Lights , Cameras ,Action Its Animation time !!

So the last part of this module was to rigg , skin then animate, Dean wanted us to provide at least 5 different animations to prove that the rigging and weighting worked and to see if we could make some realistic ' Anims '

Easy said than done me thinks :)

So using the Unreal biped we had to then skin our character to make sure that evrything worked as it should do hmmmmmm !!!



I didn't really realize how much different processes you had to go through to get your character to move 'Patience is a Virtue so they say' ! ,or something along those lines.


So my character looking like something out of elephant man time for weighting me thinks! This is all a bit new for me but i soon got my head round it .



So this is handy to know,I can control where the vertices of my mesh is suppoesed to be so that when i animate i dont get the Elephant Man thing happening, and slowly but surley my character is looking human :)



So thats how to Rigg my character now i can have some fun with ANIMATION.


So Animation Time is here so let the fun commence !


I got into college a bit late , so I missed some crucial info on this whole Amination business, but if I want to make characters for future I guess i pay some attention to this.

I did learn there are two types of animation in Max Forward Kinemetic and Inverse Kinemetic basically the difference is Forward is where you control the parent bones e.g if i was to pick up a pencil i would bend down first by chest and rotate down , then rotate the shoulders ,then the for-arm , then the hand , then finally the fingers.

Inverse is where i control the hand and the rest of the bones follow suit, and Max tries to work out where the bones follow, i think thats how it works .

So for my example for the picking up of a pencil, i basically put the hand where i want it to be and the rest of the bones follow behind and hopefully look right.

I did find it was much better to place the pose i wanted and the move each bone frame by frame, but there must be a quicker way round this judging by some of the animatons I look at in games.

So i babbbaling a bit on with the show!

So with Deans expert tutorials there are four key elements to walk cycles


1. Contact - where the heal touches the ground , and the oppposite leg, the toe touches, and the arms are opposite to the legs.

2. Pass - this is where the legs cross each other or just before

3. Down - this is where the forward legs knee bends and the weight shifts forward so the hips and the head shift

4. Up - where your character weight is upward and the hips move back to centre line and the other leg is ready to start the whole process again

The first process is to learn the art of walking, sounds easy after all we do this for the best part of our lives till where all in that wooden box, but to be honest i found it a bit hard to follow Deans Tuts on the whole walking thing in 3D Max but i had a go



Ok I think I got the walk cycle pretty much sussed I can have some real fun and Ive thrown in some of my models from my Doomsville Level just to give it a bit of reality..... hope you like as I enjoyed making this

DRAW -



Wagon Climb -



Sneaky crouch -



Brush shirt-



Walk -




Final Animations-

So thats about it , if Ive got time I mite have a go at doing a death scene to go with the others ......... If !!!!!!!!



THATS ALL FOLKS !

IT's Time For TEXTURES !

Well i thought id start a new blog fro the textures of my character , its been a while, sorry bout that boys and girls , ive got a family to run as well as studying, and my daughter leaving school in 2 months, more money for prom dresses and trivial things like that but hey thats waht you get for change in career at my age !

So on with the textures



So this is the final UVW for my character body ,




And this is the head UVW

I made a big mistake in the UVW though, ive put his stop watch on the same UVW as his head, now this works fine for models but when i come to animate afterwards in UNREAL i mite have to loose the watch, but hey its a learning process

So i got my UVW pretty much nailed and my model unwrapped , the next stage was to
get into Photoshop and start some textures,


So this is the Diffuse maps for the bulk of my character



The skin textures are from me and the hands are my own hands taken by me, the waist coat is made up of a block colour and then i overlayed a fabric pattern , at first i used a net curtain and it looked ok , but with DEAN's critical eye he advised me to make the best textures posssible as this was the main part of the model it had to look good , and so i used a fabric overlay i found on CG Textures




I think it worked out really well and the back of his waistcoat i took from one of my own, you cant really see it in the Diffuse but when i apply the spec map with same shiny texture it really works well






A lot of my textures i got from looking at sites like http://www.westernemporium.com/western.php

as this gives you a good idea of the style i was looking for






The Head is my ugly mug of course :)

Diffuse Map:



I even got out of shaving for a few days to get the goaty and stuble :) and the hair is mine but ive put some more grey in it using and overlay, the eyes are mine, my first attempt at eyes was not good to say the least, my character looked like he was on another planet, and Deans critical eye again showed me where i was going wrong so i took the liberty of nearly blinding myself by taking lots of photos of my eyes close up till i got the snap i was after

and these are my SPEC Maps





Normal Maps





Once applied to the model they really bring it to life ,





So thats the textures done and dusted now its time to animate !

Computer Games :The future of Famliy Entertainment

Introducton: this presentation will hopefully break down the boundaries between the “the age old argument that games are for the average teenager stuck in his/her bedroom” . "it will also show the history of the computer game , and then give a brief a glispse of how the industry has now steered towards the family as a mass market target".


A Brief History






“it PONGS in here”

One of the first ever interactive games was PONG in 1970 and was a worldwide phenomenon
Pong quickly became a success and is the first commercially successful video game, which led to the start of the video game industry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong



And then this little SPRITE and a whole bunch like him took the world of computer games by storm:

Following its release, the game caused a temporary shortage of 100-yen coins in Japan, and by 2007 had earned Taito US$500 million in revenue. Guinness World Records ranks it the top arcade game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invaders

http://www.freespaceinvaders.org/welcome.html



Atari 2600
One of the first consoles to use coded cartridges to play the games
The ten biggest sellers
The 10 biggest selling games for the Atari 2600 were:[24]
1. Pac-Man
2. Pitfall!
3. Missile Command
4. Demon Attack
5. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
6. Atlantis
7. Adventure
8. River Raid
9. Kaboom!
10. Space Invader

THE ‘80’s

The ZX Spectrum (Pronounced: "Zed Ecks Spec-trum" in its original British English branding) is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd. Referred to during development as the ZX81 Colour and ZX82,[2][3] the machine was launched as the ZX Spectrum by Sinclair to highlight the machine's colour display, compared with the black-and-white of its predecessor, the Sinclair ZX81.[4] The Spectrum was released in eight different models, ranging from the entry level model with 16 KB RAM released in 1982 to the ZX Spectrum +3 with 128 KB RAM and built in floppy disk



" many a long nights playing on this my first computer, and all that rubber too"

the best thing about my Speccy was you could have your tea watch MATCH OF THE DAY with Jimmy Hill have some supper , then go back to it and if your lucky it mite of loaded that game on cassette, my favourite was MANIC MINER or ATIK ATAK












http://www.zxspectrum.net/

'And now for something completley different'


Mainly there has been a change in the industry , where by the video game market is a huge source of family entertainment, AND NOW IS BIGGER THAN THE FILM AND MUSIC INDUSTRY COMBINED. Grossing over 2.1 billion$ in the USA alone.
So you could call it the Entertainment Industry

Fun For all: the generation that grew up playing Atari, Nintendo and the like , are now adults and have kids of their own and we are now seeing all the family playing games together an obvious example OF THIS IS THE INTRODUCTION DS console, WHICH TOOK THE WORLD BY STORM IN 2004


With innovative games like
Dr Kawashima's Brain Training






and other similar games the DS appealed to the masses, even to people that had never played games before.


Computer games have long been derided by critics as mindless, brain-rotting fun.
But a new wave of games is turning the cliché on its head. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4930996.stm

And of course the most innovative of consoles to hit the market was the Wii console





"Seventy per cent of parents in such households play computer or video games, and of those, 80 per cent play them with their children."
A survey conducted in 2008 in Austrailia. http://www.impactlab.com/2008/10/26/video-games-bring-families-together/


Why did NINTENDO get it right:


I think Nintendo got it right because instead of targeting the average gamer 20-30 some-things on the likes of COD and Halo to name but a few, they decided to diversify , break tradition of the cooler, faster, more powerful consoles and concentrate on new technology that wowed kids of all ages and their parents, interesting the games themselves are not the best in terms of graphic quality or astounding speed, but what they lack in these they more than make up with the playability and the ease of use.

IN OTHER WORDS THEY “READ THEIR AUDIENNCE” and not content with cornering the market they brought out the Wii in 2006. This console was the first of its kind to use motion censor technology in such a way that the player no longer had to use just their fingers but also had to physically use the rest of their bodies to play the games.
Today’s generation is clearly going to Nintendo and it’s because of their innovation. Dance and music titles have always been big in Japan, along with interactive games. Nintendo has more or less cornered the market on all things interactive with their new consoles.

According to Cyber Media Japan, Nintendo researchers found that 87 percent of Wii users use it on the biggest screen in the house, which is still the one in the living room.

Players Aren’t Passive

Games research is the child of mainstream U.S. social science communication research. As such, it is not particularly surprising that attention has remained focused on what games do to people rather than what people do with games. One problem with this preference is that the games-playing audience is plainly an active one. Some researchers have argued that this activity will make effects stronger (C. Anderson & Bushman, 2001). That may turn out to be true.

Dad, put down the joystick and back away slowly

: Games and Age
During the mid-1980s and the 1990s, video games were constructed as the province of children. Today, as an all-ages phenomenon once again, they have begun to reenter the social
mainstream.


Mitchell, E. (1984). Home video games: Children and parents learn to play and play to learn. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Mitchell, E. (1985). The dynamics of family interaction around home video games. Marriage and Family Review, 8(1), 121-135.



The Wii's success helped drive something of a sea change in the way developers conceptualize game design. As young children, mothers and grandparents in nursing homes alike all joined Nintendo in spirit, it was suddenly more possible than ever to create games for a mass market.

At the same time, the surge in social networking and the growth of other new platforms with low entry barriers, like the iPhone, also helped bring broader-focused, more accessible gaming experiences to newer and bigger audiences. These new avenues more than revolutionized the term “gamer” -- they made it redundant, as a “gamer” could be anyone.

just two quotes from Leigh Alexander

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27009/Analysis_Is_Hard_The_New_Good


Let there be MOTION !

Autumn launch for Sony's PS3 motion controller



The system – which is similar to that used by the Nintendo Wii – will allow gamers to control on-screen action through a combination of the Motion Controller "wand" and a PlayStation Eye camera, which detects movement.

Sony said the gaming system would deliver a whole new entertainment experience.


By Claudine Beaumont, Technology Editor
Published: 12:44PM GMT 20 Jan 2010 Daily Telegraph


Project NATAL




The system – which allows users to control on-screen action simply by moving their hands and bodies, rather than using a controller – is likely to top Christmas lists in December.

Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division, said that Project Natal would be one of the most significant video game developments of the year, and an “entirely new but completely natural way” to play games.



By Claudine Beaumont, Technology Editor Las Vegas
Published: 5:30AM GMT 07 Jan 2010 Daily Telegraph



The year 2010 is upon us. It should prove to be a time of interactive improvements, rather than major hardware shifts, and the area in which this is most apparent is peripherals.

Within this year, or so it is said, there will be three home systems with motion or gesture control—the Wii of course, the PlayStation 3 with its motion wands, and the 360’s Project Natal.

Everyone’s chasing the motion and gesture train, after the success of the Nintendo DS, the iPhone, and the Wii.

Games Developer Magazine JAN 2010


Lightsaber Natal or PS3 wand? Do you think that that's a possibility?

DR: You know, I think that motion control is brilliant. This is a personal opinion. Time had the top 10 innovations of the decade, and I think Natal was in there. We're definitely agnostic, related to platform. We service all platforms. I think that both of the technologies are brilliant, and we'll look for opportunities like that, whether it's partnership or internal development.

interview with Darrell Rodriguez now president of LucasArts.

A Character is Born !

Well thought id put fingers to keyboard and show you what Ive been up to in the past couple of month's, and that is working my arse off trying to get some sort of design for a character model so here you have it

CONCEPT




So yes im not exactly a picasso when it comes to drawing, but i liked the character, i didnt really want your average lookin cowboy so went with this and with a little help from Stas and Adam i used their wisdom and made this in photoshop.

Hes basically built up of a collage of images and a bit of manipulation in photoshop


DESIGN

So i ve pretty much got my concept nailed the next stage was to make my blueprints , initaially i wanted all the clothes on my character but Dean advised me to loose the long over coat as i would have issues using the Unreal skeleton i would have to animate his coat seperatley from the main model so the coat had to go :(

BLUEPRINTS


These where my 1st blueprints but i thought they looked a little basic, and with Adam keen eye and help these were born!



Which look a lot better , on to the MAX !



So ive started the modelling in Max, I took deans advice and seperated the arm on the blueprint so I could model the arm using a cylinder and the use more edge loops to shape it near enough to the blueprint and ! Bobs ur Uncle torso and arms Done!

So the guy need legs unless hes going to "Bum Around " for the rest of his life and all I did was to use a cylinder ,like i did the arms and there u go the man has legs!
"Its a miracle" :)


So after doing his legs all the other details Hat ,Boots, Spurs, Gunbelt ,Guns, Shirt and Tie where all modeled seperatly !



THE REVEREND is born





and just a couple of renders hope u like !




The REVEREND




So these are some more renders, ive decided to give him a more cowboy look by changing his hat, think it look better!

This is my final concept , hope you like it !




Will be taking that hat off for a proper stetson and loosing the overcoat !