It's alive!

Hello! This week has been all about animating! I spent about two days researching and reading as much as I could about animation.

There was so much information available to me that I didn't even know how to begin. Slowly I started playing with the different parameters and layers and I think I am on the right track...

The way CAT animation works is through layers and each layer contains different parameters. Layers can be merged and combined to create different animations.

For this animation I started with a preset running animation and then I edited the movements from there. I had to change the way the legs moved, the speed, the spine movement, well...pretty much everything.

By using adjustment layers and tweaking the position of the rig at certain frames I am gradually achieving a good animation.

I need to refine it further to make the whole movement a lot smoother but it's looking good so far!

I hope to get the rabbit animated and into engine by the end of next week (fingers crossed). If I have learned something so far is that as soon as you make a small change, the whole animation just breaks...I am exaggerating but it takes a lot of patience and an aye for detail to create a good animation!


Bye, bye!

Help! I have to animate!

Hello! This week has been pretty good! I started off Monday by finalizing my concepts...

I spent about a day to come up with a concept for the Cheshire cat but sadly we won't be including him in our level. Apparently the judging panel made pretty clear that they wanted the games to be as close to the original book as possible. This means no Cheshire cat and no Jabberwocky.

I guess that's what happens in the industry all the time. Ideas are being created and then replaced by new, better ones.

I also did a few NPCs concepts just in case we have time to create them. It'll be nice to see some sort of population in the level considering it's Oxford city.

Well, so far so good...or so I thought...

Most of this week I've focused on the real life rabbit. Modelling was pretty straight forward. I kept it fairly low poly because it will be pretty small compared to everything else.

Then I took it into Zbrush and added fur detail as well as tweaking the overall shape. I made it more round and thinner. At this point I realised that my original model was too low poly to animate properly so I used Zbrush to do a slightly higher poly version.

And then I found out that I've probably chosen the most difficult task in my group...

I used CAT rig instead of a normal biped rig because it gives you so much freedom in terms of transforming, adding and deleting bones.

I have never used this 3DSmax feature therefore I am relying on tutorials to help me through this process.

My current work is to read how to use the CAT animation tools and there's so much to learn! I have spent most of today reading tutorials and I felt like my brain could not think straight by the time I went home. The fact that barely anyone knows about animation in the course leaves me on my own for this...

I understand the basics but then there are so many little details and layers and functions that I don't even know if they apply to what I want to do that it just drives me crazy.

Anyway, I am happy to be doing this. It's something new and if I succeed, it will make our level stand out from the rest.

This is it for today, see you soon!

Choices

Hi! Today I thought of posting a few of my life drawing sketches that I have been doing throughout the year.

I love life drawing, it is the most pure form of art and I believe that to become a great artist I should never stop drawing from real life. At the end of the day if all the fancy software is removed all that remains are the core traditional art skills.

This year is happening way faster than I expected and I am still undecided on what to specialize. Now is the time to go look for internships and work experience and I want to do it....the thing is that I don't know what position I want to apply for. I don't feel like I am very good at anything in particular which makes me frustrated, the last thing I want is to be average.

I really enjoy drawing people, it is something that comes natural to me. I suppose the fact that all I've drawn most of my life are humans has made me good at it. I feel that character artist is the way to go for me but something in the back of my mind makes me doubt it.

For now I'll just continue to learn and improve both my 2D and 3D skills and hopefully things will become easier when I reach my final year at DMU.

See you soon,

Carla.

Alice's adventures off the map!

Hello everyone! The competition I have been waiting for a year has begun! Gamecity and the British Library have set in motion the 3rd Off the map competition. Using the 125th anniversary of the original Alice in wonderland, they've come up with an awesome competition for this year!

Our university has gained a lot of popularity thanks to this competition and we have high standards they expect from us. Pudding Lane productions did a fantastic job at recreating London during the period of the great fire but we are determined to do better than them!

The competition is made of three themes:

Oxford
Gardens
Underground

At first we were told to come up with a side scroller game and I kind of liked the idea, but in the end the tutors let us do what we thought more suitable for this project.

Our first thoughts were to do a stylized game with textures similar to Victorian illustrations. In the end we decided to go for a more realistic approach. We wanted something that would appeal to everybody, we wanted to create a game but also a learning experience.

In the end we decided to recreate Oxford during the Victorian era and link it to Lewis Carroll's owns views of the city. We would include specific areas where Carroll took inspiration for his famous Alice and wonderland books.

The idea is simple, you explore Oxford looking for clues (book pages) and learn about the book and how it related to real life. The level repeats itself, in other words, once you get to the end point you get teleported back to the beginning. The difference though is that the environment is changed. The weather changes, the buildings change and the experience is different. Our goal is that as the player collects the pages of the book it gradually gets teleported into the actual Alice in wonderland world.

This is the basic layout of our level.

As well as collecting the pages, we plan on adding more interactions to make the overall gameplay a lot more interesting.

I was appointed character artist for this project and my job at the moment is to concept model and animate a white rabbit which will guide the player through the level.

I first started with a couple of studies of rabbits and then I created my own rabbit running pictures. I found the first row on the internet, I took it and then created the skeletal form inside it to help me visualize the movement when it comes to animating.

Since as you go through the level, everything looks more like in the books, the rabbit will change as well...

I used various references of Victorian clothing to come up with the designs for the white rabbit and then merged the best ones into one final one.

Colouring was fun. I wanted to use bold and contrasting colors so that it would look a bit surreal. In the end the green suit seemed to be the one which stood out for most people so I decided to base my final concept on that color combination.

And here's my version of the white rabbit. I think the pink eyes make him look a bit evil but I made his face and overall shape kind of round to imply that he is a good guy.

And..this is it for today. Next post I'll talk about our group trip to Oxford and Cheshire cat concepts!

See you soon!


P.S. Jonah has been very nice to set up a group blog called The flaming dodo where we all post our progress and developments on the project.

flaming dodo productions (Link)

Container city project: Postmortem

Hello!

Container city is done and it's time to go back and review how it went.

I really enjoyed working on this project as it turned out pretty nice! I got along with everyone on my group which made us a productive team.
We didn't communicate much which was no good in terms of keeping up with assets. At one point I didn't know who was doing what.

We had a strong idea from the beginning and we made sure certain elements would stay the same throughout our level. We worked at a steady pace, without rushing anything which means we managed to finish everything on time. Perhaps if had worked a bit faster we could have included some stretch goals like the wrecked ship behind the altar.

We all started on by concepting the different rooms and then we split into different roles. Callum took most of the engine work. Braden and I were in charge of most of the assets and Johannes did some engine work (particle effects) as well as some props.

I felt quite comfortable working with them but as in any group project, there were certain things I wanted to look in a specific way but I had to respect my team mates and reach a middle ground with them.
I feel that a bit more organization would have benefited our final outcome. We didn't really have a schedule when we would meet or how many hours we would spend in labs. We would just drop assets into google drive and then help Callum put them into the level.

In this project I felt that I could speak up and that my ideas would be heard better than any previous group projects. It gave me more confidence and I want to keep having a noticeable input on future group work.

The tutors were happy with our level, they thought it was something original but they wanted to see more of the relationship between the ship wreckage and the tribal world. I am overall very pleased and it amazes me how much one can create when working in a team. So far I have been quite lucky with my team mates. I have always been with a nice group and I hope it stays this way!

Next project is the Off the map competition sponsored by Gamecity and the British Library. It'll be an awesome project to work on! All I know is that I've been put in a really good team and we've got a really good idea but I'll talk about that on another post!

See you soon!