Old Creative Stuff

How the unreal whiteboxing / prototype is going: How i would love a game in unreal to look, messed up and absract:

Matching paintings to their placement.

Charcoal and photo manipulation. A depiction of the kind of sombre mood we're trying to create. Expect layout and level designs in the near future.

Ceiling of the 'Arab' room

CARDIFF CASTLE HISTORY The history of Cardiff Castle goes back almost 2000 years to when the Romans first arrived and built defences here. In the 11th and 12th centuries the Normans built first a wooden and then a stone fortress here. The fortress can still be seen, and at the top there are good views over castle and city. The later stone fortress built by the Normans in the 11th and 12th centuries still stands proudly in the middle of the grounds, affording good views from its upper levels. THE BUTE FAMILY By the 18th century Cardiff Castle had come into the hands of the Bute family , from the Scottish Isle of Bute. It was the 3rd Marquess of Bute, John Patrick Crichton-Stuart (1847-1900) who transformed the interiors. The Butes owned vast areas of land in South Wales, and when the Industrial Revolution came along, and with it a great demand for the coal which was here in huge quantities, the Butes had more money than is imaginable. The 3rd Marquess was an unusual man, quite shy...

I wrote a bit of a more detailed insight into our few early ideas and their development: There is a collection of broken televisions dotted around the top of a desolate hill. Walking around these broken televisions, some crackle into life and open opportunities to escape ‘into’ the televisions. These televisions offer individual unique changes in games convention i.e. Changing the traditional camera angles of first person / 3 rd person / fixed camera, to something not seen in a game before, maybe under floor or mounted on some part of the body. Other ‘television rooms’ would play with light and dark, colour, and the senses. A level where you had to navigate using only proximity sensitive surround sound was planned. The aim was to escape each room, by completing each objective. It was further developed so an overarching omnipotent character orchestrated your path in an attempt to show you the possibilities of untapped games potential. Kind of like a dark underground indie-game t...

Third and final year, so that means creating a fully working verticle slice of a game concept. Me, Eric, Leah and Pat discussed ideas, concepts and design principles over the summer and spent 2 weeks sifting through the mountain of ideas we came up with. We are playing with light, colour and sound, but up untill yesterday didnt have anything to link them all together. We needed a form of narrative and context that we could use to say something aswell. Influences from the film Equilibrium led us to settle on the context and narrative of emotion subdueing drugs. This is reflective of contemporary worries for the prospect of a society driven by such drugs. Already encroaching into american culture this is a real issue and hopefully something we can explore in interactive media. More details as and when. let the games begin

Its the weekend! And after a day off on Friday to recharge, i have charged headlong into more maya skills expanding. Here's the final result: (i will post up the development at some point too - i took shots at various stages.) big version here (very much worth the jump for the extra detail) Done more on my website too, and made some decisions that means I'm a lot more happy with it now. Also bought a Wah pedal and distortion box for my guitar, so I've been putting those through their paces too. Recorded a little improv song using a blues - style wah effect. Will link when i get them uploaded somewhere. A busy few days, but i do relish it.

Ian Gouldstone, Animator in residence project 2009. Collaborative animated dialogue.  https://vimeo.com/6970022 "I've been working in a little group of students with BAFTA award winning animator and director  Ian Gouldstone . The aim, to create a short animated conversation between Ian and the individual students. Each student (or small group) would have 24 hours to respond to a 5 second animation instigated by Ian. Everyone would then show their animations and vote on the best one to go into the final film. Ian would then take this chosen clip, respond in a similar fashion and show it to us to respond back to the following day." Gladly, one of my clips got chosen to appear in the final film. Remembering to animate in AE instead of Flash, I played round with 3d layers. and camera movement. This was similar to the previous one in the fact it was slightly reminiscent on where the conversation had gotten to. Going through the many layers of conversation to see our and Ian...

Did some more work on my website, including getting to grips with bump mapping. All good fun:

We presented last out of 4 in a hot stuffy room, probably the worst time as people's concentration levels are slipping. We had some major technical issues 2 hours before the presentation, in a last minute push to get all 4 character vehicles working, we tried out a load of dts's i had exported the day before. 3 out of 4 worked in a fashion but not well enough to show in our final presentation. the 4th character that i had exported was my character which we had gotten working but drove like a house (the wheel base was too wide). I had re-exported an updated smoother model of it with a smaller wheelbase, but it was the only one that didn't work. We had all 4 characters controllable but mine controlled like a brick and the other 4 had faults like the camera was upside down. we couldn't use either of out 20+ dts exports so were pretty scuppered. we did have a saving grace, a tank-shaped model chris got off the internet that we had been using still showed we could get a cust...

Been playing round with zbrush, and exploring its kind of 'post rendering' tools. This was unplanned, using a program i just about know, fiddling with something it wasn't intended to do but i think it came out okay:

My character for the family game has been needing a re-model for a while; the geometry was messy, when rigged the polygons moved seemingly at random, and it could do with being a lot smoother. I re-modelled it from a sphere this time. I needed the smooth curves a wasn't getting if i started with a cube. Extruded the arms as well instead of haphazardly pasting them onto the body. Increased the amount of edge loops round the arm joints so now it can put its arms by its side. Much easier for animating. I'll post a pic of the rig when i get time - Its a bit of a behemoth. Legs body and arms as well as the independent pillow and engine mounted on his back that needs to move with the character. All have a degree of controlled movement. Its going be good fun trying to get finished animations exported! After re-modelling and rigging my character, I spend a day or 2 animating a few different sequences for the relative motions the character will have to go through.  I created...

I submitted 2 logos for a website re-design competition. www.womeningames.com

I was thinking I should actually be posting some images up; The following images are from the past week or so. The stage we are at now is mainly asset creation, texturing and getting animations into torque. Its getting there though, and because we don't have walking characters, its not vital to have walk cycles - we have in place a utility to make the wheels transparent to its like the vehicles are gliding across the surface. So, images: Next tasks: Get my character as the drive-able car, finish a load of assets and texturing, animate my character and export, and finally prepare for a big progress presentation on Tuesday when we show a hopefully nearly finished build. Good luck to everyone!!

Its been a fair while since my last post, its now rolled over to a new month, and a new phase of our build. I have been familiarising myself with torque more, and have managed to establish a working pipeline from maya to torque to get fully UV textured static models in engine. Its all go now as we have started modeling assets, and placing them in the world. There is another big development, we were trying to decide on how to create the track, it seemed like the only option was to laboriously go around the map space and edit the terrain manually, but i investigated height mapping in torque and have managed to quickly and easily make a raised track in a hilly environment. That's been passed to eric for some tweaking of track height and addition on obstacles / ramps. I've been modelling my own character, an engine-toting beefy pilot type character. Not finished yet, but heres a preview: We have cracked the 2d overlay too, Mac's been awsome and unlinked the mouse from the car t...

Just a quick meeting this one, I presented the 'Demo Walk-through' for the demo level we will be creating. It was warmly received, and apparently made it all a lot clearer in peoples minds. It outlined the play mechanic, and general feeling of the game: Family Game Demo Level Walkthrough: Of our plan B, multi-faceted, single screen multiplayer racer / puzzler. Initially, you are faced with a faded distorted slowly panning splash screen of a crowning ceremony. This indicates the open visual style appropriate for all the family. Pressing start, large cartoon-like text will indicate the main options on the panning circuit / environment background; Single player, Multiplayer, High Scores, Help/Tutorial (or something similar). Selecting multiplayer will prompt the screen to fill with all manner of characters running on. Multicoloured pointers relating to which and how many players are connected. Are used to select their characters (we can limit the choice to 4 or 5 in the d...

The brief is to design a family game. Not an easy brief to stamp particular artistic creativity on as it must be accessible to all ages but we shall try. Last week, we met up twice to discuss the brief and come up with some design principles we wanted to stick by. What we needed to consider within the design, and what we didn't want to do / take from / end up with. We then set about throwing loads of ideas about, mixing in what would be possible for the whole family, but also be tactically difficult, with a secondary level of 'trickyness'. We have a rough idea now - we had a great meeting Monday where we went through loads of ideas. We have settled on a racer / puzzler. Super Mario Kart-esque where you race and collect boxes, but in ours the boxes have player-specific puzzles in them. The player determines what sort of puzzle is in their colour box; be it logic, quick reactions etc.. At then end of the racing stage, you complete the puzzles you collected to get jewels / ot...

Attempting some tilt-shift on the hotel I stayed in on holiday. ...and a bit closer enjoy

Playing with the toon function and motion blur in maya. Headphone design. The environment, train station, train and large glowing billboards. --- It features a CG character wearing headphones on a train. Music starts (we went with Vivaldi's summer), the CG world around her dissolves and she falls into this music transient state where she is a Plasticine stop-motion character. Running, action, and movement are timed with the crescendos as she struggles to outrun buildings closing in on her. They finally meet at the climax and drag her back to the pseudo-real CG world. The Video: