The Art of Mass Effect

I have a book at home that really helped me for ship design and colour's. The art of Mass effect it's visually stunning and drawn so well, from this i drew some of my own concept art and technical drawings. I've chosen to go for a futuristic silver/ metal ship as it's pretty simple to do and will match my polar bears character. 

Here's some scanning's that gave me inspiration, it's a real good read. 

The Elder Scrolls Online. ARGHHHHH!!! EXCITED!!!

As a huge elder scrolls fan i had to sign up for the beta testing for the elder scrolls online. 

I'm still waiting on an email back but i presume i didn't get the chance to beta test :( I think it would have been a really good blog post too. They keep pushing the game back which is annoying but here's some interesting information and gameplay from it. 

I'll be wasting many many hours on this as i think it's a whole new start for mmorpg's. They have introduced a great idea into the world normally there are several servers with severals worlds and if you start a character in one world this character cannot travel into another, you have to make a new one. Apparently the new elder scrolls online is on one giant sever and you can visit any world. granted there are restrictions to make the race you pick more fun and special but as in level play you can interact with everyone that is playing and see the whole thing. I'm glad someone has finally done this as it was a proper pain in the ass to start in one world build your character up and then realise you wanted to be in another. Bring it on bethesda :D 

here's a short trailer for the game - 

and here's the video on questing and player freedom - 

Studying bears in real life and their behaviour - Planet Earth & other BBC shows

One of the first ideas i had for research was to watch documentrys and shows on polar bears as i've seen loads before, human planet/planet earth etc...

Watching these shows made me look more closely at the bears and there behaviour, the way they walk, their characteristics, their exprestions etc...

From watching these i also thought a good way to go for more research would be to look at the bears anatomy, so i'm gonna research into that too, that way i can gain a clearer understanding of what moves where and how it should move.

 

Polar Bear Versus Walrus Colony

Living With Polar Bears in the Arctic - BBC Planet Earth Diaries

Great Male Polar Bear Swimming in Freezing Seas - Planet Earth - BBC wildlife

Polar Bear Cubs Out on the Arctic Ice - BBC Planet Earth

Mother Polar Bear and Cubs Emerging from Den - BBC Planet Earth

Bearrrrrrrr! bear bear bear bear bear bearrrrrrr

will my bears be wearing clothes?

Presentation Idea's - 14/12/12

here's all my presentation idea's :)

The finished result

So this is our final animation, overall i think that it's good given the time we had to do it as we slacked off a bit at the end. I know that if things would have been done such as sound and things given a bit more time then we would have had a much better flowing animation. I think we all learned a lot from this module and took a way a handful of skills we didn't have before which is always good :)
Next time i would definitely plan more and make sure that we all were doing work on a regular basis that way we would be able to fit everything in next time and not feel the pressure like we did this week.
I enjoyed this module a lot and found it lifting that i could actually draw in photoshop haha ( i really thought i couldn't do it!)

So yeah overall a success and learned a lot, uv texturing was much easier this time and i'm getting the hand of it now :) finally!

Woo hoo! I found a ton of sounds for us to use :D

Shame we didn't have time to use these. Sounds make an animation and i think it would have been a lot better with a nice smooth soundtrack.

I went through all of these from the cartoon cd's we have at college. I found some great ones like a fishing reel, lazer sounds for the robot. water dripping and splashing for the ice crack animation. Pretty much every sound here could have been used. Shame it didn't get done :/

Subculture and Style

Panopticism: Institutions & Institutional Power with Richard Miles

Camera's & Scripting in Unity

As i started on the camera's i used my timing that i'd worked out before and wrote all the camera shots down for scripting later. 

The screenshots below are me moving the camera around seeing what angles i liked best

Here's some short slips of the camera angles

shot one was to follow mammoo walking a little bit annabeth pointed out that cameras dont just stop they kind of slow down with the characters so she showed me how to slow down a camera in the graph editor in unity - 

I enjoyed experimenting with the cameras in unity, again, just need more time that i didn't have. 

camera shot two i wanted to make sure you got a nice facial shot of mammoo's character as he struggled to pick up his rod, paned across a little so the camera wasn't just sat there but moved with the character. 

(missed out the timelapse because it's on the post before)

camera shot 3 i wanted to pan back a little and get a wide shot but as i was doing this i forgot to pan back in the rush of things. 

camera shot 4 - i knew i wanted to create a sense of suspense for the viewers so i used a camera angle from the robots point of view moving upwards just before he jumps out of the water so the audience is left wondering what is in the water and whats been pulling on mammoo's rod that made him loose control of it. 

I used the graph here to slow down the event as the camera reached the surface  I found that the more time it took the slower the camera went. 

camera shot 5 - This camera shot was made because of no time left. The fish animation had not been done, so i had to improvise and change the animation of the robot at the end to the stomp. Jess and i thought of this at the last moment outside which saved our animation as in making sense wise. Shame about the fish...... and zap :/

I like the angle i went for here though, i wanted to have the camera from the ground with mammoo just in the shot so that the robot 'looked' like he squashed him. I think that the angle made the ice shards look good and the robot intimidating the shot with how big it was.

Overall i enjoyed doing the camera's even though it was a lot of work for myself. 

I'm very pleased with the outcome and the skills i've learned form doing it over and over again. 

I now know how to take something from maya import it into unity and do all the camera's and script which i know is gonna come in handy in the future :)

The scripting was hard to get my head around! ....at first. There's a lot of buttons you have to press and if you miss one little thing it won't work, first i tried to do it on my own with help from andy that i had wrote down (see below) after i got to the point where i had tried everything and it wouldn't work annabeth showed me and helped me, finally i got the hang of it and remembered the order in which you have to do things. It's complicated but if you do it over and over again it's quite simple to grasp in the end.

It was challenging but i enjoyed it and am happy that i now know how to link camera scenes from one to the other :)

I also adding all the lighting into the scene's, i didn't have time to do shadows which was a shame as it would have been a nice effect for the time lapse to attach a camera onto the animation so that the shadow would move as time went on. 

animating my crack o_O .... your what?

My part to animate was the ice crack so when i finally got my ice crack finished i looked into images of ice shards before starting as i knew this is what i wanted it to look like and have ice shards flying past the camera. Here's the images i worked from-

So i started my animation and imported the robot and mammoo as reference so that it would look more realistic. With the robot's two drills i presumed that most of the shards would come out the sides and as the robot jumped out the ice shards would crack. So i did the best i could with what i had and figured if all else fails a good camera angle would easily fix it. 

Here's how i did it - 

I used cubes to think best where to position the cracks and where the most of them would appear. 

and here's them after texturing i tried to add different blues into them in photoshop with different opacity's but you couldn't really tell in the animation, i tried though.

Here's some play blasts of my animation, i really like the first one best as the shard flys straight past the camera, I'm going to look into doing this with the camera's and it should work out better than this

Overall i was confident whilst animating and felt that i could figure out the buttons much easier than previously animating. I thought much more about time and the principles of animation, as in gravity wise what the ice shards would do, how much they would way, what the force of the robot would have  impacted on them and i tried my best to apply this in the short amount of time we had left. If i were to do this again i would take longer so i could get this down to the point where i was completely satisfied with it. 

Adding particles, nearly done!

Next thing i did was the particles, this was easy for me once i got the hand of what everything did, annabeth explained to me what some things meant and this helped me a lot to figure out which values to give the particles. 

i added snowflakes to the scene 

chimney smoke with a bit of sidewards wind

this was me just messing around, an explosion was not needed :)

cool though. 

I'm gonna use this for other animations, found a great way to make an explosion! 

I wanted the fire to seem more realistic so instead of just using a simple fire i added a smoke particle and an embers particle too so they would all work together and look better.

All the particles overall made the scene look much better from the feedback sheet too people had said to add these.