5000 views! LannyBoom! Skyway!

 Enormous Blogodile has reached 5000 views!

 Following on from the previous post about the pixel drawings I did for Lanny here's some extra stuff.

The night before his grad show performance he asked me to do a few images of his head with different mouth shapes so that it could be animated in real time as he spoke into the mic during his master of ceremonies slots.

Here they are:

 It was very funny when Lanny's mac crashed twice during his performance :D but otherwise it was great, as was the rest of the show. Here's some footage of it taken on my phone. It's not great quality but you should get the idea:

 And here's some proper footage of it filmed by people who can use a camera:



 Also we've finished our 12 weeks of production on Skyway for uni. We've got a demo trailer coming soon but there's a fair bit of new stuff on our indieDB page (http://www.indiedb.com/games/skyway). So check it out! bye

Skyway update 25th April 2011 EXTRA!

 We've been doing a lot of stuff in UDK over the past few weeks, working out some of the different gameplay      elements such as moving water cubes, putting in a skybox, checkpoints etc. It's all very important stuff but unfortunately there's not much to show of it, but here's a screenshot of the skybox in engine. It looks really close as there are no distance markers and the sun is slightly too big:

 But anyway here's some more interesting stuff. I finished rigging and weight painting Oscar. It's not perfect but it needs to be out of the way so it'll do for now. Here he is posed:

 We've also been working on prop assets to decorate the pier and it's surroundings. Here are some potted bushes:

 A lovely welsh daffodil:

 A life ring (not finished):

 and a pair of beach umbrellas:

 Not much else for Skyway really, any other stuff is on our indiedb and/or facebook page so check them out :)
 In other news I've started trying to model Simon and Lewis from the Yogscast as I'm thinking about animating a few short segments from the Yogpod in 3D as they attract a lot of attention on Youtube and could be good promotion for EB. Also it's all good practice for modelling, facial rigging, character design and other stuff.
 So here's Simon's head so far:

 The new Doctor Who started on Saturday and was great. I'm not sure if everyone picked up on the Easter Island joke but I thought it was very funny. Really like Matt Smith's Doctor.

Bye

Skyway Update 15th March 2011

 So basically since last time we have been building our characters. There are four characters in our demo and four of us so we modelled one each. I took Oscar, Rich took Mr. Docherty, Ollie took Hooch and Ben was given Mrs. Docherty.

 Here's the finished model of Oscar with his texture applied: 

 And here are the UV and Diffuse maps, I'm pretty pleased with the unwrapping, especially on the head, but there were a few mistakes I noticed on the way:

 With our style the character's are mainly block colours but I added a painted hair texture and subtle cotton and denim textures on the clothes to make it a bit more interesting.

 Next we started rigging our characters following some amazing tutorials and below you can see the rigged Oscar with its controls. Just need to paint the weights and do some blend deformers for facial animation:

 Also we've been making a bit more progress with getting things into UDK. Here's Oscar (with collision) and a non-opaque water cube that you can swim through:  

 You can see the other characters at our indiedb profile as well as other stuff.

That's all for now. BYE.

Skyway Update 9th February 2011

 So last week we finished our pre-production paper work and handed it in and yesterday Ben and Ollie did the  presentation on where we are now with the project. It all went pretty well.

 Here's what I've been up to over the last couple of weeks, Oscar's Rocketcycle.
DON'T FORGET TO CLICK THUMBNAILS FOR THE FULL SIZE IMAGES.
This is the final colour design for Oscar's bike (I think I posted the first colour variants in my last update):

 Here are the texture maps I made for the 3D Maya model. Each one's real size is 2048 x 2048. 

On the left is the original UV map. I had never really unwrapped a model properly so had to learn as I was doing it but, as the model and colour scheme are fairly simple, I was able to use planar mapping for almost all the parts. The rocket was the only part that needed more than one side of mapping.

 The middle is the diffuse (I think) map (the black and white wireframes are transparent), hopefully you can start to what the parts are a bit more easily here.

 Finally is the specular map, which I only recently found out the purpose of. It is basically a grey-scale map that determines the amount that parts reflect light with black being not at all and white being completely and everything in between.     

 This is the 3D model with the UV map applied, roughly showing the wireframe although for some reason some areas seem to have a lot more lines than they should... The model has around 3500 faces (not sure if that equates exactly to polys) which I am pretty pleased with:

 The model with diffuse and specular maps added. Essentially the finished model:

 Here it is in a scene I made (textured by Ollie L) as a kind of mock-up of Skyway's title screen that we used in our presentation:

 That's it for now. Hopefully a lot more actual stuff coming soon as the project gets properly going.
And for fuck sake join our Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Skyway/161571303886228?ref=ts

BYE

Find us on Facebook...

 We now have a public Facebook page for people to follow the progress of SkyWay.
So like it and join us on our journey :D
 Also there will be a new widget on the Blogodile for SkyWay's Facebook escapades. And we are working on getting an IndieDB page on the go as well.

That's all for now
Goodbye

Skyway update 30th Nov 2010

 We had our presentation today and it went really well. Ben and Ollie did the talking and really sold the game I think.
 Me and Rich spent the weekend building a prototype of our swimming/platforming gameplay to show in the presentation and you can see it here.
 Since my first Skyway post I have started and finished the redesigned pier couple, who are currently named Mr and Mrs Docherty:

Their proportions are slightly more humanoid now.

I have also designed Oscar's rocketcycle using classic, current and concept bicycles as reference. Here is the design in three different colours (the rocket is the thing behind the seat):

Pretty fancy I'm sure you'll agree.

More to come soon hopefully.

Bye

Greetings from Skyway...

 Ok, finally a look at what I've been doing for my Final Major Project over the last six+ weeks.
I'm working with Ben Williams, Rich Coughlin and Ollie Ludgrove (their work on the project can be found on their respective blogs) and we're still working on a team name.  

 I'm not going to talk about the game idea itself right now, not because it's a secret I just can't be arsed to explain. But it's called Skyway.
The initial idea was inspired by the superb artwork of Josh Keyes (whom(?) I have linked before) but has grown and taken reference from many other places and is now its own project.

 Here is an early environment moodboard I put together (featuring some of Keyes' paintings) to give a quick impression of the setting of the game:

 Next is my drawing of the current main character design. His name is Oscar Rocketcycle.

Inspired by: various Okami characters, Lupin III characters, James (and the Giant Peach (animated version)), Pocoyo, the Team Fortress 2 engineer and, the one that everyone seems to pick up on, Tintin. 

 This is Hooch, with and without shades. He is a bike shop owner and "dark green water" brewer.

This is an updated version of a design that was initially pitched as the main character but was deemed "too bad (evil, not shit)". 

We liked the character though so we changed his role and kept him in.

Can't really remember what his face is inspired by as it started as a doodle on my dissertation handbook.

His body, and possibly personality, is inspired by Flip and the other casuals from This is England 86, one of my favourite characters from the series.

 More character concepts. These two are the owners of the pier Oscar will have to rebuild.
References include Punch and Judy, Richard and Judy and Statler and Waldorf from the Muppet Show although they ended up looking like Paul Daniels and Germaine Greer.
I'm going to alter their design soon to make their proportions a bit more realistic as they are currently a bit too cartoony.  

 Next up is a concept of the style of the sky. The game is set in the sky so the player will be seeing a lot of it, therefore it needs to be interesting and pleasant to look at.
It's based on the battle scene backgrounds of the GBA Pokemon games and currently is actually a bit too similar so it will need a bit of playing around with before it is put in our game.

 Finally something on the technical side. I found a stupidly helpful Youtube channel by Andrew Klein which has a lot of Maya tutorials that are relevant to our project. Plus he sounds like JD from Scrubs.

Anyway, following one of these tutorials, I have had a go at normal mapping from a 3D model.

 The image below doesn't show a great success in terms of its usefulness but it does show the idea working. It is a single polygon plane (a completely flat square) but after applying the normal map and placing lights it looks lumpy and 3D so hopefully we can use this technique later on for other things.

That's all for now. More coming soon.

BYE