quick plug

not that he needs it from me (he's in the UK national papers and television already) but just a quick plug for my mate Cargill, who's site i've finally got round to visiting.. a great idea, i wish i had his self publicisizing skills

http://www.themilliondollarmovieproject.com/

random sketchy goodness

As I'm out earning in my day job over the busy bank holiday weekend, all things artsy have been put to one side. As I don't want to install my scanner before I get CS2 (only a couple of pay slips away now) I am instead using my eyetoy to capture a few sketches from over easter to spice up the blog. A bit blury, but better than nothing. See you in a couple of days :)

i just can't stop drawing these two guys.. the dit i'm liking, the tally is a bit crap... the shapes are too confused, and the hands, well, they aren't exactly brilliant are they.

I think this was a self portrait, drawn whilst waiting for pizza with a few mates. Watching life aquatic... not a massive fan


Here's an attempt at the main character for my website, a fisherman who will guide the player on their journey through the interactive sections... looking forward to seeing him rendered and moving within flash. You wouldn't believe the pages and pages of face treatments I've been through.

Here's another feature of the site... this is a large crab shaped house which sits in the middle of the lake the fisherman frequents. I'll give some more detail on that, and the site's structure, as I begin to develop it.

animating blobs

I've been putting my knowledge of squash and stretch to fine practice today, animating for the TV project. Gave me a chance to snoop on some proper animators, working on their final films towards their degrees. There will be a screening of their work in a couple of weeks, which I'm really looking forward to.

Haven't got anything to post for now, although I may be doing a little bit of work on the HL2 mod, as the programmers still need to work towards a deadline. The next big interactive project I do will be my website.. should start on that in a couple of weeks.

There's a meeting comming up with my producer, so hopefully I can show off some of the animation I'm doing right now. Also I negotiated another website project yesterday evening, which will bring in a bit more money and some more examples towards my portfolio. Graduation is now only 12 months away.. I need to get some options for full time employment before I leave.

charmingly niave

sorry...

really sorry...

I went home for Easter and forgot to make a post on here. Sadly I have no access to internet there, so wasn't able to update till now.

Once again, sorry.

Well easter was pretty non eventful.. nothing anyone would be interested in. Got back to find the storyboard for the as of yet under wraps tv show... promise to get permission to show that stuff off soon. The next week will be spent on that mainly, as i wanna get some pre-audio work sent back to the producer. I'm also gonna start work on my website. Should be neat, and have some interesting sketches I wanna try out, scans will follow in later posts.

Oh, and just in case there's any spamming, i seem to have irritated another student, who has been typing away homophobic crap about me on a forum for the HL2 project I was working on.. i appologize in advance if the guy posts any trash on here

The title? a quote from the programming lecturer describing my blog.. i quite like it :)

Drawing to a close

Hey, well, today I have been getting on with written work, listening to radio and visiting other campuses.. it's all been towards the entropy project. My last official dev diary entry will be tommorow, but obviously I will keep you informed in my usual way...

Dev Diary: Day 57 - 04/04/06
A meeting

Started the day off today by being reminded I had to write a post-mortem on the game project, which I then wrote (proof reading, I'll post it up tommorow). I had a meeting scheduled in Allt-yr-yn for 1:00, but through my own stupidity ended up getting there an hour late, which was really confusing. Jules didn't show, neither did Dave. Adam had done some more work on the map, and Ed had implemented my graphics and cutscene into the UI for the mod. Looks cool, but is still a bit unfair in raising the expectations of the player before the dissapointing quality of the game under it.

For some reason the design students were cross examined by the programming lecturer. His repeated rudeness remains a source of entertainment to me, as does the question as to why I indeed have to answer to him (Barry is the lecturer who is responsible for me and my grade, and if he likes my work I don't honestly care what Mike's opinion is).

Also I found out today that our programmers keep on being assessed until the presentation (a month's time) so they should be able to get the bike working in time. I live in hope. That said we are edging closer to a successful and professional end result. If they don't get there it will be dissapointing, as I've invested a lot of time and a fair amount of heart into this project.

2D forever

had an odd day, woke up late, schmoozed with some university suits, bought food, bought a couple of CDs, sat at a computer... and textured the main character for our game.

Dev Diary: Day 56 - 03/04/06
My first character map

Today I have mostly been texturing the main character for the game. He is modelled as part of the bike, but I want to check he's working before working on that. It was challenging painting texture without perspective, but we'll see how it looks wrapped on to the model, which looks like this btw
(not my work)

My updated UV map looks like this...

I've only done some very vague shading on the bike segments, as I'm a bit shakey on what's what... fingers crossed this'll look nice on the model, and we can work out where to go from there.

More thoughts and pics when I have them :)

i still hate sundays

haven't posted for a couple of days as I've been away from all things computer earning my daily bread. Back in the studio today though, putting together some work for the mod. Just a quick note to all those I've got on my list for testing. It's looking like that may be postponed indefinitely now, as even though we have some great level design in place, it is far from ready for play testing. We hope to complete the game, but will be doing so in our free time, rather than as assessed work, so obviously production will need to slow. Here's a dev diary for today

Dev Diary: Day 55 - 02/04/06
Completion on the intro

Today I've been finishing off the opening cutscene, adding a game screenshot to the end, and moving one of the images earlier to improve the flow of information.. the finished video is up on www.reflectionsinthemirror.co.uk/dio/entropy.wmv

The game will hopefully be in a very presentable state by the time we have to, well, present it. My only remaining job is to do the texture maps, a job i need the wacom tablet for, so it'll have to wait for tommorow