Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Mod Stuff

I've finished all my units! Yaaaaaaay!
The last three were practically the same mesh, the only difference is in their weapons and accessories. This made things pretty easy for me and meant I only had to really worry about the texturing. There were some really nice sword and sheath designs saved up for the important members of the army, so I had some fun with those.

Family member bodyguards:

Bactrian General:

Bactrian King:

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Summary of the Beeb: Part 3

As mentioned before, in the third week we decided to focus on a sitcom format. Dean and Alex chose to do part of an episode of the Mighty Boosh to see how the two remaining engines fared.
Meanwhile, I didn't really have much to do, so was glad when Rupert Harris from the Bamzooki team got in touch with us.

Bamzooki is a CBBC show where kids can download a kit, create their own Zook, an insect-like creature, and give it different skills. Some will be fast, some strong etc. They then submit their Zooks to the CBBC website, and some are contacted to be on the the show. The contests are rendered in 3d and superimposed onto the show to make it seem as though the kids can interact in real life with their creations and watch the competitions on a table in front of them.
The idea was for small segments of the show to have the Zooks out in the real world, creating mischief. Rupert was wondering if any of this could be achieved with machinima, so I had a play in the Bamzooki engine and with some video editing software and came up with this:



I also explored ways to personalise the Zooks a bit more and give them character, so I created a dummy Zook in Max and made it some features. It was good fun but unfortunately the Bamzooki engine doesn't support alpha channels, so that was a bit of a dead end.

This time round, Alex had the most success. His Mighty Boosh machinima came out really well and although there are limitations and things Moviestorm can't do that the script required, you can't tell too much. Moviestorm was very strong with regards to set creation and character customisation, as soon as the video plays you can see that it looks like the Mighty Boosh.


Dean had a lot of problems with Source, his lip synchs refused to preview and his character refused to begin the machinima sitting down. His choice of characters was also very limited by the way the Source engine works. Each character comes with their own set of embedded animations, and you can only choose from these when you are making a machinima. Unless you want to edit an existing model and re-export it, or make a whole new character and add in the animations, you're quite limited. The default textures weren't really ideal either, and make the shop seem a little bit creepy!


Jappet was unsure if I should upload these as they're based on existing works, but there are a lot of machinimas that use film and TV soundtracks, especially ones done with Moviestorm. I did e-mail the production company behind the Mighty Boosh asking for advice about it but unfortunately didn't get any reply. I think we should be fine as they are mostly our own work and they should fall under fair use with regards to copyright. That being said if I do recieve any e-mails or comments from official channels telling me to take these down I shall do.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Papercraft!

Yes it's even more papercraft. I really love doing these, I just enjoy the process itself, looking forward to getting the next bit done. Once they're finished I feel slightly disappointed!

Clank:
This little guy was very simple, probably took only an hour or two to make.

Falco:
This one was complicated, but a very well designed papercraft. The arms were pretty fiddly but satisfying as they were only one piece each.
The headset was incredibly fiddly and frustrating. I also compounded my problems by choosing to do the lineless version. This meant it look a lot longer but looks a lot better as you don't have random dotted lines all over the place.
TF2 dispenser:
Tim and I made this together. It was quite a refreshing change to have a nice boxy papercraft. It reminded me of making nets for paper objects in primary school, all simple shapes and sharp corners. As you can see, we added some metal for it to dispense.

Friday, September 05, 2008

Mod Stuff 2

Finished a couple more units for the mod.

Nomadic Light Cavalry:

This one was horrible to me. Getting it so that the open bit of the jacket was textured properly without the back being weird was a nightmare. It didn't help that I had a few files wiped, so after I'd done it once, I had to do it again.

Nomadic Heavy Cavalry.

This one wasn't too bad as I had the scale armour from before. The pattern on his shirt I actually nicked from a Persian rug!



Just three to go now. Busy busy!