I have been working on one major project however, late last year (December I think) I dropped all other projects to pursue this 'secret one' which Id been working on since the final months of 2011. I don't want to say too much about it until its closer to being ready - for fear of being caught unprepared, but it is Minecraft related and involves 3D printing - a LOT of 3D printing.
The whole thing should be 'public' early May (fingers crossed). I initially aimed to have things done by mid April and was on track until some computer issues arose...
My laptop GPU nuked itself for a 2nd and final time (the first time it went bad I pulled the whole laptop apart & ended up putting a bolt through the motherboard to hold the heatsync down... That amazingly worked (initially), and it kept my loyal little laptop running fine for another week or two)
Either way, I have a super modern and exciting (not to mention expensive) laptop on order, which should last out the remainder of my studying years at uni, and should arrive before this weekend - just in time for.......
.....Ludum Dare 23
In my last post I talked about Ludum Dare 22 (and the failure my 'attempt' of a game was)
This time round I have 2 other LD's worth of mistakes under my belt, and a more structured plan of attack. It will be interesting to see what theme it will be this time round, as of writing this post, round 1 voting has started. Theres been some interesting themes in the first round, and I feel like I'm leaning towards making a horror or creepily atmospheric game this time round, so hopefully the theme will be geared towards that initial idea/plan of mine.
I'll be screen-capturing the whole thing this time too (for a full 48 hour timelapse on my youtube channel)
So, third time lucky??
Previously, in March, I also finished a Minecraft based video - 'Minecraft [Real Life] EPIC Creeper Explosions' which I filmed and then spent a week editing in both Blender and After Effects. The video itself was a test for various things leading up to my bigger Minecraft project mentioned at the start of this post, plus it gave me an opportunity to tap into the Minecraft community and get some more Minecraft based subscribers on board.
The video was featured on episode #50 of the Minecraft Monday show (@ 8:08) [link], and the Minecraft daily show #217 [link]
(we'll be seeing more of the Minecraft Monday show with this other project as well, more on that in the near future)
On a more technical note, the video also provided an opportunity to test Blenders newly implemented camera tracking module. The results weren't as good as Id hoped given the amount of time I had to spend on the video, but it was good to finally do some camera tracking in Blender!
I also discovered that as of Blender 2.61 there has been a AE exporter built in, so this project gave me a chance to give that a spin as well - and it worked exactly as Id hoped. I was able to track a shot in Blender, insert 3D elements and render it out. Then using the script I imported the camera data into AE, and continued working on the shot from there. Its the first time Ive used Blender and AE so closely together, and it was great to see the process made so efficient with the inclusion of this script in current and future versions of Blender.
The finished product:
The node rendering setup:
Camera tracking:
Creeper footage breakdown:
Intro footage breakdown:
I had a couple of other things to mention, but since this post has already become quite large I'll save it for another later this week (I'll be trying to get back to posting a blog update at least once a fortnight from now on)
So that's all for now.
