Whilst still trying to figure out a good idea for the simulated project, we went on a Disney nostalgia trip in our house yesterday and raided our VHS collection (we ended up watching The Lion King and Aladdin, in case you were wondering). Inadvertently, we ended up getting as much of a nostalgia kick out of the pre-feature piracy warnings as we did the actual films.

For those who might not remember them, they usually say that illegal video cassettes means a loss in quality, possible risk to future film production and possible damage to your VCR.

Annoyingly, this is the only one I could find. One of the later films (possibly Hercules, but I’m not sure) had one where it compared an actual copy to an illegal copy. We were all in agreement that the way these warnings were presented was far better than the ones nowadays, by pointing out what impact it has on you, rather than the corporations. Granted, the damage to the VCR is only likely to occur if the cassettes were damaged or tampered with (the tape’s a pain to get out once it’s been eaten), and in this age of digital media, the only problems you’ll encountered are usually down to someone screwing up. But there’s something to be said about the quality issue – I’ve amplified the audio on some mp3’s in the past (the iTunes volume check really is useless) and have accidentally ‘hit the ceiling’ on the waveform and caused distortion during the louder part. And if you’ve ever looked at Youtube videos, the quality is usually terrible, even when on the highest quality setting.

This got me thinking. When you copy something (and right-click save as doesn’t really count), it’s never the same as the original. So, for the 20 second animation (which by the way seems a rather short amount of time for this kind of thing) I figured I’d have a character trying to buy a DVD and, when he finds he can’t afford it, sticks it in a photocopier (for the sake of argument) to get a free one. The copied product is shown to be “flawed” (I’m really tempted to make it look like it was drawn by a six-year old) and something to do with the cops or something at the end. Haven’t figured out what yet.

Dear Lord, I can see why this might not have worked as intended.

Points should not be made using the medium of Rap and a MC Hammer lookalike. The will to live was lost somewhere around the montage of programmers telling us why it’s a bad thing.

Although “Don’t Copy That Floppy” is quite a good slogan. Bit hard to create a similar one today though – half the rhymes I can think of off the top of my head ended up having a double meaning.

[Source: Download Squad]

PS: The Download Squad post links to the results of a recent MPAA contest to create anti-piracy ads. After seeing about a minute of the winners’ entry, someone needs to inform them and the MPAA that making it in the style of a trailer for a Hollywood blockbuster may look cool, but doesn’t automatically make it a good idea.

io9 is one of my favourite blogs but, occasionally, it takes me by surprise with what it posts. Last month, it posted an animated short that completely blew me away. Everything about it; the art style, the narrative, the animation, the sound; was utterly superb, and it left me wanting more in this world.

I firmly believe that everyone should see this at least once.

I know, I know, slap wrist. It’s kinda ridiculous how I can seem to forget to log in and post about something cool I’ve seen.

And really, it just can’t get any cooler than this:

I have a long-time love of seeing usually sweet and innocent stories or themes being made dark and twisted, so this is like a dream come true. And it also ties rather neatly into my Personal Research Project. Hayley correctly guessed the plot just from the artwork, which just shows how wonderfully executed it is (maybe we should turn that into a game or something). To see more concept art (and possibly taint your childhood in the process) check out the following links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Mickey

http://io9.com/5348876/what-is-this-strange-dystopian-disneyversese

The fact that this is a Wii exclusive is mind-blowing (dang straight it’s finding its way onto the games shelf when it’s released). I’m trying to track down a copy of Game Informer, but I have no idea where it’s stocked in the UK. I’ll pay Waterstones a visit next week and see if I get lucky.

I have a few more things I’ve discovered on the way, including a really, really awesome animation that I will go on record as saying that everyone needs to see it at least once.

Sorry sorry, this slipped my mind. Didn’t help that our internet went a bit doo-lally for a few days (a fault at the exchange which, despite affecting the whole area, no-one reported for at least six hours until we phoned up).

Before I go any further – I have gone through the camera match tutorial, however my copy of Max was being slightly awkward and making adjusting proved nigh impossible. However, I do understand the basics as I can recreate things from photos quite easily, and will do so if I’m a bit stuck for something to do.

So, my visualisation project was recreating the palace of Xerxes from the Fullmetal Alchemist manga. Which went… Well, not disastrously wrong, just not as good as I wanted it to turn out.

As you can see in the last five, the shadows were being fickle again. And the interior dome… *cringes* I have no idea what went wrong, but Max would not let me fix it. Every time I tried: “Max has encountered an error”. And this was like 5 times in a row. I wasn’t about to push my luck really in case my laptop started smoking like a pop tart.

I think I probably forgot to alter the colour on the pillars, and lower the tile size of some textures, because it looks really nasty when viewed close up. And I mean pixellated nasty.

But overall I am rather proud of it – roll on the Xerxes flashback so I can compare!

Okay I admit it. This should have been up before now. In my defence I hit a sort of burnout after hand in and combined with me being scatterbrained it ended up low on the list.

I’ll say this: modelling and rigging characters = piece of cake. Wiring parameters also equals piece of cake. Cameras and x-referencing scenes to avoid a program crash (I hit double figures during this. You do NOT want to know how visualisation went in that regard) equals a pain up the arse. I also learnt to next time not model anything in excess of 100 units tall because this makes the sets you need to build ridiculously huge. Once you’re hitting 4 digits in the XYZ coordinates it starts getting unbelievably silly.

The best thing I ever learnt during this project was just how damn useful hiding stuff is. Even if you’re reaching stupid amounts of polygons, hiding stuff you don’t need is a lot less taxing on the processor. The best thing I learnt though on top of that was that you can hide some of the polygons of an object. It was an absolute godsend when using morph targets let me tell you.

Anyway, here are screengrabs, in order, of the three featured characters’ rigs, one character that never made it into the final animation (the proportions are considerably off on that one), a couple of the two ’sets’ and finally stills from the animation itself, where it becomes obvious that the lighting went bonkers.

The final animation has no sound effects (except for a couple of “voices”), instead I used royalty-free music from this site. I think I’ve also “Gainaxed” the ending (meaning that it doesn’t really make sense – “Gainaxed” refers to Studio Gainax’s ultra-confusing ending to Neon Genesis Evangelion). Also, I swear the shadows were turned on for the lights. *checks* Yep, they were on. They just refused to work how I would expect them to work (like, you know, actually cast a shadow on the other objects!). Also, can I just say that rigging and animation a 4-legged creature is very tricky? I may know a lot about animal biology, but trying to get it to walk right was still a serious effort. Anyway…

After The End is set in a world where humans are long gone, leaving being a myriad of weird creatures, which are constantly menaced by these robotic “angels” (I never figured a name). In this, it all starts when a strange wraith-like creature called Dormin happens across a broken piece of horn…

Couple of fun facts – 1) The reversed dialogue I used for the Angel is part of the Zagreus poem from the Doctor Who audio of the same name (yes, I am a total geek) and 2) Dormin’s arm does a rather bizarre 360 at one point (the bit when he reaches his hand out in the tunnel). It’s hard to spot due to the lighting, but it’s the only time it does that in the whole thing (I didn’t know how to get the elbow to work with a look-at constraint).

Not an update, more a heads up for anyone using Room 105.

I went to Uni without my laptop last night as they’ve finally installed Unreal 2004 on the computers. Couldn’t do a damn thing thing though, because at least half the computers (we lost count by the end of the evening) had pest alerts when I tried to access the P drive. Obviously there’s no decent virus checker on the network, because instead of fixing it it ended up crashing Windows Explorer and the task manager. This made them impossible to use, and it often happened when trying to use the P drives.

This morning I discovered that I shouldn’t have plugged in my hard drive into any of them (I was hopping computers like mad, and the only one that didn’t crash didn’t actually have a P drive at all), because I’ve now got a worm on it (there’s also a trojan in my portable version of aMSN, but whether it’s mistaken identity or not isn’t clear as I can’t find a mention of anyone else having in on the net). I’m getting my important files off my hard drive as I type (after checking they’re not bringing anything with them) and then removing the infections, because I don’t trust Sod’s Law one iota.

An update will happen at some point – I’ve made ground on both animation and games (well, sorta in the latter’s case), but first I’m informing IT services. Either way, I’m not plugging my hard drive into those computers again until I know it’s safe.

In which I start reaching new levels in downright weird.

Fair bit of the Easter holiday was spent working on my other main character, an “Angel.” The reason it took so long to do it was down to several glitches cropping up that required me to go back to a previous file (good thing I’ve gotten into the habit of using the Save As Copy shortcut), the reaction manager causing crashes (about 10 in the space of 15 minutes, that must be some kind of record) and the problems of not being able to remove any constraints you’ve added except for Undo. As it stands, a character that’s mechanical and doesn’t need bones is even more awkward to rig than one does.

Will add commentary later.

Whoops! Forgot that I hadn’t posted anything to do with this.

So, I decided my level would be a Steampunk airship hanger, because well, it was an excuse to draw airships in seminar. Anyway, I did some sketches of a layout and some design elements.

Yeah, excuse the confusing level map, I haven’t found that book of tracing paper I got with an animation kit a few years back yet. Rest assured I have a rather good idea of how it will look up here. *taps head* Just the dimensions that I have trouble with.

I went fishing for airships and steampunk on the net – Final Fantasy is a goldmine for this sort of thing. I admit I may have been channelling Final Fantasy IX with the airship sketches as I love that game. I also found some awesome pictures of industrial piping and stuff from factories.

I’ve been building the airship in 3DS Max as hopefully the right size to put into the level. However, I’ve quickly discovered that getting it into Unreal Editor isn’t as easy as you’d think.

Here’s the rough airship, looking very… ship-like. The little dark blob in the bottom left corner is my character height guide. Now, when I put it in the editor, I got this:

Looks odd, but I only wanted it for judging my placement (I’ve already mucked up the floor, the pit’s not meant to be all the way along), I can add the final thing later. So I run the level to check the size in-game and this happens:

Holy smeg I’ve got a ghost ship! I have no idea why it’s doing that, and I’ve been looking online to try and find the reason (the book only covers Maya, and while I may be good at translating from one program to the next, I have limits). May have to rethink being able to go inside the ship (but I’m sure as hell making sure you can go on the deck) but once I’ve figured it out I’m sure it’ll be easier to do. I’m currently trying out unwrapping the UVW and giving it a proper texture file to work from. Slightly fiddly, and I haven’t even got to the mast yet.

I’m still incredibly amused at the fact one of the set of faces turned out like an axe. I’m sure I’ve seen one of those in World of Warcraft.

Erm… other stuff when I can sort through my files (I have a fully rigged character for animation done, pending a couple of tweaks).

Okay, still haven’t got the stills from the Bulwell project (I need to apprehend Ed’s hard drive at some point), but I have the design ideas for the section project – and, I’ll be honest, I may be stretching the definition of “description from a novel” just a little. But, if anything, I’ve got myself a mammoth undertaking.

I’m a sucker for old ruins and ancient architecture, and during one of my many zone-out moments I thought it would be awesome to recreate the ruined city of Xerxes that first appears in chapter 4o of the Full Metal Alchemist manga. So I grabbed a load of pages with the ruins from OneManga.com with the hopes of at least piecing them together enough to recreate as it was.

Then after looking it on Wikipedia (because I’m woefully behind on the manga and also nonplussed about spoilers for it), I found there’d been a flashback to it before it became a ruin. “Great,” I thought. “Makes my job easier.” Well… it didn’t really, it just let me discover that not only did the author seem to forget to match the ruins up with the complete building, but she seems to have borrowed from at least 4 different styles of ancient architecture. Just as well I’m a huge geek for that time period.

The main problem, I found, was the fact that sequential panels are more confusing to piece a place together with that descriptive prose. At least with the written word it gives you general directions that the character is walking in to get from A to B, but with the manga I’m still trying to work out which direction the first image in this post is facing in relation to the exterior.

We get indicators of these:

But despite these visual references it’s still a nightmare figuring where these features are placed. The interior’s even worse, as we’re given no real hint of a floor plan and I’m having to go off what I know about Greek Temples and the Palace of Knossos on Crete.

Anyway, I started tackling it in my sketchbook. Couple of mind maps:

Elevations and floor plans, complete with what is essentially me talking to myself (most of my notebooks end up like this):

That first one has a brilliant example of how crap my sense of perspective is when I’m working from memory. I’ve got a book on perspective, but I think Hayley borrowed it and now it’s AWOL (probably buried in her room somewhere).

And finally, I broke out Wings 3D again for some test models:

The first one was before I found the flashback, and was what I originally assumed the hall to look like. The second one is much closer to the exterior shown in that chapter.

Now I need to ask my brother what books he has on Ancient Rome, Greece, Byzantium, Egypt and Minoan. Good thing he’s a history fanatic.