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

Cats

Lanny asked me to design a front and back cover for his new EP that had to have simple colours on as well as "a weird cat or animal or something" so here they are. There were a few variations of both covers, some of which I preferred over the final ones, but Lanny liked these best so they're what we went for.

The front:

The back:

Yeah so there we are. Amazing really. 

Here's some links:

Lanny's EP ad thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QcZqIUvIQo

Lanny's Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/lannyboom (where you can also see my classic drawings "Cat moustache man" as the profile picture and "Man having a poo" next to the track "She's a Conflict Diamond")

and finally

My image for his christmas track: http://theenormousblogodile.blogspot.com/2010/11/farverxmas.html 

Enjoy. bye.

Mein Kraften

 I have spent a significant amount of the last couple of days watching a series of videos about the game Minecraft by Yogscast on Youtube. They are very funny on the face of it but also tell a superb and unique story of discovery set in the world of Minecraft as well as introducing the game to people, like me, who aren't/weren't aware of the depth of the game and all it has to offer.
 The videos have already sold the game to Pete and Rich and I think I might be making a purchase soon. It's hard to say much without spoiling both the videos and the game itself so I really recommend watching them. I must have lost about ten hours watching them over the past two days and I'm not close to bored yet.

 Anyways here's the links:
The first series starts here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UdEFmxRmNE
And the "Survival Island" series starts here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcsN3d7eKgY

 There are more videos after this but it's best to watch them in order otherwise some parts won't make sense. Genuinly impressed and haven't seen any video game commentary (if that is what it is) this good before. It's like a culmination of contemporary media: video games, youtube, podcasts, comedy, tv series and plenty more. Glad it's got so many views and so much positive feedback it's just a shame about all the adverts...

 Enjoy. BYE  

Update: If you're put off by the adverts and using Google Chrome (which you should be) install the AdBlock extension and it will save you a lot of grief.

2011

A belated image for the new year (as I actually went out and celebrated this one):

Last year's for those who missed it, unlikely as that may be.
BYE