Digital Piracy Test Animation

Digital Piracy Test Animation

This is a simple test animation to see how my idea for my digital piracy animation. It is basically a stage where different scenes and enviroments will slide in, so for this simple test I've chosen a plain hill landscape.

Lego vs World of Warcraft?

Lego vs World of Warcraft?
While doing some mundane web browsing I came across this little article on the Escapist www. escapistmagazine.com, honestly check out this website it's pretty good for Games Design. Anyway on the Escapist I found this http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/103848-Lego-Bricks-Require-More-Polygons-Than-World-of-Warcraft-Avatars, in which the creative director of the new Lego Universe game proudly announces that 'a two by eight lego brick, is about twice the polygons of say a World of Warcraft character'.

Now that to me shows a few things, one how incredibly anal Lego are about detail in their products, how technology has changed and advanced. But most importantly how stupid Lego are, one of the principal reasons for WoW success is how easy it is to run on even the most basic of computers and this is achieved by a simple design throughout the game. Who cares how simple the characters are they look great even though they are a little old, it's just clever game design. Now take Lego Universe for an example the only people with computers fast enough to run the game are going to be hardcore computer users, perhaps not the targetted audience for a Lego game??

Now I just want to leave this post by saying I don't play WoW, I did at one point and found it to be the most absorbing game I've ever played. However suddenly I realised one day that I had barely left my computer for the month since I'd bought the game. Still an amazing game though.

Tea

Tea

This could be useful later on, well very useful. And particles are very useful too but very time consuming but yeah they look cool. I think this is the kind of thing that is going to require a lot of time and patience later on.

Landscape Finished

Landscape Modelling Finished


Ok I've now finished Modelling my landscape for my animation project. My theme was ancient China and I think I've managed to construct an environment that resembles that.

What I think brings this together so well is sadly the simplest and quickest thing I did, the fog. It adds so well to the overall surroundings giving it a mythical feel.



I'm also happy with the temple that I built into the mountain. This was a funny thing to build, I wanted it to be very ornate with lots of stuff going on, however I was really worried about the amount of polygons this would require so I had to strike a balance.

And I think it looks pretty good but it needs textures. Which brings me nicely onto my next task I'm going to texture it to give it a much deeper sense of depth and bring out some of the details that I've planned such as the roof tiles. But so far I'm pretty happy with it, it's basic enough to allow the characters to become central to the piece of work but it's good enough to give the impression that they are in China.

Landscape Development

Landscape Development

I've finally finished my steps up my great mountain, I had planned to make it a lot taller however I was concerned about space at the top and I was getting really fustrated about modelling these steps.

So too birds one stone and I built the pilnth where my temple is going to be into the mountain so I had a bit more space. And I've also got an entrance arch at the bottom of the stairs which I think looks pretty cool.

So far the only real problems I've had are scale, the arch was much bigger for a long time till I realised it was nearly as big as the top of the mountain, so I need to watch out for that. I think it's just a more professional way of working now that I need to be aiming for which should hopefully make everything a lot easier.

Landscape Plans

Landscape Plans

After my last post I thought it'd be a good idea to give a quick explaination of what I'm actually going to do with my landscape. Click on the picture if you can't see it very clearly.

Anyway since I'm going along with the idea of having a Chinese, dojo/ tea house thing, I thought the most practical place for it would be upon a great mountain. Basically it is going to be set onto one of the ledges of the main mountain in the middle with a huge amount of stairs leading up to it. I'll probably work a bit more detail into the main mountain since it is going to be the main focus of everything, while everything else is simply going to be in the background.

A good point about that right now is that at the moment it is rendering quite well but we'll have to see as time goes on so I might have to just chop it all out and stick in a picture instead but hopefully it'll be ok.

I'll also probably stick a fog around the base of the landscape to make the area look a lot more interesting and mythical with the mountains just poking out of the top.

I know this idea has been done a million times before, but I like it, it ties in well with my project and once it's finished it'll look awesome.

Mountains

Mountains
While I've been modelling a lot of assets recently I suddenly decided that it was time for a change and thought I'd get a big chunk of my landscape done.


Anyway I started off simple working with a plane and using a big brush in with the paint deformation tools I roughly knocked up a mountain region. Looking back it doesn't look very good at all at this point, I don't know why it's green and it's too smooth looks a lot like cloth.

So I started working in a lot more of the detail making the mountains look a lot sharper, it's still pretty shiny but that can be sorted out with a good bit of texturing.

Very Basic Airport

Very Basic Airport
Possibly the worst thing I've ever modelled but it's good to get the very basics down for my Airport. This is basically just made from a few different shapes and none of it is going to be in my final piece, but it's how it's going to look.

Anyway really it's going to be as eco-friendly an airport as possible. No taking up huge amounts of land with runways, no levelling mountains to reclaim land from the sea. This is going to be made from metal and be located in the sea. With a dam to protect from waves and to also generate energy. Lets face it no airport is ever going to be eco-friendly however it doesn't hurt to try.

Time to get modelling this thing for real with a lor more detail this time.

Spear

Spear

Just finished what will be the most complicated asset in my animation, a spear. I'm a bit reluctant to say what I'm going to do with it but depending on time this will either be in the background looking cool or will be a major part of my animation. Just going to have to wait and see.

I'm also modelling a lot of assets at the moment so I'll post up a few of them when I get them done while I'm working on my main scenery and characters.

Paint Deformation Tools

Paint Deformation Tools

Today I have discovered something that is going to make my life a million times easier, the paint deformation tools. They have to be the best things ever. Let me explain, I've been trying to model my scenery for my animation for a while now without must success.

But with these tools I did this mountain scene in about two minutes. It's not perfect but it's a very good start and I'll hopefully have the finished scenery ready very soon for both of my projects so I can start adding my assetts and making them look awesome.

Assets - Bustersword

Assets - Bustersword

I've now started thinking about how to make my animmation a lot more interesting, I don't want just a blank empty space this time.

So I'm going to model a lot of quick and simple assets that I can stick in the background and look really cool. Well since I'm doing ancient China weapons are pretty important and I wanted to stick Cloud from Final Fantasy VII's Bustersword in there. It's just a cheeky reference really I'm hoping some people will notice it, most probably won't even know what it is but it's there.

I did want to use Squall's Gunblade but the idea of a Gun in ancient China is probably pushing it a bit too far.

A Simple Man

A Simple Man

I've noticed that I've not posted anything up lately, basically I'm buried in design work so I don't have much computer work to show off at the moment. So I tho0ught I'd post up what I've been getting up to in my seminars.

So anyway this is a really simple guy that should be easy and fun to mess around with. The only problem that I have at the minute is eyes, I want them in my work but their difficult so we'll see.

Animation - To China

Animation - To China

Right I came up with this idea or the 'cup of tea' project a while ago now, around Christmas in fact and I was ready to come back to uni and get cracking with it, however I then found out quite a few people had a similar idea so I was a bit put off. My idea was basically to have it set in a Chinese dojo and look at ways o getting some martial arts into it. I quickly realised that it's going to be a pretty huge project to do so if I'm going to do it I need to start soon.

So anyway I've decided to go with it it might not be the most original idea anyone has ever seen but as long as I do it really well, all will be good. Well visually I'm going to draw off influences from 'Kung Fu Panda', not with the animals but the scenery that is really well modelled and makes you feel like your in China.

Also jamie Hewletts 'Monkey' project is a great place to start, I really loved the animation he did for the Beijing Olympics, it had a very distinct Jamie Hewlett style and yet you believed the characters are in China. That's the kind of thing I'm going to be looking to get across with my animation, I want the scenery to be believable and look awesome while the character(s) that interact upon it have a style that I like.

And since this is animation I want my characters to be easy to animate, very cartoonish and most importantly to move well. The one thing that I am most interested in getting into my animation is part of my scenery to break, or smash. I don't want my character to look as though he's just acting on top of some scenery, I want him to look as though he's acting in a scene. I that makes sense, it does to me anyway.

To Build an Airport

To Build an Airport
Ok this is my new project for visualisation, and I really like it. The good part for me is that I used to study architecture at college so I should be ok, and I've got two terms to do this in so if this project doesn't look like the most amazing thing ever there's something wrong here.

Anyway I'm just trying to come up with a few ideas and piecing together some influences, however there is one thing that I don't want to do which is build a conventional airport. Architecture I think should not only make things look nice but should also solve problems, so as most people know airports take up far too much space, so I'm going to look at finding a way of reducing the amount of space that airports take up while also still having easy access, plenty of parking and all that jazz so yeah going to be quite a hard task.

However there is a silver lining this is an airport of the future so I'm not tied down as much as a real architect so I have a bit of leway, and I've got two terms to get it done in. So time to get started.