This video was really interesting to watch being a fan of the halo francise since i was like 14 years old. Halo has a lot of machinima in it ranging through all of the games, such as not being able to climb out of a warthog but look around. Standing with your men in a ship about to storm a beach but all you can do for the moment is look around. It really immerses you in the game itself and makes you feel more like your there. I found that with halo i was always attached to the characters completely.
What i took from this video was that i need to focus and think about everything that is going to be in our animation. There needs to be that link between the characters, the camera angles have to be interesting or the animation will just be flat and boring.
From this game i also know how important sound can be in an animation scene and without it can also lead the animation to be boring or not fit. After watching this i found a load of sounds for use to use in our animation so the audience is always intrigued visually and through sound.
As were making the animation i hope we can space out everything with great timing and bring all the things we need together in the end to make a solid animation that flows.
Here's the website form this if you'd like to take a look -
I was very excited to buy this when i saw it on the playstation network, a game where you can be an animal and you have to hunt and watch out for predators and mate and do everything!!!!! Yeah!
......No, it's rubbish.
What a waste of a tenner. The concept is great and they ave a fantastic idea, but it plays so fast and its so difficult that you cannot enjoy it without getting bored of losing all the time after surviving for years and years.
You basically start off as a deer or a pomeranian, very random i know.
You have a health bar and hunger bar in the top left hand corner which you have to constantly fill but watch out for predators at the same time. This would be great IF the hunger bar didn't run out every 30seconds. You have to hunt constantly and if you don't your health bar decreases ...then you die. Also you have to watch out for your toxic bar which randomly posions you for no reason when your in an area....then you die. If you don't watch out for predators whilst constantly running around trying to hunt and find a mate at the same time.....you die. Basically you die a lot and this would be ok if it had a save feature. WHICH IT DOES NOT. Every time you die no matter how far you've got, you have to start from the beginning. How annoying is that.
Here's a video of the gameplay to show you what i'm talking about -
As you can see the guy playing this died from starvation straight away and if you noticed he was running around looking for animals for ages, this happens all the time. They seem to disappear and you die because you actually can't find something to eat in time.
It's a fantastic idea and i'm gonna give it more goes and see if i can get better or i'm missing something but at the moment it's just too fast gameplay, way too fast.
I found this process the hardest of all, as we'd never done this at all before and it was quite complicated taking in all the little things you had to do such as parent things to each other the right way or they wouldn't work. I found the whole thing a little daunting at first but as matt's video's went on and i followed the instructions i began to understand and think ahead of his word's as in what he was going to do or say next.
I learned some very vital skills doing this part and without this alien exercise i know that a lot of us would have been completely lost.
I had some trouble's with my alien for example my aliens foot just would not move with out the other foot moving and annabeth couldn't figure it out either, it's still a mystery to me why it was doing it, i presume i must have missed something in weight painting even though it showed i had not. Maybe if i turned it onto the colour rainbow weight painting next time i would be able to tell more and avoid this problem in the future.
I enjoyed weight painting it was easy to grasp and fun to do
i still have a way to go with it though, as you can see, i missed a few bits :)
Gamecity 7 for me was an absolute waste of time. I went down a few days before and everything seemed so unorganized and all over the place and it was such a treck to get there from Leeds. Any who i went down and there was a massive tent set up in the middle of town which held arts and craft for the public to get involved with, there was also a huge screen that showed off games and gave people the chance to play super hexagon. I helped with showing people where to go and got to see a few talks from people but none were really that good to be honest. I left early as it was in Nottingham and took ages to get home so i missed holding the mic's at the end but from the videos i found i didn't miss much. I wouldn't go back again as it seemed to be to attract crowds and not really a specialised event in my opinion. I researched the year before and it seemed like it was better as they had the hit game journey there and it was played on the big screen with everyone and things fell from the inside of the tent as they played i was told. Maybe i just went to the wrong day or year? Still i went and experienced it and i have it for my gaming cv so win win :) I think i prefer things that are more focused on specific topics and more professional such as BAF and comic con
Proteus live at Gamecity7
A game of audio-visual exploration and discovery by Ed Key and David Kanaga
'according to usage and conventions
which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome - men act
and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.'
-From
Ways of Seeing Chapter 3
Investigation
of the gaze through the nude in europeanoli
painting, this
does not mean that women are vain. Women watch themselves being looked at
because of the many representations of women that surround us. Women
survey their own femininity.
Hans memling 'vanity' -1485
inaccurate representation of her face, she she's what she wants to see in the mirror. the mirror is placed there as a distraction so that we can look at her and her not know were looking at her.
Alexandre Cabanel 'Birth of venus' - 1863
again concentration of focus on the body showed by her covering her face, were interested in her body and not her herself
Sophie Dahl for Opium
deemed too sexual for billboards and magazines so they switched it round so that you focus on different things first like her eyes.
Titan's Venus of Urbino, 1538
compares to
Manet - 'olympia' - 1863
very similar, reclined to the left, the hand in titans is laid back, casual but Manet's hand is almost defensive. Manets head is lifted like she's addressing us, 40 years on form the first photo, impression starts to use that snapshot style but in titans it seems like we might be spying like she's not quite sure if were there taking a photograph.
Ingres 'Le Grand O
guerrilla girls poster
Manet - Bar at the follies burgers - 1882
she's ready to serve us at the bar, again the mirror is used to give us a strange reflection which wouldn't happen in real life, we see her off from the side in stead of the actual reflection a mirror would create, what that allows us to do is see her from two viewing positions at once, we see her as herself and how the gentlemen in the mirror sees us. The gentleman is us and we are seeing what he is seeing
Jeff wall 'picture for women -1979
we have the gaze of the woman and the gaze of the camera, like a sort of doubling. this photo reminds us its a staged shot, reminds us of the gaze.
Coward, R. -1984 quote
a woman stands half dressed in the middle of a busy street, this is saying that its kind of normal and that woman think this in the sub conscience, the sunglasses show that she can't look back we can look at her as long as we want and she can't do anything. which relates to the older paintings in a way.
Coward, R. -1984 - Peeping tom - 1960 movie
conclusion is his voyeurism leads him to seek the image of the woman as he kills her.
Put up the mans picture to show men are in the gaze too
the quantity of men vs woman on naked bodies though is massive, like if you went into a newsagents and looked at the magazines and compared the pictures of naked women to sell things than naked men.
Every single one of the guys in the image are looking back, there is a challeneg to the gaze with men, they show that 'power' in the shot.
Marilyn: The seven year itch - 1955
men often lead the story and that woman are just something to be looked at he claims that there arn't any active females, they don't drive the story there just there to be on the side lines and look pretty.
Lara Croft, theres no ass kicking woman that cannot be a visual spectical but to be honest i disagree here because if you look at james bond he's portrayed the same way but i think that everyone doesn't feel that way i think it depends on what you find attractive. For example, i like James bond i think he's powerful and awesome and handsome, but i don't find him to be visually spectical.
Barbara Kruger ' Your Gaze Hits The Side of My Face' - 1981
Women
artists whose work challenges the male gaze. The comment 'Hits the side of my face' challenging males.
Sarah Lucas 'eating a banana -1990
has taken a humorous side towards challenging the male gaze.
obviously eating a banana is seen as a sexual thing and whats she's done here is giving us a look which is very confrontational, saying 'well what have you got to say about this.' She's making males feel a little self conscience
Tracey Emin says it's not really right to make money off art so shes use's a picture of shoving money inside herself obviously shes going to make money off of this art herself so in a way shes criticising herself.
Amanda Knox -
a woman is beautiful/.... quote this is like old times would view woman in paintings etc...
how photographs are often used to misrepresent in the media.
apparently she's stunned but her faces clearly shows that she's neutral, the next day they find out its a mistake which shows that the media create's two stories in advance and they actually sent this wrong verdict around the world due to a misinterpretation of the verdict in court.
Social networking - these images have no artists but it's the idea that gets spread round
paparazzi shots -
The Truman show - everything that happened in his life was a staged event.
Big brother the media gaze men and women are both offered here to view in the gaze, people offering themselves up as a viewing experience
The gaze in games -
Digital beauties -
virtual adultery in cyber space sex - documentary check this out.
So i started off the igloos by thinking of different ways i could make them in maya and the first thing i thought was to make one single block then duplicate it to several, then duplicate those blocks in a circle making them smaller and turned in as the igloo rounded..... not as easy as it sounds, very frustrating and it started to work but tbh after having a go for a while i decided to scrap it and as annabeth showed me fold a sphere in on itself instead.
It didn't create the texture that i wanted as in they all look like separate blocks that have been built but when it comes to uv texturing i can make it look like that anyway, it will probably look crisper and neater too.
I found this handy tutorial on special duplicating as i was having trouble cause it's really confusing to know what amounts to put in to get the special duplication you are wanting, this was a good trick but to be honest it took me just as long to figure this out as it would to create each single one and position them correctly.
Here's some pics of my first attempt at the igloo -
so as you can see from the image above i had trouble figuring out which way to special duplicate them on which axis and which one to translate and rotate, it's really confusing! This is something that i am sure i will learn to know through time and using maya constantly so this doesn't really bother me at this point. Annoying but it will sort itself out.
as you can see everything i tried, nothing worked, until! Eureka!
Lets look on youtube for a tutorial which i did and thus did this which worked!
Eureka!
make a nurbs circle
duplicate the amount you want
shift select all of them and tell maya to position along curve. simple as.
then as you can see, rotate and move in, make smaller etc...
So as i said this was going ok and im sure if i took a while going over it again i could make a lovely igloo but as the sphere one will be much easier for uv mapping and does look better and i can add windows and things in much easier than it would be with this one i think.... i'm going to go with the sphere ones.
So here's what i've done so far in the way's of different igloos and props etc.... :)
I'm all iglooed out!
completely iglooed out!
I can't make up my mind which one i like best so i'm gonna show the group and see which one everyone else likes best. I've added a fish barrel and fishing equipment will be propped up against the side, i thought it would be a nice little touch to the environment.
making a fishing rod in maya is quite hard, i need some more practise.
