....and now back to our scheduled programming....

Well, it seems I failed miserably in keeping this thing regularly updated with progress.

Since I didn't get the internship, I decided to spend one more summer in Bulgaria. This turned out to be a generally poor decision. On the plus side, some may say the generally poor experience built character. I am inclined to believe this, if only because it would explain the 5 or 6 different voices in my head as recently built characters.

In other news, I have been conscripted for a quick little project with a fellow student in one of my classes. This project requires from me that I animate several characters. Whilst this is very appealing, there has been some stress in trying to compress any of this activity into my schedule. Not only that, but our lack of a dedicated modeler leaves the work to me.

The positive outcome of all of this is that I get a bit of experience, and all of this work is work I can generally fit my preparation for into one class or another. So that puts a big, stupid, toothy grin on my face :D

So hopefully i'll have made it through all of these rigging tutorials on my list by the time i'm done with the model, so that I can plunge straight into rigging the damn thing. The one issue with this is that I had planned to get the model done some time around....let's see.... today!!

Unfortunately I was delayed significantly by another project i'm working on, an animation desk. But more on that in a later post.

Anyways, here's what little progress I have made with the model. I plan on punching out the rest on Tuesday morning, and to hopefully magically finish a rig too.

I borrowed the new Intuitive Animation by Gnomon from a friend. It has me quite inspired, and hopefully i'll be able to produce some kick-ass animations for this thing.

Oh, right. Here is the blog of the project's designer. It's quite the entertaining read.

Hmmm....it's an interesting futility when I, possessing a blog with fewer readers than his solitary reader(me), am making a referral to his site.

More Stuff

To prove that I DID actually do SOMETHING during the semester, I'm uploading a bunch of the stuff I did.
First one is my first ZBrush model I made this semester. If it's not readily apparent what it is, i've failed miserably.
Then I have the monster i've been working on as of late, which is nearing completion.

This gives a sense of the relative scale of the legs and head to the body.

Here the shell normal maps are more visible.

Here is the final shot, showing the skinned rear leg. Most of the detail is from the normal map i painted in photoshop.

Everything else that's worth mentioning was previously posted, and I hope to have a finished version of the creature posted shortly.

Catacomb

Here's my catacomb submission....

Wish me more luck....

Well, needing a place to post some kind of work to show for my internship application, I decided that this would suffice.

First up is my WIP for my Maya modeling class. This will eventually become the head to a much larger alien, of which I plan to post shots as soon as I can get back on my school computer(tuesday). I plan on taking this into ZBrush on tuesday to give it a nice displacement and normal map set.

Here is a shot of the alien head comparing a few slight modifications in shaded(above) and wire(right) views.









This is my own interpretation of the Parthenon. More recent image soon to follow. I have yet to decide how to do the tiles on top. I don't have the desire to send the poly count up another 100k just to add tiles, but I know not of any implementation for parallax mapping in maya, which would be great. I'll probably just create a displacement for it, if I don't find anything. If anyone happens upon this humble blog and does know, please do share with a comment.


Lo and behold my second ever head model. The nose needs some more work, but his main purpose was to make some blend shapes. Though this has been put on the back-burner until my semester is over.

Here's an eyeball I made to complement the head. Once school's out I hope to give him proper skin too(SSS woot!).

Now to prove that I do at least know of the existance of color, here's the first dirty iteration of a shield, one of hopefully many props which will populate the Parthenon. I decided to mess with Maya's procedurals to try and make the leather, which I think has some potential.


Hopefully you enjoyed my stuff, more to come soon.

If only, if only....

If only I had started working on this project sooner, like the beginning of the month, as opposed to a few days ago.... If only I had anticipated that I wouldn't end up competing in the Pan-Americans....

On the plus side, I'm definately having fun with this project. Though the deadline for the Gnomon catacombs challenge is in.....very few days.... it has gotten me to work, as opposed to just fiddling around with small experiments as I usually end up doing. The reason i'm actually posting this is so that I can ask everybody I know how bright this looks to them, because apparantly my monitor's set relatively bright. Hopefully this will allow me to better gauge what people will be seeing. I also hope the final image will be something I can be proud of....I guess we'll find out in about a day or so. Wish me luck!

More Eye-Candy

Ok, it's been a while since my little rant on graphics. Let me clarify a few things that I don't think came across quite right.

1. The main point was that having a consistent art style, and clean graphics is what's most important. For example, Prey was touted as having amazing detail....but the people's faces looked rubbery, it made them look less like humans and more like moving manakins. I feel it would have been better to sacrifice the detail provided in their normal maps in exchange for proper specularity, or some other such trade between resources.

2. Graphics should be advanced as much as possible. I merely mean to say that they should take a back seat to the game itself. As I mentioned, I kept getting lost in various areas in Halo 3; the reason being that they were adding so much detail that few things really stuck out as saying "Go Here". In the earlier games, any glowing and/or transparent box denoted a power up of some kind. In Halo 3 I witnessed various objects with these same properties....but they did nothing.

3. If physics is actually implemented in the GAME( not just in terms of what you see, but in terms of what you have to do to get through the game), then they deserve just as much attention. I recall reading an article that said that there was only one programmer who did all of the physics in Insomniac's Resistance: Fall Of Man. On the other hand, I believe I heard that there were 4 or 5 for Doom 3.

4. To elaborate on Van Gogh's Self Portrait, and to defend my slight feeling of contempt for modern/modern expressionist art and their correlaries.... it employs a vibrant use of many colors in a way that would be difficult to concieve of for anyone not well versed in using color(the eyes have around 40 colors in them, I hear), it shows proper form/proportion, and uses not only variation on light, but variation in color to give a sense of depth and life.

5. I hope to get the opportunity to do some graphics or at least be involved with art direction at some point, so I am in no way saying that art is not important.

Eye-Candy

Well, it's nice to know i'm not crazy.... or that I at least share my crazyness with somebody else. While it is true that in the future I want to do art work for video games, I must say that I think video games are going too far with trying to look good. 'What?!' you ask yourself, How could he say something like that? They may look better than before, but they're still not mistakable for reality." Well, it doesn't matter, they've still advanced too much. Now you may wonder whether or not I shoved my head in a microwave recently. Rest assured, this isn't the case.

Now, let us justify my outrageous statement. To be more accurate, I believe video game graphics have advanced too much, too FAST. I'm not saying that they shouldn't advance, but I believe that they have advanced too fast with this last console leap. My reason for believing this is that I have been playing Prince of Persia, The Sand of Time....and you know what? I enjoy it more than Halo 3. I don't care that Halo 3 has real-time bloom effects, when I look at a window in PoP, I get a glare too. I don't care that when you bump into plants they react, the do the same in PoP(granted, not throughout the game, but there is a courtyard area where this is implemented). PoP has a refraction effect on it's water. Whilst it's not nearly as realistic and detailed looking as Halo 3's, I am still well aware that it is water, and it serves it's purpose of looking cool.

I will concede though, that Halo 3's graphics implement much more impressive shaders, higher-resolution textures, and has many more polygons in....everything. But I refuse to concede that this makes it look better. I also refuse to concede that this makes the game itself better or, more importantly, more FUN.

Van Gogh's Self Portrait(possibly my favorite painting EVER) does not depict every single pore in his face, it doesn't try to realistically simulate the lighting conditions of the room he did the painting in. But it is still a beautiful work of art, and an impressive showcase of his skill.

Why then, are "last-gen" graphics considered inferior? Isn't the point of the graphics to help convey what's going on? I don't quite see how it matters that plants bounce back when I hit them, I rarely stop to admire them while i'm being shot at. What do I care that my enemy has thousands of unique ways to die? I just want to know the bastard's DEAD.

There is the argument that graphics help create an immersive environment.... which is true....but nothing breaks that environment's immersive-ness like wondering why the developers couldn't have gotten the level designer to make sure it's easy for me to find my direction again if I get turned around when I look away for one reason or another. Is it because they didn't have time? Well, maybe they would have had more time(and money) if they weren't busy worrying about making sure that the color saturation adjusts when you move from a dark area to a light one, so as to mimic the reaction of a human iris.

Don't try to tell me that the immersion level of old games isn't as good when you go back. Some of them, most definately lose something, or a lot of something. But the ones that were truly well put together in the first place do NOT. I have been playing Fallout on and off lately....while I definately NOTICED that the pre-rendered characters didn't use SSS_Skin shaders, it honestly doesn't break it for me. The world's color scheme is consistent, the style of architecture and character design works well, and it just looks good. By the logic of lo-res graphics not standing the test of time, that means that Pac-Man should be unbearable. On the contrary, I love playing emulations of Pac-Man, there's even an arcade not too far from where I live, PacMan's probably the game I play the most.

I am not saying it's bad that we're massively advancing graphics. But it seems like it's usually just with a "bullet-point purpose", where the only reason they include it is to have something to flaunt. Marketing has convinced average consumers that graphics=awesome, which equals more fun. The problem is, that simply adding more detail doesn't change the fun of the core structure of the game, or whether or not it's art style works well.

Luckily, as I mentioned waaay back in the beginning, I have a supporter. This supporter is none other than Lord British himself! Richard Garriot! In his gamasutra interview
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3535/interview_richard_garriott_is_.php
he expressed similar opinions to mine, but going further in observing that this happens with the beginning/end of every console cycle. Ok, so he doesn't really say exactly what I just said....but he does seem to follow many of the same ideas, and I agree with him whole-heartedly. The difference is that I percieve this last jump, coupled with gaming's new popularity, could push things in a direction that's not necessarily positive. I mean, many people still refer to PS3/Wii/360 as the "next-gen". Even though it is the current gen now, they seem to feel that they need to perpetuate this concept of more technology being better. I think it's, in great part, a problem with who the games are being sold to though. Most people aren't really aware of whether or not something is fun, just whether or not they want it. I guess it's just a manifestation of our Affluenza, we simply seek more.

I think developers need to all just slow down a little bit, and try to figure out how to push the point of fun, rather than physics/rendering aspect which have no effect on the game. Because that's what video games(IMO) are all about, fun.

[Note.] It's a little late, so I'm not sure if this came across right....or if maybe I worded some things incorrectly, so there's a good chance i'll edit it tomorrow or the day after to make more sense and increase coherency.