Potatomon

sadly we had to change the elder bird character because when you animated him his cape would drag along the floor or even go through it. i tried multiple ways to try and make it work using weight painting but it didn't seem to work. so he had to ditch his cloak he seemed to easier to animate but doesn't look right after so look at him with his cloak it looked like a new character.

Group work - Unity

when all the animations and the enviroment was finally finished it got put into unity. where i added a first person controller to move about the enviroment and see where if any you could fall through the floor. also i used the first person controller to see where things needed to if anything needed to be added. also while in unity i used a loop of the walk cycle of the character and set an animation so that the characters would walk down the corridor and into the alter room and stop where they would switch to an idle animation. we decided to keep our first person controller within the enviroment while the characters were moving about to make it like some game machinimas e.g. half life. i think this is a good idea because then a person could look around while the characters are doing their own thing or just watch the characters while they are walking to the alter.

Group work - Elder bird - Rigging

this is the geometry for the elder bird character. which i got given to rig and make it able to move properly. the character has a large cloak which goes from wrist to wrist that drops down the floor and  there's a bit of the cloak that starts at the elbow curves and rejoins at the wrist. knowing this i was stressing out a bit because of how complex the rig was going to be compared to the alien one i had done earlier in the module. knowing the complexity of rig i decided to get some paper and draw out the joint systems that i thought might make the cloak move as natural way as i could think of.

this is the skeleton which i decided would be the best fit for the geometry and make the character move correctly.

here is the final look of the model with controllers and all. i had a few slight problems while doing this even though i added an extra few skeletal systems the cloak didnt move naturally i even tried to removed all the influence that the binding the skeleton to the geometry and did my own and it didnt seem to move 100% correctly. i don't know if this is because the weight painting was done wrong or if  the whole idea of the rig was just too complex. i had a little problem with where the rotation point was on the knee controllers too i think this is because when i snapped the knee controller to the joint system to move out i might of knocked another button so the rotation point stayed and the controller moved to where i wanted it too.

above is the character fully rigged and textured

Group work - Young bird - Rigging

this is the geometry for the young bird character. which i got given to rig and make it able to move properly. after doing the elder bird i thought this one was going to be a lot easier in some ways it was but in other ways it wasn't. the hair for this model was a separate piece of geometry so it was semi easier to put the joint system down.

this is the skeleton which i decided would be the best fit for the geometry and make the character move correctly including how the hair would move when the spine joints were moved.

here is the final look of the model with controllers and all. i had a few slight problem with the weight painting because of the two different parts of geometry it made it harder because  i could find all of the edges that were effecting the hair from other joints on the body. the fringe parts of the hair seemed to be alot easier to sort out than i thought they were going to be though they did need fixing a couple of times. but it was ready to be animated by sarah.

above is the character fully rigged and textured

trees

a giant tree being one of the main objects within the alter room.  to being with i thought that i should have a look at trees that are within in some games. i found the image below and decided that the tree needed to have branches like the tree from shadow of the beast and have a lean/curve of the tree from the game day of the tentacle. i also had a look for a proper trees but only found one that had the kind of thing i wanted for our tree.

halo enviroments

with the recent release of halo 4 i thought it would be a good idea to have a look at the enviroments they have used throughout their games. the pictures below are the main ones i thought would help me do my work for this project. the first picture is helpful for the entrance of the temple where there will be broken doors and things. also the picture shows some of the iron reinforcements that are in the columns that we could change to wood as a kind of repair for some of our columns within the temple.the second picture is helpful for the inside where it it will be slightly darker and with the giant trees it helps seeing how much light would go through the leaves.

Alien- animation

after adding all the attributes it was time to animate the alien. we were added to animate a walk, jump and idle for the alien then it would be taken into unity 3d to be made into a turntable. i had abit of trouble while doing the animations. i dont know if it was because i hadnt done any animation in maya for a while or if it there was something up with the rig but when i had finished and cleaned it up the best i could it seemed alright.

League of legends - rig/animation

while i was doing the rig for the elder bird character for the group work. i was looking for examples of  harder rigs to try and help do my work i found this video made by someone that works within Riot the game company that made League of legends. it was nice to see that within the industry they use similar methods to what i was using for my character. the character within the video has lots more controllers and more complex movement because its a medusa/snake based character. this video also made me appreciate the time and effort they put into this character to make it look and move so nicely.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAVU0SdXjpY

after we had done most of the work i noticed one of our characters looked a lot similar to one of the characters within league of legends but sadly there wasn't any videos of his rig or animations. which would of helped a lot with out characters movement. though it would of only been useful if it showed him in his ultimate form not his human form.

Group work- Sound

after putting the enviroment into unity and making it how we wanted it we went to the sound rooms to record general noises that would be in the machinima. though in our haste to get sound for the machinima we didn't write down what we actually needed for it so some of the time within the sound booths was wasted on writing down what we needed. after doing that we seemed to go through what we needed to do quiet fast and at a decent standard. the only problem apart from not having what sounds we needed was it seemed to strain out voices a bit after it because of the change of pitch for some of the noises.

Group work - final enviroment

the image below is what the final enviroment looks like. it kept a similar shape to what i had blocked out. we slightly changed the corridor so that it looked more appealing while the characters were walking down it. we did this by adding a more instresting shape to the general corridor. making and adding statues to the alcoves and to other parts of the corridor made feel more like a temple than just a boring corridor the characters are walking down. we weren't quiet sure how to do the gem lighting idea so we just made some holes in the ceiling where some spot lights coming down into the room. we had multiple tree models and to show them off we made it so the temple had a forest outside and some of the trees were near the door.

Group work - storyboards

after fully working out with the group i started to do the storyboard for the animation. the story board ended up having 14 different scenes which though some of them could be repeated easier than others because some  theres one scene where the two characters are walking down the corridor and stop then it cuts to some close ups then back to the characters walking further down the corridor just at a slightly different camera angle.  so i think for production wise the way the storyboards work it would make near the end of the work easier.

Alien Modelling

after not touching maya for a while this part of the module was harder than it should of  been. we had to make a which one of tutors had designed. i had a look a  few forums and videos to pick up the basic short cuts and things again to help with the model because of the big absence of maya work. after a while i got back into it and got back to my neutral ground feeling with the programme. i found the face was one of the hardest things to do during the creation of the character and had to look at some reference images of human and creature topologies to help out.

Alien- uv mapping

this part took me what seemed to be the longest time to do. not liking uv mapping from the first years project i might of made a mountain of a mole hill this year. the torso, arms and legs of the model mapping worked out well. when i got to the head i seemed to have lots of problems which could of been a flaw in my modelling or just me messing bits up. the flaw being the fact that my aliens head and the body were separate parts of geometry which didn't connect to the next properly. i also realised during the uv mapping i didnt make a mouth box which set me back about abit.

Alien-weight painting and attributes

when i heard about weight painting i thought it was going to be quiet easy just whack a lot of colour everywhere and it would work fine... but to dismay it doesnt work like that and you have to carefully put/ take away paint from places. the paint being the influence on the joints, white being it has full influence and black meaning there is no influence at all. i think i did this pretty well on the and everything seemed to move nicely.

 after the weight painting we had to add custom attributes to the controllers so that the model would be easier to animate. the attributes that i added to the foot controller were peel heel, toe tap, stand tip, twist toe and twist heel. these attributes will make it easy to make a walk cycle and do general things using the legs e.g. stamping out a cigarette. i also added a fist attribute to the hand controllers and blink to the eye controllers.

Group work- after briefing

after being briefed, we had to make a group or team of 3 and make a machinima. my group being me, adam and sarah. we got together and started to talk about what kind of things we wanted our work to be. we established we didn't the work to be realistic, we wanted a cell shaded cartoony feeling machinima. so we looked at games like rayman and the legend of zelda : wind waker. we noticed looked at these games the characters looked slightly weird but you could easily remember them.  also the enviroments are colourful and have a very simple design.

Group work - my ideas

in our group we decided that we all should get some ideas together then we would group up later on to tell each other our ideas and decide on the idea that was best for a group here are my ideas for the machininma.

SURVEILANCE 1

Scene starts with a pan from right to left. In this time you will see the general scene, which is within a café/diner. There is a few people in there but the camera goes to the two people in suits talking. They talk for a while, then get up. The camera follows them to the door. Cuts to the outside of the café/diner, the two men are still talking whilst walking down the street/alleyway. They get into a car and drive off. On the opposite side to where the car was, a big white van with strange antennas, drive away after the car has gone.

EXCHANGE

The scene starts with two people talking next to someone in a hospital bed. You find out that the person in the bed needs a new organ and only has a few hours to live. The doctor leaves. The other person sits down next to the sick person and tells them they will find a new organ. Camera follows the person out of the hospital. Cuts to outside where the camera stays still and the person walks out of shot. Cuts to the person walking down an alley where you can see a shadow of someone. The person from the hospital talks to a man in a big brown coat. He opens the coat and you see multiple, different organs. The man from the hospital buys one, turns around, and walks towards the camera. Whilst this is happening, its slowly fading to black.

SURVEILANCE 2/STOLEN?

starts with you watching two men walking around a warehouse/shipyard at night sneakily. You can see the men doing multiple jumps and rolls to dodge patrols and torch lights, boosting each other up onto boxes finally. Camera zooms out, the pictures- fuzzy, shows a black outline, a tv screen, then finally the two robbers watching the screen, with a red light flashing and an alarm going off.

Group work - the crit/presentation

threw some pictures of environments from multiple games. trying to get old ruin kind of buildings to go with the feel we were going with.

the basic floor plans for the environment our group talked about. 

the top image is of a the cut section within the alter room. where i want to have a huge tree that is growing up the side of the dome shaped room and it would vines and branches would droop over the alter. i also drew some things that would be in alcoves within the corridor.

here is my idea of how the relic would be lit. there would be cracks within the ceiling where colourful gems would be placed that would shine to a master gem which would spread the light down around the relic.

Group work- before first crit/presentation

when we grouped up we ended up with 3 ideas. a grave robber idea, a not so romantic date and an Indiana Jones temple raid.

Grave robber idea
exchanging items/information
two grave robbers are exchanging items and/or information, the information being about the location of a grave within the cemetery that has a holy relic inside. while digging for the item the two characters discuss payment and after they finish they remove the item from the coffin, the ground would shake and rumble or the grave stone would crack down the middle show it was a bad idea to remove it.

A not so romantic date
love exchange
this idea would be set in paris or venice and the man would be waiting for the woman to arrive. when she turns up he would say hello but she would just walk past him down to a boat so they could take a ride. he gets into the boat to help her in then she slips on the side and she goes into the water

An indiana jones machinima
exchange
a combo of the last two ideas a man and a woman go into a temple where you the camera goes down the tunnels quickly until you get to the end where the characters are. the man runs to the center of the room where a huge golden idol is standing and he replaces it with a stone. he happily walks to the entrance of the room where the woman is standing and just before he gets to her to show her the idol he falls through the floor and the idol going flying though the air into her hands.

we chose to do the idiana jones themed machinima because we thought we could do lots of things with the environments and characters. we also decided that adam and sarah would make a character each and i would do the environment.

Group work - after crit/presentation

with the feedback about ideas we had the temple and the little bit done for the grave robbing idea. we then changed the indiana jones idea a little by instead of having human characters we would have humanoid bird people kinda of things but have a similar story to the indiana jones idea. we did this because the thought that having the bird people would give us more room to use some artistic lience and it would be more original. the basic idea for the concept of the birds(from the grave robbing idea) and temple were the main things we kept that we showed in the presentation.

after having a brief discussion about what kind of things we wanted for this idea we started developing this new idea instead.

Group work- Blocking enviroment

below shows the environment blocked out and where i want everything to be placed when the environment is fully modelled.  i only added the big pieces of the enviroment because things like little stones, flowers and other small objects could be added anywhere in the scene not just in one place.

Group work - addition enviroment

this image is of the outside of the temple because we are having bird characters i thought that the temple could correspond with a bird. that's why its a nest shape at the top of the temple but it also has many stairs like the mayan pyramids.

we werent sure how the story of the bird people would go. we had an idea that when the relic was picked up it would summon ghosts and some kind of fire would appear near the entrance to the alter room the main reason for so many ghost images.

this image is for one of the walls within the corridor which the elder bird will point out and talk about to the younger bird.

Dragon age opening sequence

we started the machinima module by looking for some short clips that we deemed as a machinima. A  machinima being a short film or series of episodes filmed within a game engine.we looked at cutscenes and opening cinematics of games past and new to see how they used machinima. most of the games used machininma to tell the player more details about the story they might not beable to get through the game play or add bits they might of missed. some games also use cinematics at the end of games to hint at the next game.

I chose the dragon age origins opening sequence because it was a game I liked to play and the opening is a favourite of mine. when you start the game this appears it starts to show you a a quote from one of the people in the games lore then a kind of montage of animated images while a narrator tells you what they all mean.this section isnt machinima but it its a nice way of story telling without going into the game and doing something. after the animated images there is some footage that has been done in game it shows dead bodies, fighting and the general graphics of the game. these short pieces of footage have been made within the game specifically to show the history and battles within the game. finally near the end of the sequence you get to the see the person that has been narrating the scene which i think is a nice touch instead of making him a unseen character they made him noticeable so you could go to him within game and know who he was. most of the scenes with ingame footage are just in game you can tell by it not being amazing textures,and backgrounds.

the whole purpose of this cutscene to tell the story of the game up to current events within the dragon age series and to show a few things you can do, fight and people you can talk to within the game. this sequence showed me different ways that storytelling can be done in a simplistic manner.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q94rdV9M1M4

Alien-rigging

at first i thought rigging was going to be very hard but when i got into it it was quiet easy and very interesting to learn about. when our tutor was teaching us about it, i seemed understand everything that was going on and the basics of rigging already. even though i had never done it before. after doing the skeletal system my alien seemed to start taking shape.

 we had to add custom controllers to the rig which when we bond the model would move the joints the controllers were assigned to. i had a slight problem adding the hip dislocate joint/controller to the root joint/controller but it was an easy fix and just involved going into the outliner and sorting out the hierarchy.

Lionhead working on RPG for next-gen Xbox

Lionhead working on RPG for next-gen Xbox 

is this game going to be fable4? i enjoyed fable 2 & 3 previously and from "MMO-like multiplayer experience that will affect the outcome of the player experience, and many other attributes surrounding their profile (such as the environment and the outcome of certain actions)" it seems like its going to be fable 4 because the 2 & 3 both have 2 player co-op and what choices in the main quests change what happens near the end.

007 Legends

007-legends-trailer

I don't usually  watch trailers that involve films to games because from past films to games they have been really bad and had nothing to do with the film at all but this one seems one of the best after golden eye of course. The grahpics seem quiet realistic and the gameplay looks smooth a game i might keep my eye on in the future if more trailers show this quality of game play.

left for dead & payday heist crossover revealed

left-dead-payday-heist-crossover-revealed

The deep story of the left for dead games and the intense game play of payday heist a game that combines the would possibly be one of the best multiplayer games out. but seeing the big attraction to military shooters the game might get swept under the carpet by other releases from the Call of duty franchise

Playstation All stars

Playstation-all-stars

though when this game was confirmed I was thinking that it was going to be a really bad copy of Super Smash bros. But not more has been confirmed for it seems to be taking good parts from Super Smash bros and making it into a better game with a deeper story in the campaign and more of a backstory for each character being there

Brian Fargo Shares RPG Storytelling Techniques

Brian Fargo Shares RPG Storytelling Techniques

i think the tips and techniques in this article could be used for any game or film that has a narrative. also this article showed me how I could possibly get a player of a game ive made to connect to characters within it and feel emotions about what happens within the game.

LEGO Game Boy Transformer!

LEGO Game Boy Transformer!

There has been quiet a few things about lego over the past couple of months and here another one I found which it quiet cool. This transformer transforms into the old game boy "brick" which I think looks good showing the younger generation something from earlier history of gaming with something newer like transformers.

Copyright

After this little lecture I have been looking at copyright in a different light. It showed me how strict the copyright laws are over certain pieces of information. And I also see why some people have been sent over to american over copyright claims.Though I believe that if a crime involving copyright was committed within the UK or any country theirs were any court case should be and use the laws of that country not just sending people to other countries where the laws are stricter.

Andy Peers PPP

In this lecture you got a list of questions which the speaker Andy Peers would ask during the lecture then answers would be shouted out. From this lecture apart from getting moved by his emotional story I got that if you stick at it something eventually it would profit you and help you out later on in life. 

LEGO Pokemon customs

 LEGO Pokemon

Some of them look slightly weird but you can tell what pokemon they are meant to be and if they were made earlier when pokemon was more popular i think these would go flying off the shelves.

Gearbox honor late Borderlands fan

Gearbox and Claptrap honor late Borderlands fan with eulogy, NPC in sequel 

i think that its great that such a big company could take a story of a fan and add a character to the game for the fan if only more companies could show some interest in their community other than trying to get money out of it

Gerard Michel

G�rard Michel

I found this concept artist after the game level module but I think his work is very simple but shows multiple angles of the builds in his work.

The year role-playing games broke

The year role-playing games broke

I dont think RPG's are broke just not many are being made compared to what they use to with current obsession with fps. Mass effect 3 being one of the latest RPG's to be released only got hyped up because it was the last segment in the Shepard story and it got some bad press because people thought the ending was rubbish. A RPG that i think is broken or not what it seemed to be was Dragon Age 2 I enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins and got all but one of the add-ons. All the characters had a deep backstory and all interacted differently to each other in the party and to your decisions which is why i liked it so much. but when Dragon Age 2 came out i thought it was going to be similar to what DAO was but I think the whole revamp of the fighting system  and the lack of depth to characters ruined the game. The fighting system in DAO wasn't prefect but it was good enough the big changes to DA2 like the rogue could just jump across the battle field to stab an enemy but I think this change was added because of Mass Effect 2. The changes from Mass effect 1 to Mass effect 2 seemed to work because you could kinda work out that the human race could have advanced in their abilitys within the years between the too games.The idea of importing your choices from DAO to DA2 seemed to be an alright idea because it worked very well with Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 2. But in DA2 the choices you made seemed to make very little to no different to the game at all. Characters they brought from DAO:awakening seemed not to be the same even though both games are suppose to overlap each other a little in the timeline of the games. I just hope that if/when DA3 is make it better than 2 was.

What Makes a Game?

What Makes a Game?

I think that a well written story & puzzles makes a decent game memorable. The whole argument of story vs graphics shouldn't be a contest the story should beat graphics hands down the old zelda games still get played to day because of the story. games that are mostly made for their graphics seem to have really bad storys because the developer puts all their time and effort into the graphics which lowers everything else.

Mojang Working On Official Minecraft Lego

Mojang Working On Official Minecraft Lego

Wooo minecraft lego. I always thought that minecraft was just a digital version of lego but now they are making minecraft lego i dont see the point of it apart from getting notch more money but with the release of minecraft on the xbox im sure he will be rolling in it even more.

Why don't we finish games?

Why don't we finish games?

after reading this article i tried to work out why i didn't finish some games. Some of the games i play like sonic i dont finish them because i play it like it was on the mega drive when i want to stop i just turn it off and not use the new addition of saving which i feel spoils the feel of the older games. I dont finish some games because im more drawn to a multiplayer game than a single player game sometimes. and other games i dont finish because i lose general or the game seems to be against me to much for me to continue playing it.

Yellow Sticky Notes

Yellow Sticky Notes

Found this animation ages ago but i started watching it again after i started to do my storyboards on post-it notes. I think that they animations is nicely done and the music adds a lot of emotion to it.

industry in leeds

This lecture told us about how many companies that are within leeds that are to do with our course. it was quiet a surprise to see all these because you dont see much about anything to do with it in the main stream media. At the end of this course i would like to contact some of these companies to get a job

BAF Hand circus

hand circus are the creators of rolando and rolando 2 i personally cant say a lot about these games because i havent played them but from what he showed it looked like a decent puzzle platformer. The main thing i got from this is the last few things they said were important when creating a game. 

• Draw inspiration from everywhere 
• stick with it 
• use time well
• dont try and do something a bigger company is doing

BAF Six to start

From this speaker i got that bad story games can sell but thats mainly because of the multiplayer aspect to the game. games that let the play make their own story or choose between multiple different choices are better games and draw players into them making them feel more connected to the game. some games with bad stories could be that way because lack of funding.

BAF faceware

Faceware is a piece of software that you can input a 3d character then it will separate the face into brows eyes and mouth. You can then move and change all objects within the groups to do facial expressions. I think I will get this software eventually when im more confident making characters within maya and can animate to a better standard where this software would be useful.