Having a smashing time!

Hello there, firstly I am trying to get a load of new posts out this month think of it as my gift to you guys/gals ^_^. 

Finally got down to playing around with the Cell Fracture add-on introduced in Blender version 2.64, I had a slight go with it when I downloaded the 2.64 beta 

Glossary type thingy....

Hello everyone out there in internet land, I hope everyone is well today's post is gonna be a glossary basically I understand people that may read my blog may not be 3D pros and some terms might be alien to them and totally confuse them so today's post will be about explaing about some of the most common terms used when it comes to 3D stuff of course this will also help when the examiners comes to read this at they can understand it :)

The plan....

Take us to your master!

Hello citizens of the world, back to on topic posts after we went a bit off topic last time with that Oddworld Book, however it was a good off topic and kind of important as it was to do with art and 3D art. Anyway I started getting some concepts together for what my final big model could be for my EPQ the model that I would rig up and try to animate which I would hand in along with all my other little models which I am now calling to keep the marker and my EPQ teacher happy "In game assets"

Smash!

Hello boys and girls, ladies and gents I am back with another new animation and shockingly this one didn't take +5 hours to render happy days :D

Being obsessed with modelling glass things in blender since I made that bitchin glass effect which I am oh so proud off if you missed that check it out here ^_^ http://simpleanimations.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/glass-effects-nailed.html

And because I have started messing around with text on blender I thought why not do a text animation ? And why not have glass text ? :D so after a short brainstorming session I came up with a simple smashing glass text animation.

Above is a still from the animation as you can see it says simple animations e.g the title of this blog I thought it fit quite well, please hold the claps.

Now I have done two animations both of which I will post up so you lucky guys/gals and view them, the first one was the first one I made and the second one was a edited version with more glass particles and looks a little better, now both animations also play kinda fast at the start so its hard to view the title correctly before it smashes this may be fixed at a later date by slowing down the first frames however I am working on many things at the moment so bare with me :)

Video one: 700 particles

Video two: About 3700 particles give or take a few :3

So there we go please judge and hate accordantly xD anyway a quick news update I start college again Monday and I have an EPQ meeting then so I will have to present all the stuff I have done over the holidays so that's all the models and stuff so they can judge if its all ok including this blog, I have got ages till this EPQ is finished so I will keep posting new stuff for ages ;) don't you lot worry however I am thinking what to do with it when I am finshed with the EPQ chances are I will keep it and keep posting because hey thats what I do...

Take it easy.

Till next time.

Simple Animations by Conor Scott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Knights and Knifes....

Hello everyone, I am back with more 3D goodness over the past 3 days I think I have been starting a load of new 3D projects which I will show you guys/gals over the next few weeks but first I promised to show you the finished Knight model, I only took one render of it but put it in a dramatic way it does look pretty cool and because of its angle you cant see all the errors I made when making it e.g the slight warping around the neck of horse because of the sub division modifier on triangles, I did convert most tris to quads before I sub divided it but sadly there was still some warping.

The head its self wasn't to hard to make, I used a new skill to make it which I then used to make another model with I will show of later, I may also go into detail another time about this new technique because its very very useful and very easy to do.

Now then the final render....

Cool right...

Well I think I did a good job of positioning it looks pretty sweet the direction the light is coming from so it casts the shadow in the opposite direction it looks epic and I think it turned out all right, truth be told I was pretty worried when I started making this because I modelled the outline but couldn't get it to fill, NOTE TO ANYONE OUT THERE USING BLENDER AFTER USING THE F KEY TO TRY AND FILL THE WHOLE OUTLINE AND IT NOT WORKING I FOUND OUT YOU NEED TO USE ALT-F INSTEAD IF THERE ARE MORE THAN 4 VERTEX'S.

Use the above help advice if you get stuck it took me too long to find that out -_- look at me helping you lot out and saving you guys/gals time ^_^

And now time for the next model I made using the same technique i used to create the horse head for the knight piece, this model is actually an item from an anime a friend of mine turned me onto to called "Darker than Black" and he recently brought a replica coat that the main character of the series wears and the main character also has these two knifes which looks pretty sweet, and I joking said to my friend I would try and create a model of the knifes but couldn't do it, one because I was crap and two because I had no idea, then after I made the horses head it hit me, so heres a picture of the main character with one of the knifes in his hand have a lookie.

You may have to zoom in to see better just click the picture remember ;)

So that's the knife in his hand and this is my render of that knife.

Slightly bigger....

Now it is only a test model Its missing textures and there's meant to be a hole in the middle as well but all in good time, for a base clay model I think i made a good job of it :D 

And before I go heres a still yes you heard that right "STILL" from an animation I am making, hopefully if it renders right I will have it ready for next time enjoy....

But what's it doing......

Till next time.

Simple Animations by Conor Scott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Characters and stuff.....

Well hello there people of the internet, today's post is going to be about characters and stuff. So as I may have already said my final aim for this project is to model a character, rig said character and animate it, I am slowly starting to find out what I like to do and at the moment it seems like modelling is my love so I may change my project to just making a high quality character and leave out the animation side of it, one of the reasons for this is not just because I like modelling its because i lack good character art to model from since I am not the best drawer in the world, I have asked my friend who is an amazing artist to draw me up some character art to model and he did it however i lost the link he sent me so I cant get the art again >.< since his internet is currently down "saying that I did see him today and totally forgot"


Hopefully I will follow through with my first plan since I have already done planning into it and that lucky if I cant get the art of him there are lots of free character art on the lovely internet which I could use as long as i quote the sources so the examiners don't fail me as soon as they look at it -_-

A lovely bit of character art done by David Revoy for Blender cookies 2011 character modelling tutorials.

Good thing about that lovely bit of art above is its totally free to use, ahh there are kind people on the internet.

After researching enough and reading books I have finally found the correct order of events in a art section of a games studio that involve a 3D artist basically this is the chain.

Concept Artists:

The first line of arty people these guys/gals create the concepts for the characters, weapons, world and draw them up in pen and pencil then scan that drawing into a computer and finish it up on a bit of editing software for example "Photoshop" or "GIMP". "For any examiners out there that think I have put the word GIMP down as a joke I am not joking its actually the name of a piece of editing software see link at the end of the post for proof :)"

Once the Concept Artists have done their amazing work the finished drawings are handed over to the 3d Art team.

3D Artists:

You peeps know mostly what these guys and girls do I talk about them enough, they take the concept art put it into a 3d modelling program like Maya or Blender and make the models for the drawings so for example, one person would make the player character model well the other makes the objects for the player character to hold the finshed models are handed over to riggers.

There's my buddy !

Riggers:
Riggers use a technique known as Skeletal Animation here is Wikipedia's description of the technique: "Skeletal animation is a technique in computer animation in which a character is represented in two parts: a surface representation used to draw the character (called skin or mesh) and a hierarchical set of interconnected bones (called the skeleton or rig) used to animate (pose and keyframe) the mesh. While this technique is often used to animate humans or more generally for organic modeling, it only serves to make the animation process more intuitive and the same technique can be used to control the deformation of any object — a spoon, a building, or a galaxy." - Wikipedia on Skeletal animation

The characters "rig" or bones are highlighted in green the animation can use these to control the models moves much like a puppet being on a string.

Rigging is a very important stage with out a rig the model would not be able to be animated easily a model needs a rig just like a human needs a skeleton.

And finally the....

Animators:

After the model is made and fully rigged it is handed over to the animator or team to create the animations for the models such as the famous walk cycle It is worth noting that these three jobs in some companies are all handled by one person like wise their could be a few modellers and only a few animators who would take on the role of rigging themselves as well, this is down to the type of studio for example a big company like Ubisoft will have multiple people doing all these jobs because they can afford to pay all the people where as in a indie company where staff numbers are often few staff may be called upon to do multiple roles and its not uncommon for a animator  to rig his/hers own models.

And like i promised last time heres another picture of my current model enjoy :)

Till next time.


Sources used in this post:
http://www.davidrevoy.com/data/images/portfolio/projects/2011-cgcookie/4_Kara_model-sheet_by_David_Revoy.jpg

Image two in this post is a picture of the character Abe from the Oddworld games series and is owned by Oddworld Inhabitants I do not own him or his design and do not intend to use this picture for the purposes of making money the image is used under  The Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.
Where the image was found: http://www.411mania.com/game_article_pictures/12313.jpg


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Sintel-hand.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletal_animation

Simple Animations by Conor Scott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Introductions....

Well hello there, as you can see from the small description under the title of the blog, this is going to be a blog to track my progress during my time on the EPQ course. For those people out there that don't know EPQ stands for "Extended Project Qualification" and is a A-level course my college runs in which you need to complete a project on a subject of your choice it could be anything you wanted as long as you can put a title to it your good!


So i choose to do animation and 3D modelling because its what i want to do at university and its what i want to do as a future career more focused around games than animated films. At the moment i am not too sure how often this blog will be updated but it will be regularly as i am working on my project over the summer holidays so i have plenty of time to work on it. "I say that now but two months is going to fly past! :L" I will posting new stuff i make with screenshots i will explain it and how i learnt it so maybe you guys/gals out there that want to become animators and 3D artists can learn as well we can learn together! :D 


I also suppose i better tell you all why i wanted to become an animator, well for starts i love games, they are wonderful i grew up playing them and still play them to this day, they are one of the ultimate forms of media the player can lose themselves in this created world and become one and really get lost in the sometimes magical and wonderful story's that games bring.
I decided animation and modelling because this is what everyone sees when they play a game they don't see the code and the other things that make up the game they see the models, the characters I wanted my work to be seen by the masses and I wanted to create these wonderful characters that hopefully the player can relate to and form a bond with.


I finally knew i wanted to be an animator when I got a game called "Kingdom Hearts 2" on the Ps2 when I was younger and I watched the opening cut scene to the game and it was just so well animated I wanted to do what they did "Heres the opening to the game if any of you wanted to see it, its pretty epic!!" 

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

Till next time.