Another post

Things are a bit up in the air right now. I havent really done any gaming except for my daily dose of animal crossing. Gotta mind the grass/snow or ill have none left. What a stupid game mechanic. My entire town will be consisting of plants, trees and blank patches before long. Cant even run anymore without fear of the entirity of the grass wearing out. Gotta spend everyday watering plants and trees when the number goes up by 6 each day. And those couple of hours i watch Dave playing Mario Galaxy. I wonder whose idea it was to let P2 have a shocker which freezes everything that can hurt Mario barring bosses. It makes it fun and i suppose I have to make do with that since i can't fire his star bits at everything. He is quite the kleptomaniac.

But yes, for the Queens Project, I'm a modeller, so I'm doing all the little bits that aren't really main geomotry. Which is pretty good for me, i have the attention span of a magpie in a cutlery shop. As always, texturing isn't my strong point, so I will do my best to at least get a basic texture over everything and then if it needs changing its there to be changed. It's coming along well i believe. The first render i saw made it look pretty darn good, lets hope the other areas we do will turn out that well.

Just an initial texture.

Gameartisans Kingdom Hearts competition also prays on my mind a bit. I have to get it done by friday but with the other projects i don't really know how to prioritise. The whole "I have to do one but i have three and then don't do anything" sort of thing going on. But I'll probably work on Kuzco a bit, since its now just texturing. Then get textures for my Queens Assets and finally over the weekend, Chris' interesting person. HOORAY SCULPTURE. My favourite thing next to having my feet stamped on and finding out all the biscuits in the packet are broken.

Seems like a plan because I don't wanna miss a competition this big, its even bigger than the sackboys so I gotta work hard. Also for when the Dom war comes. There is no way i want to miss out on that. Shame it starts like halfway through the Queens project and assessments too if we have them.  But i suppose we get the last few weeks of Easter to finish it. Wonder what it'll be this year. My first Dom war, its pretty exciting. Should be a compulsory part of the course in my opinion.  IF anyone on the course doesn't want to do it then perhaps they are on the wrong course. Though it is a little intimidating being against all those big wigs, especially since the standard will be raised even more than last year. Still, I'm gonna try, then over summer work on a bunch of little projects to improve my standard, and even do some digi paintings i guess. Maybe an hour speedpaint every night would be good.

We will just have to see now won't we?

An entry at last

Its been an entire week since I made my last post but I havent done too much work wise. I tried to paint Mac Anu from the .hack games but funnily enough not a single picture of the town online to use as reference. Today I painted a random girl, probably totally wrong in the face but i wanted to paint something. And also tried to use Dels method of only using the flow to paint a picture. That didnt work out too well for me. It gave a nice effect to the edges and whatnot but rather than use opacity to sort out your shading and colour blends, you have to pick out the exact colour you need to put in the middle. 

As for my modelling direction, I am gonna keep working on my Kuzco entry for the competition but dismayed that somebody else has done him too. While it isn't something thats illegal in terms of the competition, you feel slightly proud and unique that you're doing a character nobody else has thought of. Also I was trying to copy the head from a model someone else had made, for an animation id be guessing from all the polys, instead of using it as orthos. Boy did i feel silly.  Hope I can finish soon, there is only a week left and it would surely be better to finish it now before the hit of all the work for chris and heather hits.

Gotta get an interesting character and turn him into a character, id still like to do Elder Busch though, that is a name and a half for some sort of holy knight

One Semester down

Two more to go.

Lol obvious I know but its always nice to count things down.

Tonight will be the first night in a week that I'll be back on my normal sleeping pattern. Somewhere around 3 to whenever i have to be up, this being 8:30 so i can get ready in time for these presentations. I'll probably be first, being the only A name.

It sucks but am I nervous? Not really. Presentation is a presentation is a presentation. Talk about work, don't feel bad for what you've done. What sucks even worse is having to redo 9 weeks of work in 3. Sure I should be able to knock each of these out in a week, but for some reason they all took so long to do. Was I being slow? Was msn distracting me? Did I lean back to take a breather a little too often? 

Answer to this question and more....probably never.

I'm always finding the 3D stuff alot more fun than the 2D. Sure there is a high chance that I'm not doing a great job of the 2D but I do enjoy modelling things and to an extent, texturing them alot more. However a lot of the 2D work is environments and I'm pretty set on not going into environments, just really not my thing no matter how nice some of them look.  The characters in each game are the main draws to it. BG&E has Jade, a normal girl with green lipstick. World Ends with You; Anorexic kids but all have their own culture to them. Even TF2, every class is designed so differently but with class.

Guess thats why I'm going to use this week to do a good job for their Kingdom Hearts War 3Dmini. Mainly in the way of Kuzco. The hippest cat in creation, the coolest king of the nation.

Theme song guy is optional depending on how many tris I have left over.

Currents WiPs

So this is how my self portrait looks with the mudbox normals applie to it. Looking pretty spiffy i think. Needs a few additions to it though. So it only really needs a face, hair, arms and shoes. And a specular.

This is the progress of my environment, it all kinda comes together and doesnt look as random as before. Gotta do things on a simple small scale. So general texturing and bumps here.

And my airship. This is just a general colour thing I have going, it has no normals or speculars and most of the textures will be kinda painted.

Christmas...oh wait

Can't really have all that snow and then not record it in such digital media.

I managed to get a few photos of it all. Some at night and some in the morning.

So one of my sisters car without flash. So this is how it is normally

Same but with the flash so everything looks different and the flash picks up on the snowflakes.

Then did the flash on my mums car to get another view.

My mums car in the morning around the time the snow stopped falling and all those college kidsruined it.

And my favourite shot of my garden. I just like the blue hue it put over everything.

Work is coming along alright fyi

Work progression

Not too much of a serious post but I submitted my sackboy for the GameArtisans competition. With all the other work I had to do it got pretty crammed into the 30th until 6am so it could've been better than it was. Rigging was also a pain but i managed it in the end. With all the great entries there I don't think I'll get near the top at all ;_; but I didn't wanna miss out on something this big. MY layout could use a bit of work too but as I say it was 6am and its lucky I finished it. I did nothing on New Years Eve

FredH will be making a wallpaper with all the sackboy entries in it so it'll be really cool to see all the sackboys in one sheet.

And also today I have finished modelling my vehicle. An arcadian airship and this stands in at 7774 tris and was a little bit more complicated than the War of the Worlds thing. Makes me happier now that I've reached some checkpoints but yes it is one week left and that is totally fffffffff. Still, make my own head tomorrow, few more props for my environment and thats all my modelling done. And just for tonight, i will sleep as my blackeye bags had red in them which im sure isn't a great sign.