In the process of doing alot of rendering right now so there's a bunch of videos that aren't available to show just yet. For now though, I have some rather... well alright most of it's good but I think Simon's going to kill me when he sees the dalek.
The dalek is kind of messy; just playing with Nfur before bed, trying to set bald spots is a ridiculous pain to do though with how it's set up. Absolutely loathe the maya paint tool.
As a replacement for the Joan of Arc tutorial, I made my Kiana Schrödinger character from 2nd quarter instead.
She's finally fully rigged, and able to be posed as needed. The tail and ear controls are a bit primitive at the moment, but they allow for fluid, organic movement with little effort, so they're good enough for the moment. They just aren't really capable of complex motions yet is all. Think I'll see if it's possible to attach an IK handle in, or a toggleable secondary set of FK handles. Maybe have one primary one for basic movements, and can turn on advanced settings after the fact if so desired. I dunno yet.
At first I was going to go with 'Luminopolis' for my company name... then I realized that there were already quite a large number of people using it after some google searching. Hence, it has been changed to Nekolith, with this as the company logo/video. You'll be seeing more of it from now on since I also rendered off a video for use which is just the paw/yingyang icon and name, which can be composited onto other works, such as the demo reel, allowing for animated consistency throughout.
Here's a composited still life of 3 household objects I had laying around;
A thumb drive (it's animated to open, and this scene is rendering out at school now for the quarter's demo reel), a remote control; Magnavox NA471 in case you want to verify it's authenticity of appearance; and a lamp made from popsicle sticks that my uncle Vaughn (I just realized I have no clue how to spell his name... that may or may not be accurate) made probably 20+ years ago. I would've rather modeled the one I made, but it's back in Amherst and I'm not traveling back to get it just so I can make one, besides, this was a very similar design and looks good anyway.
This was a self taught test of how to mess around with maya Nfur; have since learned a fair bit better control, but this was good for learning alot of interesting stuff like how each attribute affected it as a whole, and how to get it to render quicker. Have since learned how to apply to specific areas, rather than having to rely on a single object application.
I was going to put in the swf of the anijam video segment I did, but then realized that blogger doesn't particularly car for swf files. I could convert it, but it's too much work for just before bed, and it was excessively messy anyway due to needing to animate about 1200ish frames in a few days. Hence... limited cleanup. If anyone's really really interested I can see about a copy for later, but it's not that big a deal right now.
This's the case to the tears of Noesis game I was working on for GD100; the background for it was originally designed as a desktop wallpaper for my mother for her birthday, but it came out so nice as it was, it seemed a waste to just leave it.
Waste not want not, so just made some adjustments and adapted it for use in this situation instead. Works fairly well really. I liked the blue version better, which's on the final printed copies which were actually used as inserts.
Due to the arena style combat in the game design, I wanted to show a 'level design' of sorts. This 'Colosseum' level design is excessively rough, and the shot isn't particularly great either. Overall, the whole thing took about 30 minutes to make, so I suppose I can't complain. Overall it looks nice for the effort put into it, which admittedly wasn't much.
Idea being to run the 'ball' (in this case a gemstone with the ability to grant the holder visions of the future) to the end 'goal'. The game's concept is vaguely similar to that of a football game, though only in the most basic premise; rather than guys in armour, you instead get magicians with spells. Seriously, wouldn't sports be so much more interesting if your opponent could cleave the ground in half and raise a wall of rock from it to bar passage from the goal line, or be forced to dodge meteors landing when carrying the ball? XD
I'll possibly provide more info on the game concept for later use, but I'm admittedly a little concerned about the information being grabbed since it could actually be turned into something playable, especially with all the mechanics and balance notes I have compiled.
The instructor's been generous enough as it is to ensure that all copies of this data is not available to the school, since 'technically' anything produced while there is the school's property... hence, we've been given the opportunity to create something in which it can't just be taken away, preventing us from getting royalties from it. As such, I'll be taking extra precautions towards ensuring that this idea is safe, since I rather like the concept and can see a potentially good market in it someday.
Anyways, that's it for tonight, most of the stuff I've been working on can't really be demonstrated without movies that have yet to be compiled into a viewable state. So far I have most everything rendered off at least, with only three main sections left to go, all of which are fairly fast to render. The issue is moreso about compositing them together, and the fact that many are either just targa sequences at the moment, or uncompressed video, of which neither is particularly useful in terms of value to show right now.
Tomorrow's agenda is to re-render the dalek and space kitchen, get the previous work properly set up into uncompressed video formats, and finish the walk cycle on Kiana up above there. Want to have her doing the walk cycle for the final reel, even though it's not actually required.
