Finally!
Ive battled with numerous issues, from the project file messing up to loosing the UDK screenshot sequences and having to upgrade my laptop's HDD half way though putting together the final cinematic.
Its been a frustrating effort to get this project wrapped up.
So in summary: This is the final product of my 2nd year (1st semester) project for a digital media class at university. We had to work on an architectural visualisation and I chose to mix things up a bit and use a game engine for the rendering which lead me to UDK and to the 11 day level design tutorial. (Id never used UDK before, but Ive had several years experience using Blenders inbuilt game engine)
The building and surrounding environment is based on the Roman Ludus and terrain from the TV series 'Spartacus Blood and Sand' and 'Gods of the Arena'.
Id originally submitted a rushed version of the final cinematic for the actual assignment, but wanted to tidy it all up a bit more before uploading to youtube (thats the part thats taken so long to get around to doing)
Ive mostly used 3Dsmax for the modelling, but did a bit in Blender as well. Level blocking was done in UDK and Gimp/Photoshop for 2D texture work.
I did a lot of preproduction, including drawing up some blueprints for reference from scenes in the series and an entire design/planning document to refer to throughout the duration of the project.
And finally heres the cinematic:
Now, time to get into other projects :)
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Saturday, September 24, 2011
New YT Video - BGE realtime slideshow
Mid semester break from Uni is into full swing, one day in and I've already got a new youtube video up demonstrating a recent project from uni. The project was associated with a speech I had to do a couple of weeks ago, I chose to use BGE for the visual side of the presentation instead of a powerpoint slideshow. The topic of the presentation was something I'm very interested in: Nuclear Fusion.
Using BGE made the project into something interesting and motivating to work on, rather than several boring hours making powerpoint slides. It also gave me an opportunity to have a mess around with videotexture, something Id wanted to use properly for a while.
And of course theres also the advantage of having a presentation which engaged people more directly than what boring PP slides with a few pictures could do.
If I have time over the next couple of weeks Ill be working towards finishing a couple more projects, most which have a large percentage of the work already done, just in need of some finishing touches.
Using BGE made the project into something interesting and motivating to work on, rather than several boring hours making powerpoint slides. It also gave me an opportunity to have a mess around with videotexture, something Id wanted to use properly for a while.
And of course theres also the advantage of having a presentation which engaged people more directly than what boring PP slides with a few pictures could do.
If I have time over the next couple of weeks Ill be working towards finishing a couple more projects, most which have a large percentage of the work already done, just in need of some finishing touches.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Mars
Ive had a lot of uni work to do lately, so not much time has been spent on blender projects.
This morning however I thought Id do one of the new tutorials over at Blender Cookie, just as a break from the uni work. The tutorial was the planet/space scene one found here: http://www.blendercookie.com/2011/08/24/creating-a-scene-from-space/
Heres the result after following the tutorial:
And the current node setup:
Considering the amount of time it took to setup, its not too bad. Theres still elements Id like to improve on however. Mars itself looks too clean, it needs some kind of subtle atmosphere. Also the lens flare needs obvious work. Im also trying to find a higher resolution texture map, the one I used here was 2K but it doesnt seem to be enough. A normal map would also help...
It was good fun to set up though and I learnt several new tricks with the node editor, I'll be trying to do more BlenderCookie tutorials in the near future I think.
This morning however I thought Id do one of the new tutorials over at Blender Cookie, just as a break from the uni work. The tutorial was the planet/space scene one found here: http://www.blendercookie.com/2011/08/24/creating-a-scene-from-space/
Heres the result after following the tutorial:
And the current node setup:
Considering the amount of time it took to setup, its not too bad. Theres still elements Id like to improve on however. Mars itself looks too clean, it needs some kind of subtle atmosphere. Also the lens flare needs obvious work. Im also trying to find a higher resolution texture map, the one I used here was 2K but it doesnt seem to be enough. A normal map would also help...
It was good fun to set up though and I learnt several new tricks with the node editor, I'll be trying to do more BlenderCookie tutorials in the near future I think.
Friday, July 29, 2011
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:
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...
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...
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
New Series Intro Progress
Bit of progress over the past few days working on the intro for my new series.
Just been looking for reference images and styles and I think Ive got a good idea of what the intro should look like. Its based around a bunch of 'glass' looking slides with a certain theme to them, most of these themes will be cgi related, for example one slide is about python programming, another about Blender, and so on.
Ill probubly do a couple of other random ones with games I like and other interesting things. Its not overly important though, the slides are mostly just there for detail and to look 'technical' and loosely provide glimpses at the types of things that might be involved with an episode at some stage.
Heres a quick render I made to see how it was looking with all the moving parts. The video is unlisted so its pretty much a sneak peak for anyone following my twitter/blog or going to my website
(I want to do more of these in future!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5LPQ5ax4B0
This will probubly be tweaked a lot more soon, but its a good start for now.
And I think I'll save working more on this until next week, I want to spend the next couple of days finishing the Ludus cinematic once and for all, keep getting distracted! Gah.
*Edit* Ill change the little thumbnail images to the full images when my internet starts behaving itself again and I dont have to use Imageshack....
Just been looking for reference images and styles and I think Ive got a good idea of what the intro should look like. Its based around a bunch of 'glass' looking slides with a certain theme to them, most of these themes will be cgi related, for example one slide is about python programming, another about Blender, and so on.
Ill probubly do a couple of other random ones with games I like and other interesting things. Its not overly important though, the slides are mostly just there for detail and to look 'technical' and loosely provide glimpses at the types of things that might be involved with an episode at some stage.
Heres a quick render I made to see how it was looking with all the moving parts. The video is unlisted so its pretty much a sneak peak for anyone following my twitter/blog or going to my website
(I want to do more of these in future!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5LPQ5ax4B0
This will probubly be tweaked a lot more soon, but its a good start for now.
And I think I'll save working more on this until next week, I want to spend the next couple of days finishing the Ludus cinematic once and for all, keep getting distracted! Gah.
*Edit* Ill change the little thumbnail images to the full images when my internet starts behaving itself again and I dont have to use Imageshack....
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Exam Fortnight (arrrghhh)
One week of exams left, Ive only had 2 exams this semester which is nice, but it still means lots of sitting around in the dark corner of my room for days on end doing last minute study.
My first (and most difficult) exam was yesterday, my final exam for the semester is this upcoming Friday, and after that I have holidays till August (Hurray!)
I have, however, continued working on polishing up the Ludus cinematic (not too much longer!)
And Ive started blocking out shots for my secret 2nd project which I hinted to in the last post. At the moment I have just over a minute of blocked out shots finished (with a couple of the shots being pretty much final - odd at this stage but theres a couple of non blender things going on here as well)
Looks like full animation will be ~4mins, not including intro and credits. Havent posted anything that long for quite some time, but its nice to have a substantial animation in the works. Also due to its nature it *shouldnt* take too long to produce. I cant say much about why that is, cause it would give a lot away. Just got a couple more characters and environments to *restore* and rig up, then some animation and Im on my way.
Ah, and I really need to get this new video series on the go as well (I think 99% of all the people who follow my work wouldnt even know about this blog yet, the first video of the series will be about news and updates etc so thatll point people here as well)
Im in the process of designing the HUD for the series currently...
-Yes this series is so serious that it requires a HUD.. D:
My first (and most difficult) exam was yesterday, my final exam for the semester is this upcoming Friday, and after that I have holidays till August (Hurray!)
I have, however, continued working on polishing up the Ludus cinematic (not too much longer!)
And Ive started blocking out shots for my secret 2nd project which I hinted to in the last post. At the moment I have just over a minute of blocked out shots finished (with a couple of the shots being pretty much final - odd at this stage but theres a couple of non blender things going on here as well)
Looks like full animation will be ~4mins, not including intro and credits. Havent posted anything that long for quite some time, but its nice to have a substantial animation in the works. Also due to its nature it *shouldnt* take too long to produce. I cant say much about why that is, cause it would give a lot away. Just got a couple more characters and environments to *restore* and rig up, then some animation and Im on my way.
Ah, and I really need to get this new video series on the go as well (I think 99% of all the people who follow my work wouldnt even know about this blog yet, the first video of the series will be about news and updates etc so thatll point people here as well)
Im in the process of designing the HUD for the series currently...
-Yes this series is so serious that it requires a HUD.. D:
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Back to Blender [finally]
With exams on the horizon I havent been too active with 3D work(s), but thats not to say I havent done anything.
The Ludus project is coming to a close (finally! Im seriously about to boot the whole thing out the door) and now Ill have time to focus on finishing my other 2 current projects, plus starting a third.
Not sure if Ive mentioned this anywhere, but Im trying to buckle down with projects at the moment. Leaving myself with 3 running at one time max, so once one of the 3 is complete I can take on a new project. This means that I cannot allow myself to get distracted with other projects (lack of productivity lately has forced me to try to rework my project and time management to try and help get more projects finished)
Any other projects I come up with get written down in my notebook and are pretty much forgotten, to be started when Ive completed some other project.
Either way, the Ludus project is finished, I completed the A2 poster for it a week ago, its pretty simple with a wide view of the cliff as the basis, the Ludus perched on the side in the lower right of the poster. The whole bottom of the poster is a 'making of' section which describes the process of designing the level and theres a few other interior shots thrown in around the place as well.
Heres a final shot of everything together:
I still havent finished the cinematic, but will continue to work on it over the next week or so before uploading.
And finally, I havent mentioned anything about my 2nd current project, the screenshot below is a sneak-peak, many people should know where its from, and what it is.
The Ludus project is coming to a close (finally! Im seriously about to boot the whole thing out the door) and now Ill have time to focus on finishing my other 2 current projects, plus starting a third.
Not sure if Ive mentioned this anywhere, but Im trying to buckle down with projects at the moment. Leaving myself with 3 running at one time max, so once one of the 3 is complete I can take on a new project. This means that I cannot allow myself to get distracted with other projects (lack of productivity lately has forced me to try to rework my project and time management to try and help get more projects finished)
Any other projects I come up with get written down in my notebook and are pretty much forgotten, to be started when Ive completed some other project.
Either way, the Ludus project is finished, I completed the A2 poster for it a week ago, its pretty simple with a wide view of the cliff as the basis, the Ludus perched on the side in the lower right of the poster. The whole bottom of the poster is a 'making of' section which describes the process of designing the level and theres a few other interior shots thrown in around the place as well.
Heres a final shot of everything together:
I still havent finished the cinematic, but will continue to work on it over the next week or so before uploading.
And finally, I havent mentioned anything about my 2nd current project, the screenshot below is a sneak-peak, many people should know where its from, and what it is.
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