Some Very useful links

Greetings

Thanks to my third year friend for providing the following links - these links are to sites that can potentially provide final year projects, you will notice that some of the closing dates are soon but should not be put off as they will 'probably' have new projects for next year... here they are. I am putting them up for my own personal use (so I don't forget) but don't mind if everyone browses through them.

http://www.dandad.org/education/student-awards/ - D&AD

http://www.mandy.com/1/filmtvjobs.cfm?jt=zzz - Mandy

http://www.cwjobs.co.uk/ - CwJobs (industry job website.

http://www.europrix.org/ - Euro student awards

Oh yeah and here's a very good link for animation students who want to study movement, there is a whole library of things moving, from planes to horses running - its also free to watch.
http://www.bbcmotiongallery.com/Customer/index.aspx

Some Multimedia - a game inside a game?

I have been very busy this holiday visiting relatives so I have not been able to focus on much work. I did however manage to complete my final script, get my scanner to work and create something with a multimedia approach to it. you may be asking, what is this magical, mysterious multimedia thing - Well it's a game inside a game.

I have always been interested in level design in games and always try to push things to the limits in the - for instance one I put 100 explosive barrels in a half life two map with a zombie in the middle of them. all it took was a few bullets into one of the barrels to set off the chain reaction which inevitably crashed my computer (but I bet that zombie was blown to smithereens hehehe) - this time I went for something more simple, I dug out an old classic by the name of Starcraft and thought of a fun game to make. Initially starcraft is a strategy game where you have to mine rescources, build a base, produce units and attack opposite factions. however the map editor is pretty flexible and allows a person to do anything he\she really wishes.There is a lot of maps already out there where a team of people have to defend so it is not a totally original idea but non the less a lot of aspects are. here are a few screen shots of the map in construction.

The idea of the game is that a swarm of enemy units spawn at a specific place and attempt to reach the middle/bottom of the map (they have to follow the platforms) - these units cannot atack, they just fly blindly to their destination, this might sound like a walk in the park but all enemy units are exceptionally harder to kill than normal. The players have to attempt to stop these creatures from reaching their goal by buying defensive units that can shoot them down. the people in the middle far end sides will have to be more experienced players at times in case other people 'leak' (are unsuccessful in killing enemy units and letting them slip by). as an added bonus people can swap a certain amount of units for a 'super unit' which does extreme amounts of damage. also if a person in the game is not doing so well you have the option of transferring money to their account.Thats the whole thing really.






Please remember to click on the images to enlarge them.
I hope to be releasing this map on the internet soon on the South American server and attempt to track the amount of games per hour are played after it's initial release (this however may not be 100% accurate and may take a while as some people prefer not to host maps and only play join games) - I may need to take two samples and do a rough calculation of how many games are played each day.

You may be wondering why I chose to do this as a multimedia project. Firstly it incorporates design (level design and game design) - next it also incorporates a lot of logistical problem solving (Believe it or not but there are 100's of lines of code in this map just to make it function correctly that is not added by the game!), You also work with layers and functions in the map editor. And lastly, I can play it when I'm finished with a group of people and kick some invading alien ass Woohoo!! - I guess that can also count as interactivity.

Odd Couple character treatment:

Thomas Turner is a slightly obsessive , wound up, widowed, mid 60 year old English fellow who enjoys having quite nights in front of the television watching the news and sports channels, he prefers comfortable clothes like jeans and a plain shirt with a small overcoat. He is quite a friendly fellow but not overly chatty, preferring to speak about daily news and find out what is going on in his local area. He lives in a semi-detached house alone; he quite likes the privacy but still misses his wife who passed away a number of years ago in a fluke double lightning strike event. He takes pride in his minimalistic furnished home but is sometimes a little too much of an obsessive neat freak. He noticed this when one of his friends came around for a visit and strangely he couldn’t wait for them to leave so that he could wash their tea cup and plate that had biscuits on, put it back in place and then vacuum the whole room which he had been in. He is not fond of having dogs or cats in his house as they leave fur but can tolerate this, however he despises insects – once he had a minor ant infestation that he took care of with a can of gas, lighter fluid and a few matches. After setting fire to a small portion of his kitchen he still used an entire can of ant poison (which took the entire nights to slowly drip into the hole) to make sure the nest was eradicated ( which unknowing to him missed the ant nest completely and went through a old pipe leading straight to his prize cabbage patch and destroying 80% of his crop) - you will be happy to know the ants escaped the initial inferno and poisoning then decided to move next door away from this half crazed fellow . Thomas Turner is his own worst enemy.

He was born in a family of two boys and one girl, him being the youngest son, his dad was an ex soldier ( Rank of drill sergeant) who lived a full and health life and Thomas’s mom worked in a bank as a cashier later on in life at the age of 46 – they had known each other from school.

Thomas and wife has produced two children, a boy and a girl – the girl being the eldest by two years. His son is the manager of a ‘Frankie and Bennies’ Restaurant and his daughter is into interior decorating – they are both successful in their careers. They stay in contact with Thomas at least once a week but do not tend to visit very often as their careers and families don’t leave them much time to do so, they are a loving and tight family.

Press Release

Hear all about it, the trailer for the new 'odd couple' theme is said to arrive shortly on the 12 of march 2008 - one thing is to be said, you wouldn't want to miss this one for all the tea in china and another thing is for sure... it's going to be a hit.

Bodypaint


I have been trying to make my life easier by using a quicker tools to paint onto a character rather than going through the whole UV unwrap process, I did find a pretty damn nifty program called Bodypaint. it is very easy to import your character directly into this program as it unwraps it for you and then paint onto it there and then whilst you can see your 3d model, hell you can even paint directly onto your 3d model . it takes very few processes and wont leave any seam marks at all. I did however find that if I wanted to create bump map you would still have to stretch realign the UV map but I couldnt be bothered to learn how to do it again in another program, at least not now as I have a big project on the go. It's definitely worth a look though and could save your hide in the future if you have the time to learn how to use it - It only took me about 1 hour of playing around with it and looking through a few tutorials online to get a basic of it (it's basically Photoshop but with 3D).


Heres an example me playing around with it.



...Oh and here's a link for the free Demo version if you want.

Character designs:

Well... I wish I could say that I am as satisfied with my characters as I am with my 'sets' so far, I have got a few good process pictures which I will provide below and maybe comment on a few.


This is my characters model process, basically it all started with a hand drawn image that was scanned in and projected onto three panels (boxes) - I started out with a cylinder and the rest is... well... history.











Heres a little test with symmetry on












...and the almost complete version which I'm no impressed with at all and may even consider creating a whole new one over the holidays

Here is a close up of the face, I have decided to use individual teeth instead of extruding them out of the skull as I think this will give me more control and realism. I have also added a raytrace reflection to the eyes to give more realism (I also need a reflection of fire in his eyes for one of my scenes)

The model now needs 'skinning; however I have wasted the better part of a week trying to find a better was of UV unwrapping instead of the traditional way - You can read all about this above this post.

A bit of set design:

I have been quite busy lately designing the set for my 'Odd couple animation' and am finding it to be very entertaining and the fact that it is going smoothly I am finding quite surprising. here are two render's... the first is the kitchen so far and the second is the living room, these are not complete yet as I'm still texturing objects, walls and also scaling everything to the right size but the majority is done. I am also happy with the render times - remember to click on the images to get a bigger picture


I am pretty impressed with the results so far, I cannot however take all the credit for the props design as I pinched a few from a website called 'Turbo squid' - the link can be found here, I was confident that I could create these models and possibly better than some but thought it would be a waste of time in doing so, after all more time not modeling gives me plenty more time to work on lighting and animation.

I am still not too sure on how to cut holes into my walls ( You will notice a giant block on the right hand side of the kitchen sticking in the wall) in a stage design program I am used to called 'Hammer editor' the technique of making room for a door is making a block the size of your door, moving it into the wall and then cutting the hole with the block... it seems it's not that simple with 3D's max however I'm sure Andy will have a solution.

The good 'old walker'

Ah yes the good old walker, thank you very much Andy for the recap it was invaluable for practice and also to realize how much time it is going to take to create the 'odd couple' animation (means I gotta get my ass into gear and stop partying) - here is the walker cycle I did, I admit the character plummets into darkness a bit toward the end, this is what I wanted however. I added some sounds to make it more realistic (sounds found here) - as my third year friend Todd Gledhill said 'if you going to do it good, you may as well do it right and if u want to do it crap then do it crap' , I did want to do it with raytracing on the surrounding box too, however the estimates render time was 7 hours compared to 10 minutes for this render (without the raytrace on the box but with the raytrace on the character)- anyways, I enjoyed the result and I hope you do to. here it is.





Heres a shot of a fully raytraced image - click on it to get the full size of it. not that much of a difference eh?... well... I'm lying there, the reflections of lighting are much smoother, the feet are not fully on the ground (something I fixed later) and the characters legs are also reflected but I still didn't think it was worth the 7 hour render, I should have cheated and made the box rusty, henceforth no reflection... Ian ur a genius hehehe!!

Visit to a museum:



I went to a museam a while back in Stoke on Trent and had a quick 'nose' around - after all it was free and there is nothing better to be heard or saw by a student than the word 'Free'... accept 'Free alchol!' (crowd boo's)

Uhum... well I better get back to the museum story I guess. There where some really interesting artifacts dated back to when Stoke-on-Trent was actually a thriving city, mostly specialising in decorated ceramics (some really expensive stuff like Spode for instance) - however it was soon cheaper to import ceramics from China and thus it became almost non profictable for Stoke-on-Trent to continue producing thier fine wares... quite a pity.

However that is a bit of a letdown to Stoke-on-Trent's past, two of the other things I found out was that the Captain of the Titanic (E.J Smith) was Born here and so was the famous inventor(R J Mitchell) of the 'Spitfire' fighter plane which they have on display at the museum, it is the Mk XVI Spitfire (type 361) which was designed to be a low altitude fighter

it was an interesting visit and I reccomend that if you are even in Stoke-on-Trent (Hopefully you never have to) you should visit the museum and also possibly the scate park.

Some character study

I have been looking for some interesting examples of violent animation comedy for my 'Odd Couple' project, I looked at a few examples of Tom and Jerry which seemed to fit in rather nicely apart from the fact that there is never any standoff in my animation. I did however come across some pretty interesting but also rather 'disturbing' dark comedy on my search - some short animations titled ' happy tree friends'. at first I thought it was a children's cartoon but something in the back of my head told me that I had heard the name before.

I have posted a few below for anyone who is interested in watching - please be aware though that you may not enjoy the content or even find it remotely funny.

UI have been looking out for some good animations and found a some very interesting ones.

here's the first link to

Fallen art

My apologies for not being able to provide a picture.

the second is called Gopher broke



and the third is called Gentleman's Duel - enjoy

Quick Scene Analysis:

Here is a scene from Stargate Atlantis season 4 - episode 13 - you can find the link to the episode here - The time for the scene I am writing about is 6:50. - you may also find this link useful for looking up types of camera shots.

Scene starts with Commander Carter and
Radak in a lift (Low MCA shot), the only lighting is a rectangular shaped 'box' light found above and to the right of the characters, it provides comfortable and not very bright florescent lighting. the two are staring at a control panel found at the left of the screen,
Radak is directly in front of this panel and examining it closely.

Commander Carter:

Quarantine lock down.

Radak:
looks worried
(sigh) Yes

Camera pans right as Commander Carter looks at another digital screen panel displaying a schematic of the city from 'birds eye view'

Commander Carter:
well I don't know why communications would be effected.


Radak:
hesitates, raises eyebrows in a pose to explain
(sigh)
Well... Rodney did say he was going to modify some of the ancient protocols...

(Camera focuses on Commander carter CU shot)

...Must have made a mistake... made the security measures too aggressive?


(Birds eye view MS)

Commander Carter bends down and picks up a computer tablet,
Radak moves in place and looks worried.

Commander Carter:

I'm going to try access the Mainframe.

Radak:

Yes but...
(MCU on Commander Carter)
...thats unfortunately all you will be able to do, this tablet has limited RAM and made mainly for read only field diagnostics

(Birds eye view MCU on computer Tablet) - the computer tablet displays a CU of a fine pigeon from a side view

Commander Carter:

Yes well at least we will be able to determine the extent of the lock down.


Radak:

Yes... oh sorry (Radak takes the Tablet from Commander carter - MCU on commander charters face, she smiles and looks interested as Radak explaines) it's one of my pigeons (Radak straightens his glasses) I raise them as a hobby (commander carter Nods) back home.

Commander Carter:
Oh (smiles again)

Radak:
Lets see what we have here

(Commander Carter leans toward Radak and looks down at the Tablet he is holding)

-END OF SCENE-

The reason I chose this scene was because of the fact it had a little hint about the character (Radak) who raised Pigeons back home (Earth), it is somehow interesting but irrelevantly, but also relevant at the same time (it shows some of his character but doesn't really have much point in the scene) I just thought it was clever how they slipped it in there and how much it actually says about the person -ie: he is caring, would probably be a good father, is more passive in nature than violent. and all that from one little five second scene involving a picture of a pigeon.

Movie Analysis (breakedown treatment)

The next exercise that we had to do was to find a movie sort of similar to the one we where doing for MALac (In my case one involving a cult) - I asked around and discovered that there was one called Sunshine (which apparently had some sort of cult agenda to it) I also looked it up on http://www.imdb.com which gives ratings on movies (if I had to watch a movie it may as well be a good one) - the score they gave it was 7.3/10 which is not bad at all - I probably would have given it a 3/10 and still say it was probably a more waste of my time than watching paint dry. it has all the features of a mass produced quicky movie of today, lots of special effects and lots of death & murder (sorry for being so biased but I'm just fed up of watching different movies that are all the same, if that makes sense). The only cult part of the movie was a man (Capt. Pinbacker) who had been stranded on a previous 'save the sun' mission for 7 years and had gone crazy claiming that he had spoken to God and then killing everyone and trying to sabotage the mission which is to save earth by making a sun inside the sun and stop it from dying. somehow this character also gained super human strength despite the fact that he suffered 3rd degree burns to at least 90% of his body. all in all it was just a silly movie trying to be serious - if you get an opportunity to watch it I would probably advise against it but then again you might enjoy this type of movie (or probably not if you have read this as it is basically the whole story in a nutshell) - anyways lets get to the treatment of this movie.

50 years from now the Sun is dying, the reason is a highly stable form of matter has formed making nuclear fission impossible and the problem keeps on growing . the only way for humankind to survive is to attempt to send a special bomb into the heart of the sun and hope the explosion will destroy this substance and henceforth allow the sun to fussion normally once again.

A new crew had been sent to achieve this goal once again as the first mission was a failure, they consist out of a crew of 8. the main character is a genius by the name of Robert Capa who is vital to the destination of the bomb, he always seems to get into trouble with the his fellow cremate Mace. the Crew is subject to many challenges on the way to the sun, the main problem bieng the fact they manage to find the first mission ship by its distress beacon but do not calculate adjustment correctly of the shield blocking the sun from their ship after adjusting trajectory to meet up with this ship . Once they board this vessel they discover the previous crew had killed themselves, they only discover the captain remains alive after he has successfully sabotaged and their docking ring. afterwards there is much self sacrifice amongst the crew members whilst the madman is still loose sabotaging the ship. in the end though he is confronted by Robert and Cassie and is stunned whilst Robert sacrifices himself and initiates the device to explode in the sun and saved the world.


All in all a pretty lame story where everyone dies in the most horrible ways you can imagine with not much real reason for it. I honestly believe a 12 year old could write a better story.

Malac exercise 17/01/08:

The purpose of this exercise was to create a story from the script found below this post. this is the idea we (Gary Mulling and myself) came up with.

- We found that there was in fact 4 people in the scene and not 3 as most people perceived, HE, SHE, HERE and MAN... (very clever and cunning Joolz)

*Decide on the story (setting and circumstances) - we came up with 3, the 3rd being our final and 'best' story choice

1 - Comedy : About a guy tied to a chair, the MALac could be a health snack or a mega unhealthy food

2 - SCI FI : Aliens captured this fellow, trying to get information out of him. the MALac could be a torture or mind control device.

3 - Horror : Weird cult is trying to convert a priest (or someone important) by drinking some sort of sacrificial wine (might be blood) and looking for his college, the MALac is an unholy book or relic used to curse or taint a persons soul.

-The next part of the exercise was to take one (1) character and expand his/her character and life story. We chose SHE's character,

-SHE's Character - Very beautiful but evil inside and unafraid of committing bad deeds, she is also very dominating. She is the daughter of the high prophet/priest of this evil cult. She has very high hand-to-hand combat abilities and trains on weekends, she is physically fit, wears size 6 shes and wears sexy clothes (usually with high heals, red or black) when not in the cult (black robes and flat black shoes) she likes lipstick a lot too. she also wears comfortable sportswear from time to time with white sneakers. she tries to blend in as much as possibly outside to avoid suspicion. cool, calculating, sexy but very dangerous.

- Locations - Scene with man and MALac is in the cults HQ basement which is damp, dark with no electrical light fixtures - everything has to be lit by torch or lantern. Medieval passageways & rooms. there is a symbol painted on the wall (which you are meant to notice but not significantly as this helped the 'Main' of the story to find/uncover the cult.

MALac:

(This is the script for a story called MALac writen by our lecturer Joolz and presented in a AV design lecture presented by Deborah Tuck, we where put in groups of two to create a story using this script as it could be anything - the fact the Malac is not a real item ie: it could be anything we desired, from a sandwich to a miniaturized jumbo jet in a briefcase) - let the madness begin.

Fade in from black: white text on black background:

Courage is the belief that there is

something more important than personal safety

Fade to black

Int.Day.Room

HE is sweating. Hard.

SHE stands impassive. Unconcerned.

HE rubs his wrist and we see HE is chained to the chair.

SHE

(Bright. Breezy)

Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink?

(smiles)

Never too late to change your mind.

HE

(Afraid)

I swear, I swear. Please. Stop. Please?

SHE

(placing a briefcase in front of the chair)

Shush. Be quite quiet. It will no longer be necessary to lie.

HE

I swear…

HER

Shush, shush.

(popping open the case)

I have here a malac. God it’s beautiful.

Could you hold him please?

MAN steps out of the shadows and forces HE’s hand horizontal.

HE

Don’t. Don’t. I swear.

SHE

(pleased)

MALacs. Now no more shall we part on this path of truth we find ourselves on.

Playing with the MALac in the case, its metallic sheen plays on SHE’s face.

SHE

Pain, enlightening truth. This is what MALac brings.

Shall we continue?

SHE removes the MALac and shutting the case she steps forward.

HE screams.

THE END

Ik chain and movement test:

Indeed I have not created an amazing masterpice over the holidays but instead decided to practice the things I felt needed improving ...a bit of drawing and Ik links in 3d max. I started off by thinking of an exercise to do, we had already done a two legged walk cycle so what better project to attempt than a 4 legged walk cycle

I started by sketching a simple character as can be seen here->
it was logical to attempt diffrent poses of this character which I did not pay too much attention to in detail (sketch wize, however the positions where well thought out) I simply modeled the same creature in 3d max(which can be seen above) and animated it as seen below (exported in PAL) setting, the first one is a front shot of the walk cycle and the second is more of a side shot. I figured out the proper way the character should move by getting on my hands and knees and figuring it out that way (it was just quicker than trying to find something on the internet). I also took this character and decided to practice my hand drawing by adding to this sketch and came up with a scary little bugger which you can see right at the bottom of this blog. I hope to create this character in the future when I learn more advance modeling techniques.





I showed my lecturers (David Downes and Joolz) the top two animations and they said it looked very unstable. upon further study I found that I had indeed made a mistake and this character was not able to logically stay up walking the way it did. I created another walk cycle though though. We all make mistakes and I have learned one (get someone else's opinion before posting stuff on your blog that is supposed to be a finished thing). anyways heres the rectified one :)

My first character

Here's my first beasty, I titled it 'Rant' hope you enjoy it :)

Creating a possible disappointment:

I have been working on my character which has to be presented on Wednesday, Of course as you would know if you have been reading my blog my character is a sort of devil thing. I hope I can get away with it this time as last time in school art class I drew a similar character I was instantly branded a satanist by the teacher (the joys of school in South Africa) - anyways, lets hope that doesn't happen again lol. I referenced the image I hand drew to create this character, I then wacked a few colours on him, gave him some awesome teeth and some funky eyebrows to help show expession all

has gone pretty well until I started with morph target. Let me explain : To get the eyebrows and get the in I had to up the amount of vertexes. Later I had to create teeth and create a smoothing effect for them so they would'nt look blocky and this also applied to the eyebrow which was also a solid block. after that I decided 'right, time to animate this bugger... what was it Andy taught us again, AH!! yes of course, morph targets' It was easy to create eyebrow expressions and morph the eyelids but when it came to the mouth I found that I had made so many damned polygons that it took ages to change the mouth, the fact teeth where morphing and changing shape didn't help but fortunately 'Soft selection' saved the day. after creating loads of these morph targets and linking them all I found that I was unable to link the eyes I had set to express anger (it consisted of 2 parts and didn't morph correctly) also I noticed my system was starting to respond slowly when I attempted to do this (which is pretty strange as it has 4 gig of ram , a 1 gig graphics card and AMD Daul core 3.2ghz Black addition CPU - In short, this shouldn't happen... ever!) I found out that the reason was because I was trying to trick the eyeball and the eyelid (last 3 to right hand side) to morph to something that had a FFD4 modifier on which it did not like at all. If I wanted this affect I would have to do this manually. I continued to make more clones of the body and made many, many expressions.

I then started to rig the character using the sheets that I had obtained from Andy Loves lesson, I ran into no serious problems at all and when I did I just reflected back on the sheets. I will not explain the process of how I rigged the character, I will just display a screenshot of the final setup. (click on it for a better look)


It was now time to animate, but first to put in the sound - I had great problems with the sound because 3d max would not import a 8 bit mono track (Dungeon keeps voice file) so I had to rune it through Quebase, convert it to stereo before it would work... to make matters worse the sound would only start from the very beginning of the time line and would not move further along the timeline to start at a different point, this was (mind the expression) a pain in the ass to correct, I had to search many forums to find the answer (eventually found it here ) - it involved opening a window called the dope sheet and then easily sliding the track along to the desired point.
All I really did then was add a box at the bottom of 'his' feet - added a bitmap material ( which was a screenshot of a stage I made for my first Identities project called 'Mr pickles and the lost coin'using Hammer editor for half life 2)to my materials library and dragged it onto the box.

After that I just animated the beast... Tip: before you start rendering always set your output file size to PAL (yes it's there). I then popped a few lights in to give me suttle shadows and then rendered it. to a AVI file... Which I hope will work :)

Lip Syncing

I have been experimenting with the lip syncing model Andy gave us and produced this short clip. I found it harder to achieve on my computer as my sound card was too quick and got each an every small sound (making it very confusing) instead of having a longer, more recognizable sound on the university computers which believe it or not made it a hell of a lot easier. I am quite happy with the fact that this is my first lip sync clip I have ever done... of course there is a few times when I could have made the lips move at certain times to produce a better illusion it was actually speaking but had so many key frames in at different points that it became quite confusing, this has taught me to try keep all the actions all at the same point on the time line instead of scattered randomly. Anyways here we go, hope you like the result


Thanks to Andy Love for the great and already rigged cats head

Art Gallery adventure

We set out to Waterstones to attend a display of 'Nancy Farmer's' work, after reaching the 4th story that is. I was not aware hoe much artists actually earn until I saw the price tags... approx £250 a pop and also sometimes up to £1.5k per painting. The amount of detail that went into this persons work was quite impressive - on first inspection I suspected it was water colours and later after looking on her website confirmed this (Well, thats about all I learned to do on the art course I took over the last holiday), This person uses a technique where she wets the paper, allows it to expand, then tapes it to an easle and waits for it to dry again... the reason? so when she paints on it again with water colours the paper wont 'puff' up as it normally would. before painting though everything is done in pencil (with some pretty damn impressive detail) - I liked Nancy's effort and dedication (as she has done a lot of these detailed paintings) but unfortunately the style and content was not my taste, don't get me wrong as there where very impressive paintings there but they didn't really make me feel anything - I guess the only pixies and mythical creatures I appreciate are the ones on computer games that I can go toe-to-toe with. Anyways, here is some of her work - I hope you enjoy it more than myself

Click here for her website - you may also be interested to know she is a member of 'The Guild of Erotic Artists'