Ken ya till what it is yit?

 Just a sneaky peek of what I'm doing when I should be finishing the Mortal Kombat picture. It's a pretty big task this time and this is only early work, maybe you can guess what it is: 

Done in painter using oils. 

Keep them peeled. Bye.

WRC Competition

 I entered this competition. Not expecting anything to come of it really. If I win the prize won't mean much to me either as I'll be living in Cardiff anyway but yeah the other parts are cool and the runners up win power tools which my Dad will love!
 I submitted it last night before getting any feedback from people but had some good pointers afterwards. It's practise with Photoshop anyway and forced me to learn how to do clean cut edges and vector stuff properly so here's my entry:

 Hopefully you can see the Welsh flag theme... or not. I'll do an update if I hear anything back about this. I doubt it'll be for a while anyway.

 When I go to bed I keep telling myself that when I wake up I will spend the next day continuing my Mortal Kombat picture but I just end up playing games. I'm determined to finish it though so more soon...

 I completed Deus Ex 3 on hard on my first playthrough (although I only beat one boss because she glitched). It's a really great game and definitely worth playing, although I doubt I will go through it again, at least for a very long time. One thing I noticed was how conservative the poly count on anything aside from the main characters was. It's still a good looking game though.

 I'm beginning to learn the German national anthem from watching the Formula 1.

 Anyway bye.

P.S. I finally discovered this song and it's too catchy:

 

Car Wars

 Check this out if you like Star Wars/the environment/cool stuff/Greenpeace/clever branding and marketing.

Basically I barged into this without learning the facts but I don't care.

CLICK HERE TO SAVE THE WORLD VIA STAR WARS


Give it a go.


More drawing soon. I've been busy playing Deus Ex 3 and sorting out moving into a new house but I'm going to get on with it tonight.


BYE


P.s. Here's a picture of Darth Vader I did as one of the first things on my Wacom (Intuos3 A4) about 2 years ago:

Devlin

 Just did this quick drawing as a break from my MK picture. It looks a bit too much like Westwood in the thumbnail but I'm happy with it:

 Check out Devlin's album 'Bud, Sweat and Beers' it's pretty awesome, some really great tracks on it.
Bye.

Raiden Loses

 Last post I mentioned I was working on an original picture. It's taking quite a while but I hit a checkpoint today so I thought I'd post a snippet of what I've done. Here's two versions lit differently:

 It's Raiden from Mortal Kombat if you couldn't tell. More coming soon.
Feedback wanted as always.
Bye.

Jenson Button

 After today's return of F1 and Jenson Button's impressive race I thought it was time I actually did the picture I mentioned a few weeks ago. In the final Grand Prix before the mid-season break in Hungary, Jenson won the race. It was his 200th F1 race as well as being exactly 10 years since his first F1 win, at the same track, so it was the perfect opportunity to draw him. But I couldn't be bothered. 

 Today, in Belgium, Button rose from 13th place to 3rd and ended up on the podium so I had to draw him. Anyway here it is:  

 It's kind of a partner piece to the one I did of Lewis Hamilton a few weeks ago but I expect they look shit together. There's a few things wrong with it but it ended up pretty good, especially for the short time it took, so I'm happy.
 I've been working on another fairly big, original picture that will hopefully be finished and up sometime this week. I think it's looking pretty good so far.
 Comment and the usual. Thanks. Bye.

Batman Returns

 More Batman copying. This is Batman from the "The Batman" series. I don't really know much about the cartoon series' but this is my favourite design of the character in the cartoons. The character design is by Jeff Matsuda, the same guy who did the amazing Jackie Chan Adventures series which I used to love.

 Anyway here it is: 

Not 100% happy with it, here's the original:

Going to do a couple more of this character soon.
Also you can now Google +1 my blog posts now if you're that way inclined.
Bye.

nana nana nana nana na... BATMAN!

 More digital drawing practise. This time I decided to draw Batman. Again it's a copy of another picture. I think I'm gradually picking things up and learning from doing this so it's all good:

 Here's the original:

 Let me know what you think. More soon hopefully. Bye.

P.S.


"Del... Let's go!" hahaha

Bit of drawing practice

 I decided I really need to practise drawing again and was particularly inspired by Feng Zhu's incredible design videos.

 I thought I'd post what I've done so far over the past month or so, it's not much but there you go.

Here's one of Boba Fett in a simplified costume: 

 

  I was planning to draw Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button and after Lewis won the German grand prix I drew him. I couldn't be bothered to draw Button but, as he had a great win the week after, I might come back to it. I was going to do a more detailed drawing but thought this looked cool:

 

 Finally a quick drawing of Gaz from Modern Warfare, great character design and voice acting as ever. Unlike the other two this is a straight copy from an in-game screenshot. I'm still trying to get my photoshop brushes nailed and this was practise for that, among other things. 

 

 Thanks for looking. Let me know what you think. BYE

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

16 Bit Lanny

 I've been doing some more work for Lanny. This time he wanted three 16-bit style pictures of himself in Mario, Sonic and Link outfits. I'm not sure what he wants them for, possibly the music Grad Show, but here they are (font is aansa): 

 I'm glad I copied the 8-bit Mario last year to give me a very basic idea of pixel art as drawing with a small amount of pixels is a lot harder than I would have thought. I found you have to really think carefully about what goes into each pixel to make it readable at such a small size and with so few pixels to actually use. Noses are particularly hard it seems. But yeah I think they're ok.  

 In other news I got the new Mortal Kombat which is amazing. I'm not very good at fighting games but I thought the demo for MK was great so bought it. I've played through the story now. It's weirdly done and very very cheesy, like the films, but I think it suits the game and its 90s roots.
 The final boss fight against Shao Kahn is a piece of shit and instead of being a culmination of the rest of the game, where the player uses all the skills they have learnt to beat them, you basically have to cheat and run away. If you fought real people in MK the same way you have to fight Shao Kahn everyone would hate you... I tend to be a lot more critical of things when they're really difficult and take me an hour to beat!
 But the game is great so buy it if you're thinking about it. I've mainly been playing as Sindel. Hurry up and get PSN working Sony!

 That's all. Skyway update coming tomorrow or later probably. Check out and like the Facebook page (link on the right hand side here). Also click the Enormous Blogodile like button at the top of the blog, if you want :)
bye

Lost Planet 2 (!!!WARNING!!! VERY BORING POST !!!WARNING!!!)

 I treated myself to some post-dissertation game buying. Three games on Monday (3 for 2 pre-owned deal in Game) and another one on Friday.
 So I bought:
 Dark Void, which is fucking laughable, going on what I've played so far. Even the guy who served me said it was shit but it was basically free and I seemed to remember Yahtzee saying it had some redeeming features in his ZP review of it. But yeah, it's shit in just about every way, although as usual this can be fairly entertaining in itself.

 I also got White Knight Chronicles. It's an RPG and I usually don't really bother committing to them, as I know how long they take and I don't like turn based combat, but it's by Level 5 who are amazing so I got it.
 It's pretty cool and the environments and monsters are cool although the combat is slow, the story is the same as every RPG and the lip-syncing is terrible.
 You get to create your own support character. I called mine Roy and made him look like a retard. He is completely out of place next to the clean cut anime characters and just stands around staring at things during cutscenes. I'll try and get a picture of him. I got a picture of him. Here is a picture of him (taken on my phone):

 The final game of the first three was Lost Planet 2. I'd played a bit of the demo before as well as the original game on Xbox 360, which I really enjoyed. It is a fucking odd game. I knew from the demo that it was online co-op orientated but I was also expecting an actual single-player campaign to carry on the story.
 There is a campaign option at the main menu but you set it up as you would an online game, replacing other players with AI bots, but in the actual game your team-mates are given mock online ID names like sharkboy123 or whatever. This is weird. Also you can't pause the game. For my second attempt at the game I HAD TO USE GOOGLE TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO PLAY ACTUAL SINGLE PLAYER!!!
 Anyway, there are cutscenes and a kind of overall story but the player character is literally no one. From what I have played you play as 'a snow pirate'. There are a lot of snow pirates. There are two snow pirate character models. They look almost exactly the same... So there is no characterisation in a partially narrative driven game which is very very odd.
 Otherwise it looks great and the gameplay is pretty much the same as the first game, which is good news. The giant monsters are awesome as well.

 Finally on Friday I bought the original Lost Planet on PS3 which I have been mostly playing since. I fucking love the kind of Japanese retro arcadey style action, also seen in Vanquish and MGS3(?)(ish).
 The story is also pretty cool in that it isn't completely generic, the player character is called Wayne as opposed to Jack McGunfist for example. The characters are good and some are a lot deeper than in many games, which is why the lack of characters in LP2 is so odd. I found Basil was surprisingly well characterised, especially for a smaller role.
 Definitely check out Lost Planet (I got it for £8) and, if you like the gameplay, Lost Planet 2. If you like RPGs give WKC a go and, wait for it ... Dark (A)Void... lolololol. Oh dears.

 I think 2011 is going to be a good year for games. Lots of great titles lined up including L.A. Noire and Mortal Kombat (both of which I have pre-ordered). I'm sorry to say that you're not going to enjoy Battlefield 3 as much as CoD regardless of what you might think after seeing the trailers. You heard it here first. That's not to say it's going to be bad.

 April Skyway update coming very soon as well as something else I'm working on that will hopefully turn out to be quite interesting. But then I would say that.
Bye.

3D Glasses for Tom

 Tom asked me to model some 3D glasses in Maya for his advertising FMP website. Here's the model with the different designs (created and textured by Tom):



 The arms can fold in as well but you can't see that here. It didn't take too long to model but I did smooth it a lot which, it turns out, makes unwrapping UVs a fair bit more complicated. Tom's happy with them though and he's paying me with vodka so it's all good.

 Tom's behance: http://www.behance.net/TomGriffiths

BYE

I've been modelling boxers for Paul...

 Yes that's right, I've been making a 3D model of a boxer for Paul and his final project.
It's fairly low poly I think (just over 1100 faces). I made it following a great tutorial on body modelling on Youtube and it took me two sittings which I'm pretty pleased with.
 I've also textured them with two colour schemes (a black guy with black shorts and a white guy with blue) and done a basic rig and weight painting.

 Anyway here are some shots of the boxers posed and with greyscale variants of the original textures:

 

 

 I'm pleased with them and hopefully they'll help Paul with his work.

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