This blog now lives at www.thepixelcrush.com.

Long Live The Pixel Crush

After over 80,000 views (lets pretend that's significant) its time for the Pixel Crush to go through a phase of reinvention, to turn it back into a place I can't help but write and share things on.

This process has already begun, a new website is well under way with being designed and the site address already points to it's half built corner of the internet. I don't know how smooth that transition will be, its been a bit tricky so far but I'm hoping I can maintain you, my faithful readership, without needing to claw back the meagre following I have neglected recently. I'll do my best

I'll make a grand announcement when I'm ready to cut the ribbon and usher you all into the new Pixel Crush, until then, hold tight.

Olly.

Global Game Jam 2014

Global Game Jam comes around once again, that annual event where for 48 hours there is a mass sacrifice of spare time, healthy sleeping patterns, and an outpouring of game based creativity centered around a surprise theme.

My fellow team mates were Aardman colleague and game jam vet Gareth Williams, and master composer Eduardo VC.

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are"

This was the theme announced on the Friday, along with an emphasis on accessibility and inclusivity.

The theme, and some sketches on the layout of the environment for out initial idea.

With a good plan for what we wanted our idea to be locked down, we went home on Friday ready to start the actual creation of the game on the Saturday morning. We had lots of complex ideas about player swapping places in order to fix things and having to impart information to each other verbally in order to get the job done, and that core thing is in the final game. Other stuff to do with an interesting kind of rock-paper-scissors relationship between players based on the 6 senses got lost in the mad dash that is game jam.

the view from our bunker jam room at the Bristol Games Hub

By the end of day one I had had a little meltdown over animation not importing animation correctly into unity and we had little visible progress, even though invisible progress had been made in terms of code and design decisions.

Turned out that it was a scaling issue to do with the .fbx file importing the mesh and rig at different scales, so I set my export settings to centimeter (which was technically incorrect) and it worked.

The team stayed up late and by morning Gareth had a functioning prototype, and I had fixed my animation issues and finished the character creation. Video evidence from 2:30am:




Day two was super productive and by the submission time we had a basic playable game that had compromised in all the right places, leaving the best mechanics intact. Team AHOD making important creative decisions:

left to right: me, Eduardo, Gareth.

The game demoed well when it came time to show the other jammers what we'd achieved and it even came away with the best audio award, to Eduardo's credit. Here's the poster I assembled from the assets for the game's upload page

And a screenshot from the game:

It was great coming up with the game design for this, I was lucky to have like minded people to collaborate with and bounce ideas off in a really encouraging environment. I'm pretty pleased that I managed to get so much more done successfully than last year, probably largely down to the team this year and me having more experience than last time.

The game can be downloaded from here for Windows and Mac should you like to assemble 3 players to try it out, and groove to that award winning sound!

The Evolution of an Ident

14th of January, negotiations begin...

David's initial design with directions

My grand ambitions...

...and unrealistic expectations

Modelling begins

Animation begins

Manuscript ideas are protoyped

An extreme example of the mental ray bevel shader

A classy example of the mental ray bevel shader

Many months pass- employment, side projects, and apathy prevent further progress.

16th of May, production resumes but quickly falters again. Creative dead ends and  over ambition takes its toll.

Tuning peg, so far so good

Cello Head? Just give up now.

Many more months pass, same feeble excuses.

9th of October, David breaks radio silence and I threaten myself with a fictional deadline while he posits a real one.

Text and motion blur are introduced!

Textures appear and I make use of little spheres to help me gauge how the materials are working.

I use a layered shader to blend between paint and scratched metal.

The layout of the scene

A text change is requested, and the box gets the axe too

Re-texturing and final logo

Specular highlights: check.

I use NUKE for the first time on a side project

Crustacean

I've recently been working on my game modelling in my spare time, with hope of relevant work next year.

The brief: make crab tank, make painterly, make low poly.

Here is the concept, cribbed from cghub courtesy of one of Naughty Dog's concept artists.

While its quite lovely, it leaves a lot of the form of the tank to the imagination, relying on a strong silhouette to convey all it needs to.  Thats fine, until you have to figure out how it might work in three dimensions, so I took the concept into Photoshop and tried to create solid shapes from each of the different parts. Also there are some crab diagrams, never know when they might be useful.

That ultimately was not as useful an exercise as I had hoped and it turnout out the tried and trusted technique of blocking out the shapes in 3D was far more effective. From this blocky outline I was able to then begin adding more detail while retaining the proportions I had laid out.

This is the high poly (lots of faces on the geometry) mesh, I made a couple of mistakes here because I was too eager to get the things into Mudbox and start roughing it up in the sculpt phase. I should have gone in and refined the mesh, some of the unsubdivided meshes were too low poly. Another thing that would have been good to take into account would have been the distribution of edge loops, as I had only added them where needed- as you do when modelling for games, but Mudbox actually works much much better with evenly spaced faces so it can subdivide more cleanly.

But I went into Mudbox instead and added pitted surfaces, scratches, gouges, it was good fun.
Unfortunately I went to town and ended up creating a 7gb sculpt that no longer ran properly on my desktop, weirdly my laptop has twice the amount of RAM and Griffith saved the day, I was able to export all the AO and Normal maps from there.



Then began the texturing, I was trying to go for a cross between the texture style of Journey and the messiness of the original concept. These two styles are slightly at odds due to the clean gradients of Journey and the dirty oils of the concept.

Pretty pleased with how it was looking at this stage:

Maya render:

I then exported the whole thing into Unity. I recently bought the marmoset skyshop in a sale and used some of its image based lighting and shading techniques to creating a little scene with the crab tank in.

With a lot of luck you can actually walk around in that scene yourself using the webplayer below. W,A,S, D to move, mouse to look around.

Edit: Yeah screw that, you can download the folder here if you want to play

Grumpy Downton Deer

Perhaps the greatest dramatic climax in 2012's pivotal Downton Abbey Christmas special.

Reel 2013, plus extra Chevron bits

I cut together a new showreel from the work I have completed over the last year, it can be seen here:

I wasn't able to include everything I would have liked but hopefully this gives a fair impression of how I've developed. It was especially cool to be able to show a piece of Darkside, and the Chevron commercials.

But not everything is shiny enough to fit into a two minute reel, so I've made the breathtakingly arrogant assumption that people want to see all the work-in-progress bits. So here are some of them, presented in the fashion that one might present the bed with a pile of washing.

Chevron Bird

This is the process of building one of the main cars used in the commercial that I didn't light.

In preparation for lighting I had fun tweaking the shaders and making them look as much like fruit as possible.

And a disco ball, as a parting gift.

Time from a break from all this money and success...

I Made Some Unimportant Things

When you're stuck, making anything at all is a victory.

Sometimes you need a new tool.

 It doesn't have to be a sunset, a grey day will do,

 You just need some friends

To inspire you.

And then you can make again.

I'm slowly starting to create things again, me and Jenny made this time lapse together. It took me a long time to finally accept that not every idea I have has to be the most important thing ever conceived to be worth pursuing. How obvious is that? I made a (self indulgent) investment in my creativity and bought a beautiful journal to scribble and write things in, it came highly recommended from the Cartoleria behind the Pantheon in Rome, so it clearly has mystical qualities. All these things are small steps toward rehabilitating myself, I feel better already.

First Person Journal Action: Immersive

P.S After Effects has a raw editor for RAW sequences!? Very, very cool. Lovely to work with but slow to load images, unsurprisingly.