Ah, knew there was something I meant to post here - the progress video of me painting the Hug? image I did last month.

The music used is Ukele De Chocobo from the Final Fantasy IX OST. Done in Painter IX.5 with an Intuos3 Wacom tablet, recorded with the trial of SnapzProX and put together in Premiere Elements 1.0

The facts are these (take a guess at which show I’ve been watching ): after nearly causing my brain to shut down from finishing my showcase I took it easy for a week. Then things got a bit mad when Hayley had to go into hospital and currently I’m trying to get past a brain freeze on my essay (which isn’t as bad as it sounds as I’ve a rather rough hand-written outline on my desk, it’s stringing sentences together that gives me trouble). I’m going to get a rough draft done today and fired off to Jools and sort out my presentation while I’m waiting. It’s currently four days till presentation day, most of which is probably going to consist of raiding my ImagineFX issues for the interviews and articles (they’ve got some seriously useful stuff in there).

I’ve found a couple of interesting bits on the net from the videogames industry in the meantime (well, well I say me, I mean Hayley). First are two spectacular clangers from RockStar games in the box art department (snatching the title from Capcom and Okami’s IGN watermark).

Fingers miscounted on the Grand Theft Auto IV box art and again with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Now I’m not brilliant when it comes to drawing people, particularly with hands, but there is no way that would have slipped under my radar! The artist (or artists, I don’t know if it’s the same guy) either need to be sacked or given an anatomy book.

Secondly; the new Prince of Persia. Well, a Prince of Persia, they’re pulling a bit of a Final Fantasy on us here in more ways than one. They’ve plumed for a more myth- orientated story and setting (using Persian mythology obviously, as a myths and legends geek I’m not complaining) this time round, and the artwork’s bloody brilliant in my opinion. I just can’t get my head around the in-game graphics.

Really not digging the cell shading - it reminds me too strongly of anime games. It works fine for them, and I appreciate the attempt to tie in the artwork with the game graphics, but it just looks wrong. I miss Raphael LaCoste.

Ubisoft have been nice enough to provide a speedpaint vid from the new artist mind you, so I can’t really stay annoyed at them.

All links and images are from Kotaku, with the exception of the painting video which was originally found by Hayley at Jeux France and subsequently tracked down by me over on YouTube (no idea where they were put up originally).

I spend a lot of time online and come across many sites (I saw one just this morning that had an heinous none scrolling background image that made the text unreadable in places), and I narrowed down 3 to do my report on.

Doctor Who S4 Site

I adore this site. Whenever there’s a site redesign I’m usually very sceptical, and take a while to get used to this. This however is wonderful. Appearance wise, it’s… very fitting to the show. I don’t know how to describe it. But boy, it’s easy to find you’re way around, with possible the best roll-down menus I’ve seen on a site (I usually find them annoying, but this is done so well it’s not a bother). Obviously, the content’s relevant seeing as it’s all Doctor Who related - well, most of it, some is news of appearances by the actors - and it’s all organised by episode, then further organised into media type. Storyboards, behind-the scenes stuff, you name it. And thanks to the BBC iPlayer gone are the days where you had to go into a separate window and deal with the pain that was RealPlayer or WMP and it’s constant buffering - it’s all in site. Of course, it’s great when you’re watching short clips, but attempting to watch a Doctor Who Confidential gets taxing after the first 3 refreshes because the buffering stalled thanks to everyone and their dog using it on their lunch breaks. The appearance reflects the series well, as I said earlier. Sci-fi and old-fashioned patterned background going perfectly together in a way you wouldn’t think (in case I’ve made myself unclear again, the sci-fi elements are the menu designs and the info boxes). Suits the philosophy of the series well if you ask me (as you can guess, I’m trying to fudge my way through the last two points on the brief). Anyway, the interactive parts are absolutely brilliant. They don’t throw you when you’re looking for something, they’re as easy to use as using the top menus in an application (with the added bonus of not closing when you roll your mouse off by accident) and I have always found exactly what I was looking for. Only downside is linking to individual parts is a little tricky due to the junk-filled urls (my term for urls with the numbers and question marks in them).

Brickfilmers.com

I can’t give you a link yet since this site isn’t live, but the admin has been posting screencasts showing some of the interactive features for the site (mostly for the staff, and for adding films to the directory). And I happen to know him (online anyway), so I have a bit of insight into this place. Since the site was essentially chosen by us on the forum, the look is inkeeping with who we are and out hobby. The navigation will be easy to use to find your way around, and it has a built in announcement system so important messages can be sent to the whole community without anyone needing to go into the forum. But easily the best bits are the features I mentioned earlier, which you can see in action here and here. He might kill me over possibly using up a chunk of the bandwidth with this, but thankfully there’s the Atlantic between us. What I love most is, like WordPress, it’s just so easy and straight forward (that is not me advertising WordPress btw). I actually thought he might have used till I remembered that he’s one of our best coders in the community.

Amazon.co.uk

I’ll come right out and say it. I absolutely hate this layout. Honestly, this thing’s more cluttered than my room. It’s far too busy and the only thing you’re guarenteed to find is the search bar, which is the only part I use. The old layout wasn’t the most visually pleasing in the world, but at least I could find my way around it if I wanted too. This one, I don’t know where to begin. It’s not the only site that’s like this either - Comet, Apple Store, most online shopping sites use the same basic layout. It’s a supermarket mentality - make it as confusing to find what you want as possible in the hopes that people will find new things they want to buy, and in turn make more money. Which as a design choice makes sense considering Amazon essentially is a virtual hypermarket. Interactive wise, links work when clicked, you can narrow your search by category (as it stands, the search page is easier to find your way around than the homepage. Which doesn’t strike me as good web design - the idea is that visitors can navigate around a site from the word go, not having to flounder around until you find a page that makes reasonable sense). I know you have to display what you’re selling, but layouts like this are really off-putting and make you not want to bother going further.

So, a little short, but that’s my report. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and get Flash to behave.

OK, so I’m exporting my 3d footage for my showcase (it’s not in Flash yet, but I’ve already figured what the code need is and figured the buttons part - hey, I’ve got to do something while I wait).

First here’s the plan I did (warning, large file)

Here’s the notebook closed - the dragon/phoenix thing is the logo I design. If you squint and look at it at an angle you can make out it’s in a loose ‘J’ shape.

Open, and I’ll be honest, my actual notebooks don’t look like this - my sketchbooks do. It should also be noted that my desk is currently a lot messier than this, this is what it’s like when it’s ‘tidy’. After I’ve finished, I can set about making it so I can actually see what my mac is sitting on, and my tablet. *notices the holes on one side* Oh well, that can go in my evaluation as “right royal cock-up”.

Idea is to make this into a scrolling gallery. I know you can drag movieclips, and it should be much of a stretch to do - a mask over the top, very long stip of images, should work out fine.

To my eternal disappointment, I’ve been unable to have Arty speak in this due to his model being, to be blunt, a bloody pain to rig correctly (cloth modifier is also a right pain as well, my work-around currently has a patch on the right arm where you can see the body colour underneath. Maybe I can say he’s got a hole in his sleeve).

I finally have done at least one painting video - but due to SnapzProX being insanely on processing the file and the fact it’s going to take nearly the same time as it did to paint this to import it into iMovie, you won’t see it till later today. Thankfully I was not impeded by my latest moment of clumsiness that almost resulted in broken fingers (good job I’m not left handed). I do have a lovely bruise and cut knuckle to show for it.

My geekiness knows no bounds, as I ended up painting a little Adipose from the first ep of the current series of Doctor Who (the cutest creature I’ve ever seen). Despite them being simle looking, they are not easy to paint (three false starts on this painting are testament to that). Having said that, the times for the two halves of the video add up to 90 minutes, so it’s officially my quickest time on completing a painting. I’ve also come to the conclusion that while I can’t seem to sketch for toffee with my tablet, I can block things out and ’sculpt’ them brilliantly.

I’ve also been paying some attention to one of my personal projects, which is a fantasy setting (at risk of descending into Steampunk and turning into a train wreck if I don’t research that area properly and make sure it slots in) and decidedly dragon orientated. It’s the only thing I’m working that that features them so heavily, so ‘don’t deny me my whimsy’ as Hayley would say.

Most drawings for the different kinds currently inhabit my sketchbooks, but a couple have made their way into Painter, with this one being the most realised:

Ignore the patchy skin colour, I need to look at the workshop on Dinosaur concept art in ImagineFX and see how they did the skin texture (I really need to stop doing this from memory). There was a sketch reference for the head that can probably still be seen if you squint and tilt you head sideways.

Actually that’s a bit of a dumb thing to ask, since I already know. Having discovered that the pathways are different to what we were originally told, it’s cemented my choice more for reading what they are.

Virtual Environments - I’m such a geek for this sort of thing it’s not funny. TV, movies, videogames, it doesn’t really matter. I’ve been fascinated by it since I was 10, and to be honest it’s not really changed much in 10 years.

This game I blame completely for my love of virtual world and creating them. A pure delight to play, with so much detail and nooks and crannies to explore me and my siblings wasted most of the six months it took to finish it sight-seeing. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t much of a story to the game, we ended up making our own up as we went along. So I was ecstatic when I was told of this video’s existence.

Of course it doesn’t mean that I don’t have interest in the AV side of things.

Legend of Zelda Movie Trailer

And the making of the trailer

The fake Legend of Zelda trailer, which is #1 on my list of Best April Fools Pranks Ever. A team of 20 worked on it since the last April Fool’s Day and subsequently made many fans (including a couple of my online friends) very depressed to learn it wasn’t real. I hope they’ve realised they’ve just gone and raised the bar for fanfilms.

And finally anyone with an ounce of interest in this sort of thing should visit the BBC Doctor Who site - they’re going all out this year on the behind the scenes stuff. I’d have embedded the videos but that bloody iPlayer’s a pain in the butt, it took me five restarts to watch through the first Doctor Who Confidential!

Sounds suspiciously like a b-movie/bad horror film title doesn’t it? *ahem*

There’s something about term holidays that leave you wanting to do anything other that what you’re supposed to be doing until the last week. Which is better than my old record of 3 days before you’re meant to come back.

First two weeks were spent - not surprisingly on my part - messing around in 3DS Max and NOT doing my redesign for Arty. Good job I did actually, because I stumbled across a way to still have it smooth in render, but way fewer polygons that works. Well kinda, I’ve yet to do a rig test and see how it behaves.

First thing I did at the start of the holiday was follow up on a conversation between me and Hayley and make a rigged model of Yahtzee in his Zero Punctuation guise, which if anything was a lesson in how to rig a character that essentially has no arms or legs. This is before I found out about the fewer polygons trick so the model has a high polygon count.

Then I sorta leapt of a cliff into deep water. I decided to get started on something I’d been thinking about doing for a while and make 3d models of LEGO pieces and a minifig (the plan for the latter being to make it so it can move like the videogame models). An attempt to import the LDraw model itself and fix it got quickly aborted for having far too many polygons and the mesh surprisingly not joined together in the slightest, and weld the damn thing together was more trouble than it was worth.

Don’t ask about how I’m going to get that ‘hand’ in the arm socket, I’ve not work that out yet.

Making the bricks is easier, until I get to the part when I’m modelling bricks I don’t have and can’t get the measurements for that is. Then it’ll be a different story.
On to the Showcase, or ‘What I Was Supposed But Couldn’t Be Arsed For Two Weeks’. Thanks to said polygon saving trick, Arty now stands at 500 odd polygons whereas before it was about 30,000. He still doesn’t have his hat or cloak yet - a quick test run with the cloth modifier ended in a program crash when I cranked the count up too high by accident. Opps! ^^;

Work model on the left, smoothed model on the right. He’s actually set to symmetry at the moment (the shoes are separate) with the original half set to NURBS and Render Iterations, i.e; it’ll only smooth it off when you render. Every polygon on the body except the face that disappears when mirrored is set to the same smoothing group, and that one face doesn’t have one, so when NURBS is set to Separate by Smoothing Groups you get a flat surface and no weirdness (which is what used to happen before I learnt what a smoothing group is).

Then there’s the notebook - since I’m reusing my environment for the showcase it’s just a case of making sure this is right and then worry about interactivity. The spiral binding was
seriously great fun to do (set to Render Iterations again), although the holes in the ‘paper’ are causing trouble, so I may have to cheat a bit there.

Author’s Note: This post took a bit longer to do than usual as WordPress.com has updated the software and it took me a while to find my way around.

my presentation went fine, and I’ve been spending a fair bit of the holiday just doing different things - like my attempt to create a LEGO Minifig in 3DS Max that has the movement of one from the games (and I’ll get some screenshots once I figure how to sit at the laptop without possibly resulting in the need for a chiropractor).

And that’s the nice part out of the way. I’ve seen and read some truly bad examples of prose (if you want a laugh, a trip to the Livejournal Bad!Fic Quotes comm is a must - be warned, some of it could break you brain) and bad amateur films, but this ownsall of them in one fell swoop. And if I had to suffer it, then so are you. Be warned, these are like a train wreck, it’s bad, but you can’t stop watching.

I’m assuming this is a commercial, and could someone tell what that thing is at the one minute mark? But it gets worse

This one wouldn’t have been so bad, if this hadn’t been in the video description.

“Ogopogo is the legendary sea serpent, said to be living in Okanagan Lake in BC, Canada. This video proves he is alive and well.”

Lost: one will to live (possibly more). If found, please contact me.

PS: I’m starting to wonder whether these people are having a laugh at our expense. They have this page is on their site. I wouldn’t even pay 1p to access them, let alone a dollar!

I never thought I’d be so relieved that my presentation is in two days - because that means that I can say goodbye to this nightmare of 3D modelling and work at a more leisurely pace on my showcase. And since the avatar has to be included, Arty’s getting a lower polygon overhaul complete with cloth modifier because the stats say it’s over 40,000 polygons and unsurprisingly my laptop is protesting at the work load.

I was planning on having one of my paintings on the piece of ‘paper’ on the tilted easel, but with the material mucking up and after a disastrous attempt to fix the mesh on Arty I’ve given up and am going with what I have, messy mesh and all. This is what’s mean to be in the background:

Not my best painting, but I was aiming for something traditional looking (sketched on paper, painted in Painter IX).

I don’t even want to bother about being nervous for the presentation, I’ll just make the flashcards, write it down roughly and put the slides together and if I stuttered so be it, I know the lecturers and I can sit down so it’s nowhere near as petrifying as in school.

Just a quick post to show you Arty in the environment.

Now I know we need a minimum of 30 seconds of animation, I’ve got to work out how
to fix the skin modifier to not include the bottom of the cape on the feet, as it’s making it act weird. I may just add a couple of extra bones so that way I can control its movement better. As for what he’ll do, maybe I’ll have him struggle to pick up the rubber, the idea being that he’s clearing my desk after I’ve finished working.

Next time, I’m using the Cloth tool, all-in-one is real awkward at times.

Also, note to self: find out what the heck people mean by lighting passes.