Sunday 28 February 2010

WOF: "Look ma, no hands!"

No longer a floating head of doom, but still needs hands and feet.


The one on the left is the view of the actual polygons, the center one is what it looks like when I press [3] for the smoothed view, and the right one is... possibly asleep.

Saturday 27 February 2010

One of the things I Love about Humans.

I love how we can take One thought, One idea, One concept, and express that in so many different ways.

A Look.

A gesture..... An action.
A sensation. An experience.
A word. A voice. A song. A tune.
A sound. A video. A picture. A color.
A shape. A movement. A dance.
A story. A poem. A book.
A puzzle. A game.
A blog. A list.
A graph.

A...



And haha, the next post shall be my 69th.

Friday 26 February 2010

WOF: Floating Cardinal head... of Doom.


I'm basically relearning how to model in Maya, except better than I knew it before, because I'm using orthographics properly. I think.

Thursday 25 February 2010

"Avatar da Hip Hop Musical on Ice"

Some friends of mine had to do a "hip hop musical based on Avatar" for their course. Check this out:

Essay Idea: Binaural audio / HRTF

Okay, I've changed my mind. I'm going to find out and write about binaural audio in games, because binaural audio is cool. Although, my question could be to do with what impact the research on binaural audio can have on digital games. Should be cool.

If you've never heard this before: put on headphones, close your eyes, and press play.



I found the following video just now - it's not quite to do with binaural audio, but it's pretty cool anyway.

Monday 22 February 2010

If you read the whole of this entry: Haha, you must be bored :)

Today, I didn't do any work.

And by didn't do any work I mean, I did read some articles about the possible futures of gaming for ideas on what to write my essay on. I also went to a gymnasticy gym and learned how to front-flip into a foam pit with and without a trampoline. And then jumped out of my friend's [slow] moving van when he dropped me off - everyone else had and he said I had to too, so I did, because I'm a ninja in progress...

But I didn't do any Wings of Fate work.

Somehow, I managed to get the animatic done by yesterday afternoon, so I didn't need today free for emergency work-overflow. I spose I didn't need to spend any time creating audio with which to sync the scenes to because I wrote it out onscreen as subtitles for easy adjustment, so it didn't take as long as I'd anticipated.

Although, I could have spent some time taking the slides and putting them into a tidy printoutable storyboard doc, but I thought my time today might best be spent beating the "Smelly Unsociable Gamer" stereotype out of existence by doing womanly things like cleaning clothes to make sure I had clean socks and tops and tights.

...And learning how to be a ninja. Because as I learned in last Thursday's lecture: primary sources are the best. So it's better to make games about ninjas after you've tried being one for a day. Or two. Or three. I'm currently on a mission to learn how to front flip on grass without any aiding bouncyness. I think I've got diving rolls pretty much down.

Sunday 21 February 2010

Grow my pretties, grow!

During the research for Squeak's desk, I found that plants are supposed to help in the area of creativity. Failing a real nice pot plant on the desk, a tree outside the window is supposed to improve mood.


Two of my cooking onions started sprouting. I've put them in cups of water on my window sill to see what will happen. All I've noticed in the past few hours is bubbles appearing and the water turning very slightly brown.


Perhaps if they live and grow, their presence will improve my mood and creativity. Maybe I'll stick googly eyes on them and make a film about them having a conversation.

---

Day 2: 11:30AM
The water is now twice as brown as it was, the one on the right being a slightly yellower hue. I've taken photos but for some reason the bluetooth connection between my phone and laptop is failing. [Update: Bluetooth now works..]


Most of the bubbles have disappeared, but I've noticed the one on the right developing lots of furry little hairs. I think it's mould regrowth, because it was starting to go a little mouldy under the outer layer, but I decided to try salvaging it because it wasn't really squishy and had the biggest shoot. It possibly won't survive. I put a tiny bit of antibacterial Listerine in the right one to see what would happen...

I feel like a mad scientist.

---

Day 3: 01:00AM
Just got back from AberG, where a massive cookie was made and Father Ted was watched [I now have a song about a lovely horse in my head]. It seems the Listerine hasn't done that much to stop the tiny hairs growing in the right one, as there's now possibly 2 or 3 times as much underwater fluff as there was before. Although it does smell like Listerine, which can only be a good thing. And the water in it has turned a much darker tint, but not cloudy. I wasn't expecting that.

As for the left one, the water level seems to have dropped more than the right one, even counting the Listerine I added [it wasn't that much at all]. I'll take a photo tomorrow morning when it's daylight outside, it might show the fluff better.


12:20pm: I've decided not to put anymore photos up on this post, except for especially interesting occurrences... I will continue to take a picture daily however, and will probably edit them into a video. The right mould-grower seems to be doing fine apart from the mould, I'm fairly sure the shoot is still growing.

---

Day 4: 01:45PM
THEY'RE GROWING NEW ROOTS!! ^_^
And both shoots are definitely growing :D My brother suggested I change the water, so I've given them some fresh stuff.

---

Day 7: 03:45PM
The one with mould on. She's still ALIVE.


As for the other one, I put it into my bathroom to see if the dark would make it grow a bit faster. It hasn't really. Not sure why.


Day... whatever day the 10th of March is: 10:37PM
BEAST!!

I'm naming her "Medusa" after my brother's odd comment on the subject of growing onions. The other onion is sprouting well now, I think I'll name it "Kaa", after that discussion I had with some friends in which we couldn't remember the name of the snake from The Jungle Books. Cheers, google. I think there's another onion sprouting in the cupboard. I might put it in another cup and try a spot of time-lapse filming on it.

Day... whatever day the 27th of March is: 10:37PM
Haha, and I thought they were beast before.

The new addition is doing well. Kaa seems to be quite small compared to Medusa regarding shoots, but has 3 groupings while Medusa has 2 [nice, considering I live in flat KA3]. I'm thinking of renaming them as Kaaa and Metusa. When it comes to roots, Medusa's seem comparatively short. Oh! And I've only just noticed, by the roots on Kaa and Medusa have started branching.


Friday 19 February 2010

"Who knows what tomorrow will bring?"

I'm listening to an RJD2 Breezeblock Mix or something. It's just under half an hour long, and there's a bit I keep wanting to listen to that starts around 25 minutes in.

"Who knows what tomorrow will bring.
Maybe sunshine, and maybe rain.
But as for me, I'll wait and see.
Maybe it'll bring my love to me, who knows.

Who knows?"


So, today's post is about the future. Sort of.

---


After the lecture yesterday, we had a sort of seminar with Corrado. It was more of a, "put your names down for the slot you want for ten minutes of feedback". I did get the last slot, but then I gave it up to someone else because they were on their way to campus and would have got here for nothing if there were no slots left for them.

But before I left to go sort out where I'm going to live next year, Corrado mentioned to me that there was something he wanted to talk to me about next week regarding my essay. I was like, yep, okay. But then he said don't worry, but there is something I wanted to discuss. Then the automatic thing happened that usually happens when someone puts the word "don't" in front of the word "worry".

After I read back my essay for the first time since handing it in, I noticed a silly mistake or two, as well as the fact that I didn't really like how I'd written it [I was very tired and at my wits end after trying to finish a 30second flash FMV in the same night]. So now I'm trying to forget about it and relax into the fact that if it turns out I've done terribly, I would probably have done better had I not made the paired FMV project with Ben my priority over the essay [I'm not actually sure how I've done in that project either yet, but we'll see].

---


Back to the topic of the Thursday lectures: they've been about essays and research. It sounds boring when I write it like that, but the actual lectures have been pretty interesting to me. The next essay we're doing is going to be the introduction to the dissertations we'll write in our third year, and we were set the task of thinking of a broad area within games or animation on which to concentrate.

I, as usual, didn't know off the top of my head what I wanted to do. So I did a little soul search [woohoo for google] to find out what I'm all about. I think I wanted to see if I could compare what I found to the ideas and work I had come up with in the past.

I found out a while ago that I'm an "Idealist", possibly an ENFJ [Teacher] according to one online test. I could go on forever about how this matches me, but I won't do that here right now. One of the key things about Idealists is the idea that while Artisans live in the now, Guardians live in the past and Rationals live in the "eternal", Idealists tend to live in the future, in the world of possibilities and "what if". Sounds just like me.

It's true that, while I keep a lot of my old journals so that I can look back through them now and then, I don't actually spend much of my time reading through them. I spend a lot more of my time imagining the future and the possibilities and outcomes of my actions. I do it in all aspects of my life. I do it when I "shuffle paper" in my artbook because I don't want to stick anything down just yet. I do it when I write notes about characters for stories I could write one day. I do it when I have a billion conversations with people in my head and try to imagine their responses, but then never go on to actually have those conversations with them for real. I do it when I read about things that have been invented recently and think how they'd effect events in the world.

And then it hit me. Why don't I write mine on the future of gaming? I may have to narrow down the topic to something more specific like "The future of the games industry" or "The future of games in education" or "How games can help people in the future" or "How games can evolve in the future". But it's definitely a subject area that would engage me.

Saturday 13 February 2010

Haven't written a post in over a fortnight!?!?!

How naughty of me. The Interaction thing came and went, but apparently there wasn't enough drive or momentum in most of the groups because only three people including myself turned up to the showing... we ended up watching inspiring videos on Youtube on the big screen :D


Sebastian's Voodoo. I saw this ages ago and can't believe I forgot about it. It's so beautiful. Totally still makes me cry, haha



Watched this later in the evening with friends, but still posting it up because it's another one I'd forgotten about and couldn't believe I had. I love it.


My group didn't finish our film/animation, I think mostly due to technical difficulties [with not being allowed to use uni equipment, e.g. cameras, for it for some reason]. Shame. But never mind, Hains has said he still wants to finish it eventually because it would be a good showpiece for him. It probably wouldn't do that much for me except possibly teach me how to put film and animation together maybe, but if it'll help out Hains then I'm happy to help finish it.

As for actual course work, we've got a new project underway, 8 of us CGD designers working with 3 of the Games & Artificial Intelligence dudes. We seem to have a good group going people-wise, but we've got the brief that was rejected by one of the groups last year. Not sure exactly why they rejected it because we like the idea and are pretty happy to work on it. Here's the brief we're working from on the website Pete set up for the group. I may have to set up a blog especially for Wings of Fate pre-pro and production work.