing (the pole is indestructable remember), mainly by playing his favourite jungle music really loud to drown out the noise, and carry on writing his diaries as normal. That is until He realises Hooded Figure has hired some animal minions to go out into the world to retrieve a set of fabled 'supersaws' which will cut through Melvin's indestructable pole like, well like a normal pole.
So now it's up to Melvin to travel, as a mouse, with Sihir across the world in an attempt to find the supersaws before Hooded Figure's minions so he can live out the rest of his life as a happy recluse.
We haven't thought about the Hooded Figure's identity too much as it wasn't particularly relevant to the trailer and maybe if there was a game it wouldn't even need to be revealed. However we had an idea that it was a woman who, when she was little and before Melvin found the house that enabled him to transform into a human, used to go adventures with him. She is trying to get Melvin down as she doesn't like him be alone and, more importantly, thinks that life as a human isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially when you're lonely.
So, as I've mentioned before, depending on your point of view, the game's win and lose scenarios' roles are potentially reversed. The game over screen will be Hooded Figure successfully getting Melvin out of the house and completion will be him living out his life as a lonely human. I think this could be an interesting take on games' outcome scenario and how the interactive elements of the medium could affect play and story. BYE.

Crit

Crit went ok. Some problems with the file caused some pixelation, distortion etc so some bits looked crappy.
Main point was the unecessary buttercup explosion at the end. And maybe an establishing shot of the house at the start, although that was supposed to be a surprise at the reveal. Also we could have gone for a lighter more varied palette to be more exciting and help amplify the vivid world in which the game is set.
Video up soon. BYE.

...chain round dem neck and gold chops pon dem wrists...

Finished our game trailer and handed it in today. We're both really happy with how it turned out.
Having seen the animations so much they start to show their flaws but I think our audio brings it back up. Very happy with the pacing and flow of the FMV and I think in some places it feels like a proper trailer.
Was playing Infamous earlier on the PS3 and some of the animations were dire, maybe on the same levels as ours but this is a major current gen title we're talking about.
Will post our video tomorrow after the critique and probably some explanation of the story and characters, hope it goes down well.
Need to cut my hair, haven't done it since before christmas and it's over a centimetre long, with mixed responses from the public. BYE.

First Year Maya Project (Primitive Theatre)

Roy is trying to build a wall and Andy's supposed to be helping but instead he's playing on his game boy.
Did this last year with Pete and Ben. We were really pleased with it apart from the sound which got heavily criticised. If the files still exist I'd like to have a go at polishing it off, mainly with the camera work, some of the animation and obviously the sound , as I reckon it will be a good portfolio piece.

"What's the difference between a human and a lump of rotting meat? About a week!"

R-110 from Timesplitters.

I love the Timesplitters series. The developers Free Radical were taken over by Crytek early last year after going into administration. I read somewhere that some of the team went on to form another development company called Pumkin Beach.I really hope Timesplitters 4 is still on the go though.
I love the games' vast collection of characters ranging from a snowman on a magic carpet to a shoal of fish to a man made up of matchsticks with a giant hand for a head. Every character is fully realised and I really like the caricature art style.

The series is also genuinely very funny. Second Sight is another Free Radical game in a very similar style. It's really good as well.

Geoffrey the Gardener

Geoffrey is a gardener who just loves picking buttercups. One day he decides to embark on a buttercup picking marathon.

Geoffrey will appear in the loading screens picking his way across a field full of buttercups. When he picks the last one though, the sky explodes (as shown unposed below).

The original storyboard.

Sihir

Sihir is Melvin's loyal friend and pet magical bengal tiger. He can fly and farts rainbows. Sihir is one of the playable characters, the other being Mouse Melvin. Getting there now :) Looking at how long we've got left we've cut down the number of textured tiger heads from four to two plus one simply textured head for the puzzle scene where Sihir is turned to stone.

Sihir's gonna fuck you up bad. Especially if you're a pelican.

RAAAAARRR!!!!

The title feature: Melvin's Lonely Home

It's all alone on top of a big indestructable pole.

Ctrl + W

Sihir the tiger (melvin's pet)

Just got to do the heads now. We have four different heads for Sihir that we will alternate to show mood rather than rigging it. I can't remember why off the top of my head but there was definitely some justification for doing it that way. Maybe tiger heads are hard to rig...

The top of Sihir's back doesn't line up exactly but it's good enough.

Oh yeah and I did this when I was fucking around on photoshop during the snow.

Hmmmmm...

Looking at Rich's puzzle scene I started wondering why Melvin never turns human on his adventures, so I thought perhaps he can only turn back into a human when he's in the house. That would explain why he wants to stay at home and why he's never human when he leaves.

I also just realised that our game's win condition is the bad ending and the lose condition is the good. Crazy.

At some point I will explain the game's story to hopefully tie all this information into making sense.

Meet Melvin...

Some weird shadow behind his protruding brow.

About to kick some ass.

Fix Up, Look Sharp.

Just got to texture his head now.

Skanky old man hands.

FUCKING FINALLY...

A real character. Untextured Human Melvin.

Looking a bit mousy you could say. Heehee! Job? Go away then.

Had the painters in :P

Put some wallpaper up. It's a bit dark but you get the picture. Also laid down a smart victorian rug but you can't really see that. May need to mess around with the lighting a bit more. Maybe place a dull ambient light without shadows just to add a tad more light.

And some lovely wood panelling.

Just the chair now!

Lighting Melvin's room

With a Directional light pointing through the windows and an elongated Area light facing down into the room from the ceiling.

There wasn't enough light on the assets at the end of the table, especially the front of the radio, so I added another small Area light from the chair facing down the table towards the door.

It took a while and a lot of tinkering to get the balance right but I think this looks good. Hopefully a backdrop behind the radio will get the buttons on top to stand out more, if we decide to use this version of it.

Just need to do the chair and walls now and replace the pen with the textured version and the scene is ready to go.

More Maya? You're spoiling us Ollie!

My version of Melvin's boombox.

Some lovely victorian decor.

Watching The Innocents on Film4 now. Creepy as fuck.

Even more Maya

Melvin's Book.

Melvin's glossy table

Gorilla

Textured Gorilla minion. He's a silverback that's why the back half is white.

Still got a lot to do.

Check out my partner Rich's blog to see more of the production:

http://richardcgd.blogspot.com/

Vomitted Colour

Wanted to do another snow picture for all the snow we had in the night but ended up like this.

I chose thirty or so of my favourite pokemon the other day and Gyarados was one of them, I know it's not an ice type but go away.

Also thought I'd mention that I do read the daily web comic strip Cyanide and Happiness on explosm.net and have done for a long time. It's the only good web comic I've found so far and you should check it out: http://explosm.net/comics

I wonder what John McClane would have to say about all this snow.

Cool snow scene from the awesome Mini Ninjas (not my picture). Also today I thought I'd venture into the world of web comics after watching the Zero Punctuation episode on them. I've done this before and was fankly horrified by what I saw but thought I'd have another go as there must surely be some good stuff out there.

So I went on a web comic list website and immediately clicked on the most badly drawn picture I could find which led me to Victor Daniel's 'The Vanguard', a sci-fi superhero space opera promoted as "Adventures of a team of starfaring heroes protecting the galaxy of the 24th century". Here's the link:
http://webcomicsnation.com/macnut/vanguard/series.php

Right. Hopefully you've a had a nice long read. Clearly what we're looking at is a massive dollop of wank. I'll admit to having only read a couple of pages but I can safely confirm that it was enough to qualify me as an expert on the subject. My favourite line of dialogue so far is "OH I'M SORRY, DID I INTERRUPT THE IMPENDING MURDER OF MY FRIENDS? WELL, TOO BAD..."
I'm not entirely sure but it seems that only one page is released per week and this, given what one page of 'The Vanguard' consists of, is absurd. Imagine if DC or Marvel released issues page by page, it would be fucking MENTAL. Even more ridiculous/incredibly funny is that the "on next week's page" previews are more descriptive, revealing and coherent than the actual next week's page.
Also, perhaps more terrifyingly, people read it. It's been presented by Daniel at comic conventions and there's even fan art, most of which is far better than the actual comic's artwork incidentally.
However, willing to give the creator (obviously an young fellow in his early teens and heavily into Star Trek and X-Men) the benefit of the doubt, I decided to find out more about his prodigious self and hopefully unearth some information regarding his "self-taught drawing (wait for it...) skills". Turns out he's a 40 year old network support worker from Philadelphia with a Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology... It's been over an hour and I still haven't quite gotten over this.

Thought I'd better post some work today...

So here's the textured hedgehog (gorilla's on his way). It's a bit rough but he's quite far away and moving and only shown for a few seconds.

Celebration of the Snow

Been looking for this sketch for ages. Amazing show that nobody seems to know about.

5 Cool Sampled Songs

Sampled in And I Will by D Double E


Sampled in Out of Space by The Prodigy

Sampled in Watcha Say by Jason Derulo

Sampled in Through the Loop by Pendulum (dunno if it's technically a song but it's one of my favourite films so go away)

Sampled in Hits from the Bong by Cypress Hill

More Wasted Life

Hahaha I just noticed in the bottom one the colours get more vibrant as they get further from the screen. A completely intentional metaphor for television's dilution.