Friday 23 July 2010

Gyland: Fire Oranges

The sky is pink again, and I've now got those fire oranges in. Giant ones.


Next addition could be giant snails with fireworks attached, inspired by Ollie Elliott...

Wednesday 14 July 2010

Like a Headless Chicken

You may be wondering about the title of this post. Or maybe you're not. In any case, you probably won't be by the end of it.

Gyland: Oh, has it only been a day since yesterday's post?

So, what happened was this:

Which then turned into this:

Which then... uh.. became this...



Which inevitably resulted in this:


That's red biro hand-drawn circles on a scrap bit of paper painted with watercolour paints. Apparently there are only so many straight lines a girl can handle in one go.

In other news, I haven't developed the Morse Code game idea any further since I last thought about it. One of the WOF programmers, Dan Wynne, sent a few of us a message a few days ago about a game he wants to make based on a town like Dudleytown. Not sure what's going on with that right now, I think Dan's on holiday so I'll have to ask Pete what plans is.

I felt a little zap of inspiration today when someone I know posted on Facebook that Tetris is the reason kids drop bricks off of bridges. Made me laugh. I was thinking of a game based on the 'lives of Tetris block characters when they're not busy being dropped', but I don't know how long that idea is going to hang around for.

I also watched this recently:


Reminded me of a request made of me by a friend to make an inspirational martial arts film over summer... Except I don't know how I'd even begin...

I guess I'd have to start with baby steps. Maybe I'll watch some of the old Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers for inspiration, since it was a childhood favourite... Or I could use one of my friend's own fight scene films as reference for choreography and recreate it with some snazzy cartoon characters in place of the human fighters. Haha. Ooh! Maybe I'll use some of the old flash characters me and Ben were working on. Maybe Squeak and Headphone Jack...

I don't think this is going to be quite what Mr Ware meant when he requested an inspirational martial arts film.

Tuesday 13 July 2010

Gyland: Skylines

I've been searching for a tutorial online for creating your own skyboxes by hand. The results were horrendous. Tons of pre-made [and probably really good quality] skyboxes, plenty of instruction on how to implement them, a few that show you how to make them by taking images within 3D software of terrain you've modeled yourself [but less good due to lack of distortion]... But absolutely nothing along the anamorphic distortion or warping of 2d images to create seamless boxes that don't look boxy.

I even saw someone post on a forum that it was basically impossible. Is this what we've come to? Tools created for the masses to make things easier for them, stripping them of the need to work things out for themselves, resulting in masses who seem to believe that working it out humanly is impossible and that it can only be done by computers? Ridiculous!

Check this out.

Looks messy, huh? But I know it can be done, and I'm not the only one - I'm sure there are plenty of modern artists that understand how to make it work, and it's only a matter of time before I join them... Ooh.

There's that mad-scientist feeing again. Excellent!

Sunday 11 July 2010

Gyland: PINK

Yes, I know, it's very pink. I'd like to give you a scientific explanation for it, but scientists haven't made it to the island yet.


After Pete pointed me in the direction of FBX file formats, I got all excited yesterday and made a teepee style hut in Maya, very quickly textured it, imported it into Unity and then figured out how the import scaling thing works.

Then I decided to give the place a sky, except I didn't know how, so I googled it and learned how to put on a standard sky box. But then I wanted to know how to make my own custom skyboxes, so I tried making a really basic one, but it looked boxy, so I experimented with distortion and stuff in Photoshop. It didn't turn out too great, I think I distorted the image forwards instead of backwards so the sky felt really... close.. Also it was a quick bodgey experiment jobby, so the edges didn't match up either.. haha.

Think I'll try putting a square tiled textured into the skybox and play with distortion more. I do realise that there are probably tools out there for this... they may save time, but they take all the fun out of it!

Looks like this island isn't going to be much if an SAS simulator, I think I'll get carried away with my liking of fairies and stuff [yeah, I like fairies, what of it?], and make giant plants and other pretty stuff to fill the island. I might even make the camp fire be a giant orange peel oil lamp, based on the one I made today...

Sunday 4 July 2010

Gyland: Damn it Unity, what is your problem!?

You know that thing that happens, where you try to import an asset from Maya into Unity, and it takes forever, and then it turns out it's not taking forever it's just crashing? Yeah? That keeps happening.

I'm trying to import a really basic structure made of interlocking diamond-shaped "logs" to mess with in engine and how big it ends up when imported.


It's having none of it. Wouldn't import the bunch of logs, and wouldn't import the initial single log. I won't even import a simple 10x10x10 cube.

I really don't see why. It'll probably start working after this rant is posted.