20,000 VIEWS!!!

 Sometime yesterday we hit 20,000 views! What's even better is that the second 10,000 took half the time to get as the first. Hopefully that will continue to be the case. There's no revamp like last time unfortunately as  I can't be bothered and think it looks good enough at the moment.

I really love having the Blogodile here to promote myself and my work and I actually do have fun coaxing poos out of it, I just wish I had more time to focus on it consistently. I'm going to put a lot more effort into promoting the blog via Twitter and Facebook from now on.

In other new I'm currently helping Rory out again with some design stuff for an app he and a few of his friends are making so will be posting some of that soon.

And of course, the big one.

Congo War Child.

I'm currently working on getting a gameplay video together in celebration of reaching 20,000 views.

The mechanics are all in place but most of the current art is place-holder and there are no animations so I don't want to turn people away from it because it looks shit.

Here's a screenshot of the game in it's current form as some evidence that I'm actually doing something:

CWC is the piece of work my main focus is on at the moment and I'm intending for it to stay that way until it's done (mainly to prove to myself that I can see a bigger project all the way through).

Anyway thanks for reading.

bye

AudioVineyard

So unfortunately it's been a while since my last post as I haven't done much work on Congo War Child or anything else, but here's something new! I've done a few cartoon illustrations for my good friend Rory's new website AudioVineyard.net. It's a website selling royalty-free music and is amazing and definitely worth a look so go and look. Go on.

Anyway here's the images all put together:

And here's a screenshot of them working on the website:

Really happy to have my work on display in another place online and glad I could help Rory out.

More news soon hopefully, been really busy in work and out but really want to get the ball rolling with my creative work again, especially with CWC.

That's all for now.

BYE  

September Update (Short and Sweet)

 Just a quick run-through of some of the stuff I've been up to recently...

1st is a tattoo design for one of my mates at work:

2nd is a business card design for Lanny (both sides are combined to make this image):

3rd is my first ever published piece of work! My advert for the Camera Centre, where I now work (www.cameracentreuk.com/). I've done a few bits of design at work including posters, web banners etc:

That's all for now. Quorn is fucking disgusting. Bye

Spillin the beans (Part 1)

 It's been a quite a while since my last post. I've got a job now and have been working on stuff in the rest of my free time so that's why! But here I am again with a big update specifically about my work on Project Steel, which has since become 'The Seeker'.

 We have an IndieDB page to keep you up to date and you can find that by clicking here.

So yeah this post is going to be a recap on where I was up to in the design process of the character Spillins last time and, from there, cover his progression into a 3D model in-engine. There will be some ground I've covered before but hopefully enough new stuff to be interesting. Aww here it goes...

Character Design

 With a pair of sketches of Spillins that Pete drew last year as a starting point I began work on the character design concept drawing. Using reference points such as famous historical explorers, american mountain men, and Yoda, the drawing took shape and finally ended up as the image you can see above.

 While designing Spillins I made a conscious effort to make him as recognisable from a distance as possible. As he is such a mysterious character and will occasionally appear at long distances unannounced it is important that his design catches the player's eye so that they don't miss him. The two main factors I took into account were his silhouette and his colour palette. 

Giving him a large rucksack, bulky figure, and bald head combined with a red coat with white fur (based on an image of the aforementioned mountain men I found) will hopefully mean he stands out against both the white mountains and the dark green forest settings of the game. 

Orthographic Drawing

 With the concept drawing complete the next step was to create an orthographic drawing of the character to aid the transition into a 3D model.

 I suffer from the problem of not being able to draw the same thing twice so, as you can imagine, I'm not a massive fan of this type of drawing. Luckily however I knew before I started that I would be modelling Spillins so I didn't have to go into a serious amount of detail as I could visualise the missing pieces in my head, having come up with the character's design myself. Had I had to pass the drawing on to someone else for modelling (or if this is the case in the future) I would have gone into a lot more detail to make sure they understood exactly how he is meant to look.

 Having said all that, the orthographics were fairly painless to draw and I had a good image in my head of how Spillins was going to look as a 3D model.

3D Modelling

 I was so glad to get into the task of modelling Spillins. As much as I'm satisfied by finishing a drawing, it doesn't come close to modelling, which I find constantly rewarding.

 There's little to say about modelling the main bulk of the character's body, arms, and legs as it was so trouble-free and quickly finished. The video below shows the body at an almost finished stage with a placeholder head:

 Once the main body was finished I moved on to Spillins' hands, which turned out to be the most frustrating but ultimately rewarding part of the model. Although the topology isn't great I'm incredibly happy with the shaping of the hand:

 Next was probably the most important part of the model, the head... The following image shows the head throughout the process growing from a random bunch of polygons into something more recognisable:

 And here's the head at this point on a partially accessorised body (rendered in Maya):

 After quite a few hours of developing and tweaking the head is complete. Following that more accessories are added and the model is complete and reading for engine testing:

 And again with the wireframe visible (don't forget to view the pictures in full size!):

 I'm pretty pleased with the model's poly count (weighing in at just under 4000 faces) but obviously still have much to learn when it comes to low-poly game modelling (and modelling in general of course). Since finishing the model I've found some great topology pictures of Assassin's Creed Brotherhood characters which have insanely low poly counts and which I will be using very closely as reference points for future character modelling. 

 To wrap up this part of the development of Spillins I give you him in-engine (UDK) with a rather jazzy sandstone texture (unfortunately not two-sided as his bag strap is invisible):

 I hope you agree that he's looking good and hope that this post offers a bit more insight than usual haha! Next time I will hopefully have the model textured and possibly rigged, but that's all for now.

BYE

Project Steel Character Design

 Finally finished the character concept drawings I've been working on for the past few weeks. They are for Project Steel, a game I am working on with a few friends. So yeah, I'll let them do the talking:

Captain Hawk

Adam Adams (First Mate)

Gunner (waiting for a name)

Rascal (Quartermaster)

Twin Deckhands (waiting for names as well)

Spillins (Mystery Man!)

 Very pleased with how these have come out. The recent drawing practise has paid off I think.

Let me know what you think. BYE

Weaver from Black Ops

 After the reveal trailer for Black Ops 2 I played through the original again. It's great in some ways and appalling in others. Here's some more warm-up art, this time it's of Weaver, one of the support characters in Black Ops. He's one of my favourite characters even though he doesn't really do much of note but yeah here he is (Pete's gonna bust my balls for not doing the character art yet haha):

 I don't like the fact that it looks like it took a lot less time to make than it did but I do like that it looks messy and slightly unfinished and the fact that it was done in Photoshop shows through. Anyways now for some proper work.
 Also new Minecraft video coming next week.
BYE

March 2012 Update (with added Star Wars)

 Hello.
It's been too long since I posted anything and I've lost the knack of starting a post with a load of bullshit so I'm just going to post pictures and tell you what they are etc... (Don't forget to right-click > new tab if you want to see the images in full resolution)

 I decided to add a lightsaber to my graduation photo and it received a massive amount of positive feedback on Facebook (I graduated last year with a 2:1 with hons in Computer Games Design):

 Then my friend Dan of Toxic Games (creators of Q.U.B.E) asked me to do one for him! I'm in the Q.U.B.E credits as a tester! My first credit in a game :) It's a great game and you should definitely check it out. You can find it on Steam and loads of other places.

 Similar stuff again here although a lot more recent. A friend asked me to Star Wars up some photos of his brother and nephew, both of whom love the films, so here they are. I'm very happy with how they turned out and they are probably some of my best photo manipulating in Photoshop so far:

Jack

and Jamie

  Next up is an image I have only finished tonight. It's a Photoshop painting of an angry parrot, created as a promotional image for my friend Steve aka Phrazer for his soon to be released track 'Angry Parrot'. Visit his Soundcloud and listen now!

 This last picture is a WIP of a creepy Mario drawing I am slowly doing. I made the mistake of posting it on Facebook as it is here and got some really positive feedback meaning that I decided it was good enough like this. I really want to finish it though:

 In other artwork related news I had my first potentially paid commission for a website header but it fell through and they used their own design. I was very happy with the work I did and it showed progression in my design skills but I won't be posting the work on here as it might act as promotion for their website and basically fuck that. I learnt quite a bit from the experience though which is great!  

 Finally my two housemates (Pete and Ollie) and I have been playing a lot of multiplayer Minecraft on the Exiled Gaming server and have made some really cool stuff. We have set up a Youtube channel for videos of our adventures on the servers as well as some up-and-coming building instruction videos by me.

 Here's our first video. I'm blocodile and I don't have a mic (subscribe, like, comment, share etc):

 Hope you like what I've had to show. Hopefully Blogodile droppings will become more frequent again soon. Please like, follow, comment and all that stuff if you feel like helping me out :) 

 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

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 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