I stumbled across a Ted Talk recently featuring the life sized, ridable horse puppet from the play War Horse. I've never seen War Horse, so I can't give any opinion on the play itself, but the puppet is incredible and the style it gives to the play is just.... so unique. I just love the image of these earthy looking wooden horses moving about among the real people.
If you watch the first video, take a look at the shot about 30 seconds in. That single shot is amazing, the fluid motion of the puppet, if I couldn't see the puppeteers controlling the horse I would think that it was done in CG. Now that's talent.
Then again, maybe it just speaks to the child in me who wished her toys would come to life... particularly a certain awesome lion beanie I had...
And here is the Ted Talk demonstrating the puppet, just to warn you it's a little cheesy at points.
Now back to work I go!
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Texturing and More
I have faced the beast known as texturing and come out wiser and better for it.
It isn't too difficult to do, it just requires a lot of patience to do it well. Unwrapping, sewing edges, making sure the texture won't distort. I had the unfortunate lack of foresight to make my model a Hork Bajir rather than the human we were supposed to be modeling, and it's legs were... an absolute mess to deal with. I had to go back to them after I had more of a handle on it.
It's definitely something useful to practice, however, I'd also really like to get into actually painting textures. I think it will likely frustrate me a lot at first, but there's quite a bit of power in texturing and it's a skill I'd like to have.
Might be good to look into it more for our final project and get some practice in.
In other, slightly outdated news, a few weeks ago I purchased both Pokemon White and Dragon Age II, and I have to say I'm enjoying both quite a bit though I feel a bit guilty for starting on Dragon Age II while my copy of Dragon Age: Awakenings that I got for Christmas is still sitting there in the plastic.... probably feeling very unloved.
I'm not particularly far in either due to dividing the little gaming time I have between the two of them, however they're both quite enjoyable so far. Dragon Age II still feels quite buggy and slightly unpolished however, but it's great fun, I love the characters just as much as I loved the cast from Dragon Age Origins, and gray morality!! Thank you Bioware for making me think beyond "Do I want to be evil or good this time around?". I also like the fact that the dialogue options have tone indication, you can be blunt and forceful or lighthearted and sarcastic, or diplomatic and pacifying.
And pokemon... goodness, every time a new game comes out I go on such a pokemon binge. It is my guilty pleasure, I admit it, but I just love the series. I grabbed the oshawott, named him Derpymaru, evolved him into a dewott and I'm currently looking for an everstone to prevent him from becoming a samurott (I like dewott's design much more). I still love pokemon after all these years, but I have noticed their designs seem to have gotten unnecessarily complicated over the years, they were much simpler in the beginning in general, nowadays they have so much extra crap on them.
Anyways, I suppose it's time to wrap this up. To end things off, I'll leave you with this trailer for an upcoming movie... It may be of interest to you, after all future events such as these will affect you in the future :P
It isn't too difficult to do, it just requires a lot of patience to do it well. Unwrapping, sewing edges, making sure the texture won't distort. I had the unfortunate lack of foresight to make my model a Hork Bajir rather than the human we were supposed to be modeling, and it's legs were... an absolute mess to deal with. I had to go back to them after I had more of a handle on it.
It's definitely something useful to practice, however, I'd also really like to get into actually painting textures. I think it will likely frustrate me a lot at first, but there's quite a bit of power in texturing and it's a skill I'd like to have.
Might be good to look into it more for our final project and get some practice in.
In other, slightly outdated news, a few weeks ago I purchased both Pokemon White and Dragon Age II, and I have to say I'm enjoying both quite a bit though I feel a bit guilty for starting on Dragon Age II while my copy of Dragon Age: Awakenings that I got for Christmas is still sitting there in the plastic.... probably feeling very unloved.
I'm not particularly far in either due to dividing the little gaming time I have between the two of them, however they're both quite enjoyable so far. Dragon Age II still feels quite buggy and slightly unpolished however, but it's great fun, I love the characters just as much as I loved the cast from Dragon Age Origins, and gray morality!! Thank you Bioware for making me think beyond "Do I want to be evil or good this time around?". I also like the fact that the dialogue options have tone indication, you can be blunt and forceful or lighthearted and sarcastic, or diplomatic and pacifying.
And pokemon... goodness, every time a new game comes out I go on such a pokemon binge. It is my guilty pleasure, I admit it, but I just love the series. I grabbed the oshawott, named him Derpymaru, evolved him into a dewott and I'm currently looking for an everstone to prevent him from becoming a samurott (I like dewott's design much more). I still love pokemon after all these years, but I have noticed their designs seem to have gotten unnecessarily complicated over the years, they were much simpler in the beginning in general, nowadays they have so much extra crap on them.
Anyways, I suppose it's time to wrap this up. To end things off, I'll leave you with this trailer for an upcoming movie... It may be of interest to you, after all future events such as these will affect you in the future :P
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Character Modeling
So this past week we started character modeling in Maya. I find it rather interesting, especially considering before I joined up with my fellow future Game Design students, I was kicking around the idea of designing and modeling a creature for my final.
Despite teachers constantly talking about the importance of not saving over the same file, making new files so that you can always go back to a previous version if you bork something up, I regrettably rarely listen. However in Maya, I can definitely see the usefulness of this. Particularly because as you work on your model and make it more complex in order to get the shape you want, you do risk winding up with far too many vertexes to be able to work efficiently. I know myself, and I know that I could easily end up with a mess of a model, too complex for a newcomer like me to be able to really work with it.
Over the past couple of days I've been looking at low poly models to try to get a sense of how complicated it would be to create our own zombies from scratch for our game. It's interesting to see how people fudge details on models by using textures; why painstakingly model wrinkles, folds in clothing, curls of hair, etc. when you can simply texture it to make it appear as if those things are there? Textures are powerful things, and I'd love to be able to add it to my arsenal of skills, however we've only covered some of the basics last term, so texturing is still a bit of an intimidating creature in my mind.
Thankfully I believe we'll be tackling that beast next class.
Despite teachers constantly talking about the importance of not saving over the same file, making new files so that you can always go back to a previous version if you bork something up, I regrettably rarely listen. However in Maya, I can definitely see the usefulness of this. Particularly because as you work on your model and make it more complex in order to get the shape you want, you do risk winding up with far too many vertexes to be able to work efficiently. I know myself, and I know that I could easily end up with a mess of a model, too complex for a newcomer like me to be able to really work with it.
Over the past couple of days I've been looking at low poly models to try to get a sense of how complicated it would be to create our own zombies from scratch for our game. It's interesting to see how people fudge details on models by using textures; why painstakingly model wrinkles, folds in clothing, curls of hair, etc. when you can simply texture it to make it appear as if those things are there? Textures are powerful things, and I'd love to be able to add it to my arsenal of skills, however we've only covered some of the basics last term, so texturing is still a bit of an intimidating creature in my mind.
Thankfully I believe we'll be tackling that beast next class.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Post Process Volumes, Anothology Covers and Turtles, oh my!
Dropped off my scholarship applications last week, all I can do now it cross my fingers and hope for the best... and have nightmares about being disqualified for overlooking something and making a tiny mistake on my application. Heh heh...
But let's talk about less stressful things, I've been making my way through UDK tutorials and just finished off the basics of creating a level and got my first taste of Kismet. The idea of visual scripting is very intriguing to me, code is something I've wanted to learn for a long time, however I am definitely a much more visually oriented person. Other, more widespread coding languages are still something I'd like to sink my teeth into however. I am getting a taste of some coding in flash class, but it's not really the main focus of the class and we haven't gone very in depth so far; unless we dive further in down the line, it's only serving to whet my appetite.
One of the things I learned about today was post process volumes. I have to say it's probably rather silly how much I like those things, but man, the possibilities!
This probably isn't the best explanation, but basically a post process volume allows you to change the look of a particular area of your level by adding a volume around it. You can change the settings of that volume to to tweak things like the colour of the area, the depth of field, bloom and more, and you can change how quickly these settings take effect. For example, if you were making a horror level, you could set up a volume around a particular room that would cause everything to suddenly turns red once the player walked into that room, or you could set it up so that as the player explores and spends more time in the room, the colour slowly fades away until everything is black and white.
There's so many ways you could apply this; you could create a desert game where the environment feels boiling out in the open, but stepping into a cave feels instantly cooler. Or you could make an area filled with poison, that causes the player's vision to be slowly more blurred the longer they stay there, as if their character is about to pass out. It makes me want to take what I learned in Cine class about movie lighting and create a level in which the player walks through different movie genres, from Horror, to Western to Noir to Sci-Fi.
Anyhoo, tomorrow I have comic class, which so far looks like it'll be great fun. We're teaming up with students from VFS's writing program, they'll be writing four pages of a comic and we'll be drawing them, in the end it will all be put together as an anthology. Last class the writing students pitched 3 concepts and we got teamed up, and I'm quite happy with the story I'm to illustrate. However, the comic class is for Animation stream students and I'm in the digital design stream, I'm just sitting in on it because I really love comics and I wanted to learn more about creating them. As a result I'm supposed to help with the cover and packaging for the anthology and I'm to make that my primary focus. At work today I was jotting down some ideas for a theme to sort of tie the whole anthology together, something like The Worlds Inside your Head, or Creativity or Bringing your Ideas to Life, to emphasize the joining of different VFS programs in the common goal of learning and creating, or possibly something like Comic vs Graphic as we have a mix or more comedic, newspaper style "comics" versus darker, more mature "graphic novel" type stories.
Well, I have work to do, so I should probably wrap this up for now. I suppose I'll finish this post off with another video, I've been throwing a lot of these up here lately, haven't I?
So cute.... so tiny....
Oh and... um... it-it's a wonderful use of depth of field... and really shows turtle movement and anatomy which could be a helpful reference for anyone wanting to draw a turtle...
Yeah.... That's totally why I linked it.
But let's talk about less stressful things, I've been making my way through UDK tutorials and just finished off the basics of creating a level and got my first taste of Kismet. The idea of visual scripting is very intriguing to me, code is something I've wanted to learn for a long time, however I am definitely a much more visually oriented person. Other, more widespread coding languages are still something I'd like to sink my teeth into however. I am getting a taste of some coding in flash class, but it's not really the main focus of the class and we haven't gone very in depth so far; unless we dive further in down the line, it's only serving to whet my appetite.
One of the things I learned about today was post process volumes. I have to say it's probably rather silly how much I like those things, but man, the possibilities!
This probably isn't the best explanation, but basically a post process volume allows you to change the look of a particular area of your level by adding a volume around it. You can change the settings of that volume to to tweak things like the colour of the area, the depth of field, bloom and more, and you can change how quickly these settings take effect. For example, if you were making a horror level, you could set up a volume around a particular room that would cause everything to suddenly turns red once the player walked into that room, or you could set it up so that as the player explores and spends more time in the room, the colour slowly fades away until everything is black and white.
There's so many ways you could apply this; you could create a desert game where the environment feels boiling out in the open, but stepping into a cave feels instantly cooler. Or you could make an area filled with poison, that causes the player's vision to be slowly more blurred the longer they stay there, as if their character is about to pass out. It makes me want to take what I learned in Cine class about movie lighting and create a level in which the player walks through different movie genres, from Horror, to Western to Noir to Sci-Fi.
Anyhoo, tomorrow I have comic class, which so far looks like it'll be great fun. We're teaming up with students from VFS's writing program, they'll be writing four pages of a comic and we'll be drawing them, in the end it will all be put together as an anthology. Last class the writing students pitched 3 concepts and we got teamed up, and I'm quite happy with the story I'm to illustrate. However, the comic class is for Animation stream students and I'm in the digital design stream, I'm just sitting in on it because I really love comics and I wanted to learn more about creating them. As a result I'm supposed to help with the cover and packaging for the anthology and I'm to make that my primary focus. At work today I was jotting down some ideas for a theme to sort of tie the whole anthology together, something like The Worlds Inside your Head, or Creativity or Bringing your Ideas to Life, to emphasize the joining of different VFS programs in the common goal of learning and creating, or possibly something like Comic vs Graphic as we have a mix or more comedic, newspaper style "comics" versus darker, more mature "graphic novel" type stories.
Well, I have work to do, so I should probably wrap this up for now. I suppose I'll finish this post off with another video, I've been throwing a lot of these up here lately, haven't I?
So cute.... so tiny....
Oh and... um... it-it's a wonderful use of depth of field... and really shows turtle movement and anatomy which could be a helpful reference for anyone wanting to draw a turtle...
Yeah.... That's totally why I linked it.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Mostly Videos
I like when people can appreciate solitude, I've never understood people who can't stand being alone for very long, quiet can be nice.
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a beautiful movie, with wonderful animation, story and amazing scenery shots. I've also found it seems to have a disproportionate number of well done AMVs compared to most other anime (yes I'm an AMV junkie...)
A video I came across a while ago and recently stumbled upon again. You may not want to watch if you're easily creeped out.
Ahh gaming.... you've come a long way.
Behind the scenes of the ever so popular old spice commercials, it's interesting to see what goes into all those set changes.
And finally, an absolutely beautiful little animation called Out of Sight, reminds me of Studio Ghibli in a lot of ways.
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a beautiful movie, with wonderful animation, story and amazing scenery shots. I've also found it seems to have a disproportionate number of well done AMVs compared to most other anime (yes I'm an AMV junkie...)
A video I came across a while ago and recently stumbled upon again. You may not want to watch if you're easily creeped out.
Ahh gaming.... you've come a long way.
Behind the scenes of the ever so popular old spice commercials, it's interesting to see what goes into all those set changes.
And finally, an absolutely beautiful little animation called Out of Sight, reminds me of Studio Ghibli in a lot of ways.
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