September - October 2012 [Updates]

Not much has been going on other than University the past two months. Next week is the start of end-of-year exams - so holidays are in sight. I guess this post will just be a roundup of the past 2 months worth of random projects & works.

So as far as current projects go, I've felt a lot of motivation towards this sci-fi horror game, to the point that I've put plans in motion to have it appear at the Indie Games Room at AvCon 2013. Every year I go to the IGR I end up wishing I entered a game, bout time to step up and actually do it. At least 1 game is the goal, if anything decent comes from a Ludum Dare I'll consider throwing that in as well.
Some old & new screenshots of some SciFi level assets:

A mockup SciFi hallway with experimental shader(s)

 

Staircase section

Modular floor panels with added
details (such as spinning fans)

Ludum Dare 24 was missed, due to a pretty heavy workload at Uni that weekend. But Ludum Dare 25 is almost a month away, nicely placed before the Christmas New Years rush. So all going well I'll be enjoying 48 hours of madness starting on the 14th of December.

On the 3D printing front a new (and pretty major) order has been placed, theres some interesting non-Minecraft items in this lot, including a Raspberry Pi case I've been wanting to print and design since my Pi arrived. Theres also a few other interesting items which could lead on to some more business opportunities  and of course a couple of new Minecraft figurines. The Enderman has been requested more times than I can count...

Solar flyby - ingame

I also started working on a Millennium Falcon mod for Kerbal Space Program, inspired by some images I saw a while back where people had imported full 3D models of ships from Aliens and Prometheus and so on into the game so people could fly them.
I didnt want to just import some model and set it up to be pilotable, instead Id rather have a set of parts to build a ship from, not to mention the ability to spontaneously de-assemble. Its much more effort, but Id say its worth it - especially for a ship like the Millennium Falcon.
At this point in time the low poly is done and imported into the game (which took a ton of work to setup all the node positions), I'm now working on the high poly mesh for normals, AO and texture baking. Once exams are over its one of the projects I want to focus on and wrap up first.

Armour Platin'
Greebles ahoy

2012 so far

2012 has been a busy year so far, Ive been trying to focus a lot more on uni, and so this blog has suffered because of that (was hoping when I started this blog, to be posting at least once a week!)

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.

The Past Month

*Warning - Massive post*

Ive been meaning to post at least once a week, apparently not for the past 4 weeks. Time flies :/

Over the past month a few interesting things have happened. Heres a summary:

----The first ever Blenderheads meetup took place in Adelaide.

I got to meet some very cool people who Id known and talked to online for several years. This included Ben Dansie who worked on Sintel, and Lee Salvemini who runs CGMasters (http://www.cgmasters.net/)
It was also great to catch up with the guys who run Monkeystack again (I did work experience with them at the start of 2010), they were very kind in hosting the event in their studio.
We had a pretty relaxed dinner and chat initially, then some people did presentations (including me) about work they've recently done or a particular area of Blender.
Lots of interesting things were discussed and my only issue with the night was that it ended so quickly, I felt like we all could have talked for days (even though the meetup went for several more hours than planned)

Theres a thread for organizing the event on Blenderartists here. This is where all future meetings will be organized.
Blendernation Post

On the forum thread Ben did a nice writeup about the events of the night, he explains:

The recent Blender User Group meeting in Adelaide was a great success. Big thanks to Michael, Lee, Duann, Alex and Levon for sharing and again to Monkeystack for hosting.


After a pleasant round of chitchat and greetings, I got the ball rolling with a demonstration of the Cycles renderer with an emphasis on characters. (Slightly embarrassing side note, my drivers weren’t actually up to date for CUDA on the night so “only” showed off the CPU rendering.) Michael then continued on by showing some very high res Cycles renders (up to 7k from memory!) and talking about his findings as he pushes Cycles in its current form.


Lee gave an overview of creating the trailer for the CG Masters Rigging DVD – animation, rig controls, adding titles and the sequencer. Also of note were his recent efforts in talking to local schools about the potential to use not only Blender but the growing training material as well. This is certainly something I’m keen to keep an eye on.


Duann then shared about his work with Shapeways and gave a general overview of what the company can offer artists. Some really cool examples were shown including a very neat little walker. After some further questions and discussion, Alex shared his experience with getting a Shapeways print made and painting it. Neat trick – simulate the model falling in the BGE to see if it will stand on its own when printed!

To cap off the night, Levon shared some of his work on various projects and those of us who were left (rather long but enjoyable night) had a quick chat about future meetings.

Further meetups are more than likely going to happen, we all agreed that 2-3 months between meetups was a good amount of time.
My presentation was pretty unorganized and was on the topic of one of my current projects (the one hinted in a past post with a node setup) - it involved some 3D printing testing, Id only finished getting the presentation video together the morning of the meetup, next time I hope to have something more detailed prepared.


----Space Shuttle Atlantis launched - The end of the era of Space Shuttle flight

Might be a strange thing to mention here, since its not *really* related to my current work. But I did have a trip to America planned for this year - at the start of July - to see in person the final space shuttle launch. Unfortunately exams and money became an issue, so I wasn't able to see it in person, but I did watch it live online which is better than nothing.
Id planned to do some kind of mini documentary on the space shuttles, their history and my trip to America and back again, using a lot of footage Id take myself. Im thinking of doing something different now however, perhaps a 3D animation of some sort as a tribute to the 30 years of Space shuttle operation. We'll see...


----Ive purchased an 'Eleven'

Which is basically an Arduino-compatible microcontroller board designed and produced in Australia. Very nerdy, very cool, very fun.
Its a rather powerful little device, which lets you program microcontrollers. I have several little projects planned, and some larger ones. I might take on some graphics related projects with it, but a lot of them will be electrical engineering and programming based. Ill probubly end up posting stuff about it on here as well. One project relates to the next topic Ill mention below:

----I attended Avcon

Avcon is the Adelaide Video Game and Anime Convention. It happens once a year and is pretty much one of the only events in South Australia for geeks to get their geek on.

It was a pretty interesting weekend all round, lots of *interesting* cosplayers however (some terrible of course, but some surprisingly awesome)
This guy took the place of one of my favourite outfits for the event, it was something I was looking to do, but didnt have the time (and couldnt be bothered anyway)

SSSSssssssSSssssssss........

All that aside, I plan on definitely coming in costume next year.

Another highlight of Avcon was the indie games room (pretty much the main reason I attend the convention), its a place for indie developers (or even hobbiests) to display their games, and have them played for pretty much 48 hours straight by thousands of people. Its a great place to network, and I met several people there over the course of the weekend who were good to network with.
Next year I hope to have something to display in the Indie games room. Something to work towards...


----Operation Moonfall began


This one kinda came out of nowhere, but Im not surprised. In an interview only a couple of days ago, Eiji Aonuma stated that if fans made enough noise about it then Majora's Mask would be remade for the 3DS (MM3D) like Ocarina of time (Oot3D) was.

This was quite exciting to be heard, coming right from one of the top guys at Nintendo, the fact that theyre actually considering remaking Majoras Mask.
This is a game which has firmly sat in my top 3 games of all time, ever since I played it way back in the 90's on my N64.

I had plans myself, before hearing of any of this, to make it heard that MM3D needs to happen, and many other fans have been voicing this since Oot3D was announced as well. So to put it simply, I need to get my plans up and running a lot faster now, since now is clearly the time to make as much noise as possible.
Either way, Nintendo will be recieving a message from me in the near future, heres a sneak peak at part-of-something-to-do-with-it:

I should probubly drop the link to the main site as well while Im at it. So here it is - http://operation-moonfall.org/
Theres a petition to sign, and a facebook group to join + twitter feeds to follow.


Thats about it for the wrap-up of the past month. I have done the occasional 3D work, but not as much as I had planned and Im back to Uni as of this week as well, so finding time for this stuff is even harder again.
The Ludus Cinematic is still not 100% finished, hit a snag when all my file allocations messed up in Premier Pro and I effectively had to re-import everything to the timeline again from scratch (very frustrating)
The problem was caused by the way Id imported the files, and the way they were named after being dumped from UDK.

Hopefully this doesnt happen again...