Halfway through artefact 3

I've changed the theme of my artefacts. For the rest of them I'm going to choose characters from Alice in Wonderland and redesign them while keeping the feel of the characters the same. I think I'm going to make them in a more modern setting, but when designing their face and body shapes I'm going to use a simple version of their original design.

So here are my designs for Alice so far, along with the shapes used.

I'm going to pick the designs that work and develop the other aspects of their design such as hair, clothes and body language, then colour comes afterwards. By the end of it, I should be able to draw conclusions about which shapes, colour and other such character aspects work best for each character.

I'm going to post comparison pics between other renditions of Alice soon so I can further my ideas.

Backdrop 1 - the street

Need to sort the lighting in the final render when I animate with it, but at least the 2D textures look a little 3D with some shading added.

Will post some PRP artefact work this weekend.

Duey mouth morphs

Just a quick example of how his mouth moves. Will rig him and the ballerina later this week.

Monster and Ballerina models

Both still need rigging, but Duey's (my monster got a name!) got his mouth movements sorted. The ballerina went strange while I tried to sot her hair out, but I don't think I did too badly overall.

Ballerina model WIP

Here's a front and side shot of her so far. All I need to do is add her hair and then rig and texture her.

Still need to tweak her nose and such, but considering my previous luck with modelling human characters, this is definately my best model.

Creating an animation, one piece at a time

The technique used to put all this together fascinated me, I never thought of putting Flash animation together in a video editor as such an effective method, but it works amazingly here. Definately gonna try it out when I get to create my first proper animation (which is in its planning stages, yay!)

Also, I've (very slowly) started work on revamping The Adventures of Sir Cuthbert Pencilton. Deadlines ultimately meant I didn't have time to put as much effort into it as I'd wanted to (specifically with lighting, sound effects and backdrops), so I plan on sorting that :)

Here's one backdrop I've revamped. It lacks the doodle look so much, but I still prefer it to the old one XD


Also, I'm a little confused with what's happening when we get back. Do we go straight into presentations, and should have done all our research during the holidays, or is it something else? I'm currently writing a questionnaire for my artifacts so I can at least say I've done something, I guess.

WIP shot of my animation

I know I haven't been posting much, I've been busy trying to sort this animation out. Here's a pic of it in the meanwhile, while I try and get the second half of it sorted.

The tecture's not on the conveyer belt at this point, but the lighting's all sorted and I'm loving how soft and almost model-like it looks.

Simulated Client Project Animatic

Gotta tweak a couple of the sound effects, but I like the pacing and the number of loops :)

Simluated client brief, designs and storyboards

First of all, a copy of my proposal (I had issues with the dropbox, and I know this is late, sorry).

Download (password is 'uni', so people don't randomly download it)

So, for my project proposal, I've decided to focus on the more lenient (and hopefully more popular) message of saying that it's alright to file share and download as long as you support the artists you like. That way the file sharing is no different to hearing something on the radio and TV and the artists you want to support can keep going. This is hard to pull off in 20 seconds, so I had to simplify the message a lot.

Instead, I'm going to use the example of 'when you X, God kills a kitten' (with X being something bad/sinful/something a person wants someone else to see). However, I'm going to have a pirate squishing the kittens with a mallet with a squeaking sound from them, making it seem more comical. I've found the 'God kills a kitten' fad on the internet to have more of a sense of humour about it, so people hopefully won't think it's trying to see you as a criminal for whatever you do like most adverts.

Here are the charater designs:
Simplified to make it easier to model, texture and animate. Also simple because 20 seconds isn't long enough to justify a details character design when it will appear for such a short time.

The Storyboards:

Pretty self-explainatory, really. If you don't pay for music you like to support artists, kitten go squish, if you do, kitten gets petted, which means happy kitten ^^

An odd game's (kind of) redesign

Anyone here heard of Terramex? It's a game I've got on my old (and awesome) Acorn Archimedes, which I still love playing. Trouble is, not many people of heard of it. Truth be told, I like it that way, but it'd be nice to see it's weirdness get a little recognition in the odd obscure reference or picture.

So I decided to redesign and recreate in 3D certain aspects of the game. Y'know, as a little warm up for the final year. Here's what I've got so far.

Some characters/enemies (reference pics below).


Top left is Henri Beaucoup (in the middle), who I designed with his chin way too pointy ^^;
Middle right is Big John Caine (to the right of Henri in the pic), who's my first ever attempt at a jaw shape like that.
And in the background's a really creepy looking feint image of Prof Eyestrain (top right in my sketches)

Middle left's a really freaky monster that doesn't seem to do anything. It just had a really unnatural repeating movement and scared the hell out of me as a kid.
Bottom left's a dragon-pterodactyl type thing that flies in straight lines and kills you if you touch it. It can get kind of annoying when you get you're timing wrong on one part of it.

And finally, bottom right is the 'main baddy', if you will (well, I get the comet's that, but it doesn't do much in the long run). They randomly pop out of rocks and kill you. Timing means nothing to them, which is why they're a total wind up. This one's next to the first item you collect in the game; the vacuum cleaner. It flies. Awesome.

Right, now doodles and explainations are out of the way, here's a 3D model of the flying thing I started work on. I haven't got a clue how to UV unwrap it to texture it though :/

Not bad for a few hours work, if I do say so myself. And this coming from the person who had a challenge with Sir Cuthbert and his mad lot.

Animation ups and downs

Same as with every project I've ever done, I've hit highs and lows pretty evenly, so naturally this set of projects are no exception.

So I got a new mic to record voices, and I got a load done, then it decides it doesn't wanna work anymore, so I've gotta go get it checked out to see what's up. That's the main problem that's bugged me, 'cause I need to finish off recording lines :/ Then there's been the usual rigging and texturing issues, but I think I'm over them now.

Been posted a lot of updates on my deviantART and a small forum, but I keep forgetting I'm meant to post here ^^; So here's some WIP pics I've got.

The main cast! From left to right, Sir Cuthbert Pencilton, Charlie Scribblesworth, Lady Eliza Illusta and Lord Augustus Sharpes.

Sir Cuthbert's main room. The backgrounds are going to be 2D and look like they've been drawn/painted. I was originally gonna make it look like they'd been coloured with crayons, but it didn't work out. Here's a pic of the original colouring technique I used.

The style wasn't working out with how I wanted it to look, it was way kiddier than what I wanted it to look like.

And just a couple of minutes ago, I exported a quick clip from my animation. I need to tweak something with Sir Cuthbert's arm, but that won't take a minute.



So it's going pretty good so far. I'll make posts about this, visualisation and games around next weekend, I think. If I survive this week XD

The obligatory female character

Well, not obligatory, but I wanted to include one. Introducing Lady Eliza Illustra!

I'd asked for opinions from other people and they liked that colour scheme best. Before she looked like this.

It's a bit too obvious for a colour scheme, really. I'm glad they agreed that my brief first thought of making her wear green was better ^^

Another 3D model

I finished the badguy for my animation project, Lord Sharpes, earlier, so here's what he looks like without textures of rigs.



Now onto Charlie. The chips from where he's been sharpened are gonna be tricky, but he's the last major character that needs to be modelled. There'll be one more minor one after this, then it's onto locations.

My character's a talking pencil

Go me :D 'Cause I've hardly updated here, I don't think I've mentioned that my animation project would involve my anthropomorphic stationary designs. Particularly these two:



I just finished my basic model for Sir Cuthbert Pencilton, so here's some screens I got. I gotta rig and texture him next.



I still need to model Sir Cuthbert's sidekick and design and model his nemesis, too.

Character designs for animation

Forgot to post here again. Anyway, my head's been all over the place the last couple of weeks, and ideas have been really few and far between, but here's what I've got for animation so far.

First of all, I tried the cute and simplistic type:
The one on the top right's not my design, it's from a game I like. The bottom right one's not so much cute as just following the simple design part. And the pencil sharpener's to do with one of my other design ideas, it just ended up on that page. I like the screep looking dog thing that's middle left. It's got such a blank expression that I keep getting drawn to it. I also like the penguiny thing that's middle right, 'cause I find it really cute.

The next idea I followed was a guinea pig character. I love guinea pigs and they're not used too often as characters, so I gave it a quick try:
The first one was Hamtaro based, the second one was based on a triangle shape, the third was an oval and the fourth was kind of more realistic. None of them really stood out at me, and the only one I could instantly recognise as a guinea pif was the more realistic style one.

Possibly my favourite train of thought was stationary. Sounds weird, but I can't really remember a franchise based off antropomorthic stationary. So I did some designs for a pencil character, since that's what I use more than anything else:
I like the Victorian era and superhero designs, since they're simple and can give a lot of character. I thought about it further and realised I could make the scenery drawn and coloured with crayons. It would add a far more cartoony style to it and they would be relevant to the theme. And yeah, that's why there was a sharpener in the earlier one. I needed to fill space on it. Rubbers may erase what a pencil's written, but it's the sharpener that cuts the pencil down, so it seemed logical to me.

Okay, my bad

I keep forgetting to post details of my interactive identities project ^^; Really sorry about that.

So, to start things off, I collect trinket pots. A lot of them. About 5 shelves worth, actually. I thought it'd be a great idea to select 5 of my trinkets and make them say different things about me.

So, the five sections I've chosen to look at are info, art, what's special to me, music and animation. I was gonna use my own music for it, but I can't export it properly, so I might have to use something else. I hope that's allowed ^^; I might chose Melodies of Life from Final Fantasy IX, since it's one of my favourite songs :3

I've had to make a few changes to simplify it, since I'm not too good at coding. I hope it'll turn out okay.


Each trinket opens as you click on it and I used photos for reference.

Preview of my latest animation

Okay, so it's more like a 3 second clip, but this is the only bit I've finished so far. I'm not going too badly with it, tho' :3

Here's the link. I can't remember my SWFup password, so I can't embed it ^^; I'll post the final version when it's done, but that'll take a while with uni work and all.

Painting 'Violet'

Thought I'd share a quick speedpaint video I made yesterday with everyone ^^



All the info's in the video description and at the end of the video. And no, I can't sort that typo with my name at the end. I tried, but it won't work ._.