The Post-Men

Post production looks to be the next exciting project and I've started mudboxing Hugh's island model, so effectively he worked from his design and then I took the base mesh into Mudbox to add cracks, stalactite type details and general rockiness. Amazingly Maya loves working with Mudbox's displacement maps, it exports them in 32bit Open Exr by working out the difference between the base mesh and the sculpting I added through a process of either "raycasting", or "subdivision". Don't ask how either of those work, because I only understand the principles of both.

Floating Island Mk.I

There are some minor issues with the UV's which, while they work, they are the default cube UV's and there are some lines appearing in the displacement where the seams are. I've re-unwrapped it with RoadKill (the wonderful UV unwrapping tool, it uses Blender's open source UV algorithms so its free!) and luckily Mudbox allows you to import new UV's onto the base mesh whilst hopefully maintaining all the sculpting I've already done.

Floating Island Mk.II, fixed UV's

Those hard working animators making the The Last Trophy have been slightly preoccupied with dissertation work recently but I managed to fix the problem with the sky and finally make a decent night lighting set-up in my Monday/Friday sessions. After endless tweaking to make sure the matte backgrounds that I plucked from Google weren't overexposing due to being included in final gather or receiving light from anywhere else I managed to get a simple sky which really completes the image.

Background now shows through but no image yet for night lighting.

The physical sky makes a nice caramel effect for some reason when no image is provided.

This one has the correct colouring, shadows, and background matte.

The shadows no longer fall across the trophies on the wall which I might have to tweak but otherwise this feels close to completion.

 On top of all this we had Double Negative give a talk to us about their role in the visual effects industry (which is pretty integral seeing as they have worked on all these films and are in talks with the various software vendors to get their tools to better meet their needs). Some of the stuff they showed I'd seen on the Inception bonus features but other bits were totally new and it was fascinating hearing it explained by their head of 3D Alex Wuttke, I got to ask why they use Renderman, and whether they've overcome UV's yet and both questions yielded informative and entertaining answers. We even got to chat to him in the studio briefly along with their recruitment manager, it was surreal and humbling.

Me: pointing a gun at something...

Nelson my beast PC has opened new doors into the gaming world and I've finally managed to complete Half Life 2, Episode II. For a four year old game, damn is it pretty, makes me realise what a big deal resolution is when it comes to showcasing a game's art, everything sparkles at 1080p. Also in terms of storytelling I just continue to fall more deeply in love with Half Life's style of unrestricted player movement during key plot sequences. It goes some way to diffusing the conflict between authorial intent and player expression. For example the player can interact with the environment in fairly limited ways in any game, most of all first person shooters, so when the player is constantly pointing a weapon at what's in front of him its hard to create emotional experiences when the protagonist is a mute who points his gun at everything, psychopathic right?

Me: pointing my gun at something else...

Valve attempt to address this by having Gordon Freeman lower his gun every time the cross hair passes in front of a friend or ally. But this doesn't really solve anything because the player can still fire it right through them with no consequence, effectively breaking the illusion of agency the game has worked to build during gameplay. So I found myself switching the to crowbar during the more dialogue heavy parts of the game in order to avoid firing a shot that should blow the characters head off, why is the player not equipped to express himself in non-violent ways besides puzzle solving? This renders all the emotive aspects of the story slightly redundant as they can only flow one way. While Half Life has the decency to be self aware of these things: "you don't talk much do you?" -Alyx Vance, I feel its the one thing missing from an otherwise exceptional interactive experience. Why make a character silent if you're not going to encourage the process of the player using the character's actions as a cypher for their own? Why not create a character as a developer if you're deny the player the right to do so.

My one find recently has been series of blog posts by the founders of Naughty Dog on the making of Crash Bandicoot. It's a great insight into the process of squishing a hugely ambitious game into restrictive hardware, and then knowing when to battle with the corporate machine, and when to submit to it.

The Imaginators

I remember the first time I got to use my Mum's Panasonic camcorder when I was maybe somewhere in between 6 and 9 years old. The first thing me and my sister did with this fascinating device was to film an epic starring our cuddly toys. Not just one epic though, "The Beanie & Boonie Comedy Show" ran for a good 10 episodes over two or more mini DV cassettes constituting over 3 hours of footage. I loved that thing, the way the stories we'd been playing out could now be immortalised and shared kept me filming for years, even in those early days I was already mimicking film conventions before I really new what they were for, there were crazy close ups, slow-motion (faked, naturally), titles that were no more than sheets of paper with my appalling hand writing on. The structures and ideals that media embed into our malleable minds from a very young age would flow from my imagination with fully formed narratives involving heroic ducks, evil monkeys, hysterical elephants and the domestic troubles of a pair of owls. Its amazing how watching these things back; the mind edits out the hands holding the toys and the voices appear to emerge from the characters themselves, but I can only imagine that to a viewer who didn't participate in these film's creation, all that appears on the screen is two kids playing with toys.

Watching the Toy Story 3 bonus features suddenly reminded me of The Beanie & The Boonie comedy show, and perhaps brought me to the root of why these films had such meaning for me, and anyone who remembers a similar childhood. The beauty of Toy Story for me is also in the premise itself. It was the first computer animated feature film and what does it choose as its subject matter? The imagination of a child and the act of bringing inanimate objects to life through imagination. How perfect is that as a comment on the medium and a start to a flawless run of animated films? (nobody mention Cars). When Woody runs, the exaggerated flailing of limbs and excess of energy is such a perfect depiction of a Toy imbued with imagined life that the audience is always reminded of what the Toys live for. I am now 20 years old, and I didn't hand on my toys to a little girl under a Pixar sun, in a suburban American garden, bathed in purple shadow. I'm holding on to every bit of that past, there's a reason I became an animator...

On a different note. I recently purchased Castlevania: Lord of Shadows. What a pile of crap. Its basically Crash Bandicoot but much much shinier. I love me some Crash Bandicoot, it was the first videogame I ever played, in the days of the original Playstation. It's linear level design, fun platforming gameplay, charm, and one the best theme tunes in gaming all helped establish Crash as a mascot for his platform and genre. 14 years later and Castlevania: Lord of Shadows is employing much the same design techniques well over a decade too late. Its almost as if the developer's realised this and decided they needed to cobble together some more gameplay elements to create a bit of variety, so they stole some more stuff from Naughty Dog with a simplified version of Uncharted's platforming, they stole a few boss fights from Shadow of the Colossus-even nicking their grab mechanic and power points that had to be stabbed. This all amounted to something a little like a diluted God of War so they added some quicktime events just to complete the overall sense of deja vu thievery, if you're wondering what Kojima's contribution was to this smorgasbord of plagiarism it would probably be the pointless cut scenes that break up the "gameplay" (again, I love metal gear solid's cut scenes but they don't really add anything to Castlevania when they show you walking into the next area every 2 minutes).  Castlevania: Lord of Shadows, from what I hear, is almost nothing like the franchise its supposed to be based on, so why not draw from that and bring it onto the current generation of consoles instead of just taking a quick look at what some of today's games are doing and pilfering it.

In other news the 11 Second Club results are in and I came a mildly disappointing 70/295. I was hoping for a top 50. Its interesting how some I was sure I'd beat were popular and others that I thought were masterpieces didn't do nearly as well. My animation clocked an impressive 24 comments (well, I was impressed) nearly all remarking on the vomit inducing handicam-seriously fuck you, its awesome, and the shiny rendering- yeah I know it was a cheap shot. But others were genuinely constructive. Here are some highlights:

• Matt 3 days ago
  Rander and effects are awesome, but animation needs improving, maybe by making some stronger poses to make the character look more agressive i.e have him point the shovel and the dude on the ground when yelling you stole it! But still nice job though!

• Edgardo C. Padilla Jr. 3 days ago
  I don't see any problems here but I kinda wish there were more close up shots of their faces since its dialogue driven.

• Olly Skillman-Wilson 3 days ago
  frame that shit tighter next time Olly, cant even see their bloody faces.

• Alexander Baert 3 days ago
  Very nice piece! The gag with the lightning could have a bigger impact with a cut to a wider shot, more sky (he could be strecthed more also, making a stronger pose, and we would see the top of the spade, attracting the lightning going from top to bottom through him), and him actually getting burned or ellectrocuted, now it seems a bit 'on top' of him. Nice animation, both the guys dropping is very well done! The hands of the angry guy needs attention when he climbs out, they seem flat all the time. Cheers!

• Tyler Johnston 2 days ago
  This is good. I think it will rate higher based on the great production values. I am 50-50 on the camera; while I think the movement is really well done, I'm not sure what purpose it serves to drive the story. Is it supposed to be another person's POV? Is the camera supposed to be floating on the water? I think you might want revisit it (but that's just one person's opinion). I think the animation itself is good, but given the cinematic treatment you have given it, I think you could have pushed it a bit further. When looking past all the glam, it seems a bit on the timid side. Obviously you've got a solid skill set here, so I think you can handle the harsher critique. I do like the staging, although with the lighting I feel like we loose out on the emotions of the characters somewhat, especially the angry guy. Nice work overall, keep at it =)

•   Adriano Mariotto 2 days ago
  more appeal, the camera movement distracts, the faces not be able to read. good body mechanics, good poses, good idea.
  
  keep animating! 

• David Wardell 1 day ago
  Concentrate less on the high-tech handheld look and the unnecessary action and special effects. You're a good animator, but you need to improve your timing and exaggeration if you're gonna make it. 

  Yeah that's right, I commented on my own video. This is probably the last post before Christmas, I'll keep blogging hopefully as I have a couple of things planned.