Yeah, it's Been a While... Also, Sadface.

Okayokay. I didn't update for a bit. And you'll find that once again this will be more of the same.

Y'see, things have been very mad lately. I just can't seem to get my head around everything. With easter coming though that should give me a bit of time to fully organise myself and get everything up on here.

There is a bit of news, but its not good news. I spent a very large amount of money on a computer a while ago; I can't remember if I mentioned it on here, nor can I be bothered to check. But this computer was a very powerful heavy-duty thing and... its dying. The computer itself is okay, but a little while ago I began to notice some slightly odd things going on; odd popups opening in new windows when clicking on a site sometimes (and it doesn't matter whether I was actually clicking anything: a linkless border or actual links, no matter how official the site... popups). I stupidly put it down to my new version of Firefox being crap. I installed Adblocker and thought nothing of it.

Until yesterday when I turned it on to do a bit of work. It was fine at first, but then things started becoming slower. Internet pages first. Then it began to load more slowly. I scanned, it found nothing, but continued to become increasingly unresponsive. Well you can imagine my horror. All my stuff's on there! (and this, kiddies, is why backing up your data is vital!)

Well at this very moment its been left on safe mode with programmes running to try and bring it back to life. It's got Malwarebytes, Avast, SuperAntiSpyware and one I think is called Adware(?) taking turns to try and beat the issues out of it. Also use Rkill (stops viruses from operating) and CCleaner (I think it sorts the computer's registry) on it now too. I find it curious... my oldest computer had Avast. No problems. My old iMedia had Avast. No problems. My sister's two laptops had Avast. No problems. My mam's old computer had Norton. It had viruses. My new computer had Norton, and now its got viruses... pattern?

So hopefully I can get rid of the issues without resorting to a wipe. But if a wipe is needed... well it'll at least save my computer I suppose. It's gotten worse with every reboot, getting slower and now it refuses to connect to the internet (even though Avast's started behaving oddly and trying to get me to connect to unknown networks... I find it all a bit strange). Once its sorted, I'll be able to start uploading again. I make a point of not using my memory stick when its been used with a computer I know is infected so I quite literally have nothing. I'm empty handed and sad and... Geez I hope I don't lose too much stuff.

Yeah, Been a While...

And that's very much because I've just being doing the same thing continuously. I probably mentioned at least once in an earlier post what the game plan is: I sketch out every major scene in rough, line test it all, then colour those main scenes. Once I have that done wait, my last post was February?! Oh geez... okay, I'm going to start blogging. Every day. Just joked to my friend that I'm going to post a blog about every daily movement to make sure I don't let my posts slip. WHO'S INTERESTED IN EATING SANDWICHES? No one? Well poo.

Anyway, once I have that done, then I'll go back and put in the little niggly bits, depending on how much spare time I have. So basically, I'm doing exactly the same thing I've been doing since I last said I would be doing what I'm doing. I'll probably update this post later today to show a bit of what I'm happy with so far. I also have self-branding to finish (yes, I haven't actually finished that yet. I can't help it; I find branding hard to get just right). AND, I did say a while back that I was going to make myself upload my more personal projects and I'll get to that. ...soon. There's also a 3D model to make for the figurine, and 3D practice models I've been roughing out myself and the 3D mask for Varquer'eel to wear. Besides that, there's really just my own worldbuilding and character/species designs (I've also begun working on some clothing and armour designs for said species. Yay, I'm a fashion designer! :D ) and I've been looking into machinima again, but that's just for fun. Still, its timing and composition I guess.

My most recent issue with my animation is trying to figure out a way to get a background which is keyframed to move (hence moving it in 1s) and the drawn character frames to move slowly (in 2s) without a) the shot looking odd or b) having to draw what I can shoot in 2s, in 1s. So there's possibly a bit of problem solving to do on that one. ...Or just a load of drawing.

And that's about it. I have to remember to update more regularly. I should be back to edit this later on today. If I can, I'll get some clips uploaded. 'Til then!

Placeholder Posts (Platonicerific Primative... P'Free)

DON'T QUESTION MY MAGNIFICENT SKILLS OF ALLITERATION, DAMMIT.

Well, it's been another week already. Joy!

Basically it's been a week of more or less struggling with a single scene. Yes. One. Single. Scene. Because being the cleverclogs I am I decided to have a character raise its head, camera panning with it, and then do this really dodgy head turn which probably would look really impressive if I had the skill to pull it off (Read: I don't). So because of that I've let myself fall behind again... not good. I'm putting that scene to one side and moving onto easier scenes, needless to say. I can cut it if I don't have time at the end. Also, I forgot my memory stick today so I can't show you what we've been up to in Cinema 4D (go figure), but it's basically taking a photograph and building objects which it is projected onto; makes it 3D and camera pans around it look badass. Well, not my one, but Paul's looked badass. I'm actually quite excited about getting it down because my remake(/completion?) of my Nidhogg and the Eagle could really make use of it.

Dave approached us the other day two and he has an idea for our portfolios that sounds pretty exciting too - make a character in digital 3D which'll then be made into a figure. With moving joints. MOVING JOINTS. That's awesome! I'm hoping I can get a figure of one of my personal characters since it seems to be an extra-curricular thing, and because they're more interesting than my course characters, which is pretty sad really. Try as hard as I might, I just can't design characters quite as freely as my own projects. Trying to cling onto ideas I like for personal use probably has something to do with it.

Geez, I'm so scatterbrained today. I'm just sort of oogling this blog post, racking my brains for something to do or talk about. I want my computer. And my software, and my tablet. And coffee. I'd love coffee. And my memory stick. Also, coffee.

Mmm. Coffee gooooood.

Platonicerific Primitives!

So, yeah, I actually forgot to update. Until today. Yeah. Are you really surprised?

There's nothing really of note that can be said of my work, really; just the same thing I've been doing but... more of it. And it'll probably be that way for a while. I've more or less knocked up a (rubbish) animatic for timing but I'll upload it when it's fully finished... I'm not spending 5+ hours uploading an unfinished version. At the same time, I've started animating scenes that are finalised, but the same applies for them. They need more cleaning up before I'll invest hours of time into uploading them.

Kind of makes me wonder if the hours upon hours time to upload to Youtube is normal... more video compression obviously needed! Compression. It's your friend.

I've also found out the date for my interview for my 3rd year at college - I have until the 8th of May so I'll need a portfolio prepared for that. Urk. I hate interviews.

Also I was meant to talk about my personal projects a little while ago... I will. Sometime.

Also, exploding laptops, phones and planets in Cinema 4D!

So a little explosion we made in Cinema 4D. It was actually pretty easy to make; just knock up the models which were simple as anything (the laptop is literally two rectangles), triangulating them and then sticking them inside an explosion tag.

This one's the same sort of idea, but we used emitters to provide the rocks, which are really just textureless... whataretheycalled... platonic. Things. Platonicerific primatives.

Platonicerific primitives provide perfect planetary 'plosions!

Yeah, I couldn't resist.

A Day of Downtime

I'm taking a day off, because I'm lazy and if I overdo my animatic-making I'll hate my life. That would be a shame. My life is an important part of my life y'know.

I guess this sort of counts as work? I made a little fan character of my friend Emma's work. And I tried to mimic her style. I think I have a tendency to make things too angular so it doesn't look quite like her characters, who are more rounded... but it was an attempt all the same. This one's a small girl pidgeon loosely based on a Lucerne Gold Collar pidgeon. She's called... *drumroll*... Beige!

Beige is quite a friendly but meek little pidgeon and this often means she doesn't make it to the food before other, less fussy pidgeons get to it. So most of her daily life is devoted to looking for food in less obvious (and occassionally downright stupid and/or dangerous) places. And preening herself. Because clean feathers are functional feathers!... Not that it would do her much good, because she's also crap at flying. Ah well.

AD206 Finished

So yesterday was the deadline for AD206 and presentation day. I think it went alright.

I mean, the presenations are meant to be about 5 minutes long and I was told that mine was 40 minutes long but... better it's too long than too short, right? Better that it's 8x too long? I did forget to talk about my mood board though... and note in my handin list that it was a mood board... ah well, hopefully Dave'll get it himself. Unless he's actually marking it as if he were a client, in which case he'll not know it's a mood board...

And I know the time management section of my proposal was weak (like it goes... 'This job - 2 weeks. This job - 1 week' instead of having a clear timetable. But I'm hoping since there technically IS something there they have to give me at least 1 mark for that section! XD
The evaluation was probably a bit meh too... I'm rubbish at those. Hopefully the other stuff I submitted was alright, I mean, I think my treatment was pretty okay. And the script should be formatted right ( Scriptfrenzy.org is a great place for guides) and there were some other bits I stuck in there to try and boost marks, like some old planning of the original full version of the story, world lore that was with that, old script mockups, some printouts of Rinzen art and that. So fingers crossed!

I haven't had much sleep lately so by the time I was finished running around like a mad hatter at about 6pm I was plastered. So I haven't really gotten any work done since but here's the plan.

I know that to get the sound design crew to do my music and that for me, I'll need an animatic to show them. And I rather like the idea of not having to do sound design so that's the obvious next step. And no backsies this time. What I make this weekend is the final final final final final final final final bl**dy FINAL version.

*coughingfit*

Oh geez I nearly killed myself with coffee. Why am I drinking coffee right beside my computer, you ask? Well, because I'm a badass.

Nah I'm just kidding. The tower of my computer's like a mile away.










But yeah. Back to the point. I'm going to finish off these final storyboards and then make them into an animatic. That done, I'm then going to render that animatic out, pull it back into Adobe After Effects and re-edit it to leave only the scenes absolutely nessessary to give the bare bones of the story. Now, when I go to the sound design team I'll be showing them the long one. That's the one that (hopefully) they'll design sound for. But when I begin animating, I'm essentially going to make the short one - the scenes involved in the long version will be treated as extras and only worked on after the completion of the nessessary scenes. IF I get the short version finished and have time to animate and edit the extra scenes back in and use the full soundtrack, great! If I don't have time, the short version will suffice, and I'll edit the soundtrack down to fit as needed.

Sounds workable to me!

Also, I'm going to spend some time doing the ultimately important work that is playing Assassin's Creed Revelations.

I got this begger for my birthday last Sunday and I've never even had the chance to unwrap it yet! Oh yeah. And I'm 20 now. Urk. You know, I can still remember before my 15th birthday thinking, 'I don't want to be 15. I like the number 14.'

Ooooold. ;_;

Read this Post! It's contains epic!

Okay, so you know how last time my blog was all like 'I've faaaaailed, ah well I don't care. I've FAAAILED! *sob* Nah life is fine', and stuff? Well turns out, life is okay. Not great, but okay. And by okay I mean I passed! And by not great I mean I passed crappily. I did have my talk with Dave over the holidays though and he basically said 'Get a distinction in the next three modules and you can get a distinction overall'. So that's the plan! It'll be easy, right?

...right?


...


Ah, dammit.

Quick, I need a dose of epic!

Ahaha! That's epic.













Anyway, I've promised to really kick myself up the arse and try to get into good habits with my work. So before breaking into the full-on animatic for my upcoming negotiation module presentation, I decided it was probably a good idea to iron out the setting for my animation which up until this point was sort of accurate... sort of... but it was time to really iron out the kinks. So I had a browse of some old books I had stashed and trawled google for a day or so and came out with about 30 pages of really nice environment images; photographs, a bit of video game concept art as well as one 3D scene from a video game, lots of Avatar screenshots and concepts (but I've not yet got the actual art book for the film from my dad who's lost it), pictures of weeping willows (awesome tree is awesome) and all that rubbish. Feeling my work would be well informed enough, I then set to work to create some concept pieces that in no way resembled anything I'd been looking at. Except for the colour scheme, I suppose.

Here's the first one:

Now, before I say anything else I should probably mention my problem concerning lighting. Simply put, do I do it or not? Here's the flat version without the lighting/shadows:

I like both versions for different reasons.  The version with lighting will probably give more atmosphere when characters are moving through it (some cell shading on my vector-silhouette characters could also look quite interesting, it could reveal more of their shape that the viewer doesn't get to see otherwise, and that could be very interesting for the final showdown.  Because no villain is a villain until he has evil villainous lighting!)

Unless he's a giant monkey, in which case he'll look villainous even without it.  DOSEOFEPIC!

Quick, give him a banana!




Ahem.






So, that's my issue.  I do like the plain version though, as the shapes of the trees are more clear.  Perhaps if I kept the colours for these areas darker and just added light (the light version actually has a dark haze over it)...

Second concept piece:

Similar issue here. I added a pink haze over the top version to try and show distance and give it a bit of atmosphere, but I'm unsure about whether to keep it or just go with the flat, more brightly coloured version.

I found a slightly better way to do these sorts of pictures, actually, without using the pen tool. As much as I've improved at the pen tool I'm still quite slow with it and I find the lines are a little TOO pristine. What I did with these was take a new layer and draw rough, simplistic line art using a hard brush. Then I added a new layer, selected chunks from the line art layer and filled them in with the fill tool on the top layer. That done, when the line art layer was removed I ended up with a rougher version of the 'vectors' which had white lines where the line art had originally been. I thought it added a bit more randomness when I was messing with the colours (look at the lines on concept 1).

*spends ages clicking around confusedly, because Mac mice are rubbish and tend to confuse a left-click for a right-click. And then get stuck right-clicking and try to copy everything. And yet when I MEAN to right-click nothing ever happens.*

Die, Majin Buu, die!












Ok so anyway. I do need to run this by Dave to be sure I'm not spoiling the vectoriness of it all, but I'm fairly happy. Target time.

Got my presentation on Friday, so here's my lineup:

Rest of Today: Finish written work
Weekend: Begin animatic, finish off presentation and proposal.
Monday-Tuesday: Finish animatic
Wednesday: add placeholder sound effects to animatic
Thursday: Make sure all odd ends are tied up and presentation is ready and organized. Probably panic profusely.
Friday: Presentation, write a boring blog post, plug pictures shamelessly, and write down more targets. Huzzah!


And now, my duckies, I'll leave you with something slightly cuter than giant angry monkeys and dying Majin Buus.

D'aaaw. Bless his face.