Ollie Clarke's Journal

The Button

2011-04-17T23:29:00.004+01:00

Its been a long, hard and testing weekend. But at the end of it I have a website ready to host a game ive started working on called "The Button":
thebuttonexperiment.com

The game is a short and stylish adventure game set in the 1960s. An unethical experiment is taking place in a secretive institute involving an all powerful button. Given the choice, will you press it?

The game platform is simply, a browser.

In other news, my Twitter background has been updated.
I want to be open about what im making and how im making it in order to get as much feedback as possible from people willing to share their thoughts so that I can learn from the whole experience:
twitter.com/#!/ollieclarke

Ive got a few other bits to share in the coming weeks that will shed some light on what the game is and what it will be about. Im really enjoying myself so far and cant wait to see what thoughts people have, good and bad!

In the meantime, here's a logo I have been working on, till next post!
Ollie

Flower Power!

2011-04-12T13:47:00.013+01:00

In Bloom Part 2
Last post I put up some pictures of my favourite tree in Leamington, it looked a bit lifeless and grey, however that was before spring arrived and kicked it into bloom!
Check it out...

This is how it looked before

And this is how it looks in full bloom

a far our shot

and this is the sad way the bloom ends

Okay, I've finished with my flower powered tangent.
Next post will be on a new adventure game im working on in my own time called "The Button"

Have a good one!
Ollie

In Bloom

2011-03-16T21:30:00.008Z

This is my favorite tree.

In the long, cold winter months it is like any other tree. Bare, claw like and bleak.
However, come the Spring it blooms into the most beautiful tree for miles around. I get to walk past it everyday.
It's March, soon it will be in bloom. I'll post some pictures of it, simply because I love it.

New game!

In the meantime, ive got an exciting new game started.
Here is the first tantalising concept:

Crisis of Confidence

2011-03-07T13:14:00.009Z

In 1979 US President Jimmy Carter spoke to his people about a crisis of confidence in the United States. People felt that their children's future prosperity had come under threat. Previously infinite energy resources had become finite. In an impassioned speech, Jimmy Carter urged his people to unite and tackle the energy crises together.

He lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan.

I heard this speech and felt a genuine voice from the past that strangely echoed with today. Echoes that spoke of the rising cost of oil, the pressure on our resources and our worries for the future generations.

I wanted to commemorate the address with an ethereal visual and audio track that would lend weight to the words, strip away any visual clues and allow the participants mind to enter a kind of hypnotic state. Hopefully a peaceful one.

I recommend you turn off the lights, load the video in HD, turn the volume up and let the visuals drain away the day.

The video is 11 minutes, 34 seconds long.

In making this video I recorded the last 11 minutes of Jimmy Carters speech. Time stretched a piece of orchestral music to it*. Created some soft ambient visual effects in an aim to create a detached numbing feeling and allow the mind to wonder.

*If anyone guesses what the music originally was before my treatment, I'll be impressed.
The music and imagery ties into some of my first memories which are from around 1979 to 1980.

Eyvind Earle Post Mortem

2011-02-27T22:42:00.018Z

My first tip toe into Unity 3D land is complete!

You can view it in your browser by clicking this link*:
OllieClarke_EyvindAndGetz.html
*ok it does require running the Unity plugin however it is very easy to install.

Or download it from here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1151317/OClarke_EarleAndGetz.zip

Or watch it on YouTube here:

Development

So, how did my first Unity project go?
To create the almost 2D world I took the image originally created by Eyvind Earle and began to model it in a 3D application. Below is an in progress image of the scene being built.

It really didn't take long to model the pieces. With the buildings modelled I seperately modelled the moving parts such as the vehicles and boats.
Initially I wanted to use vertex shading to save on using textures that would increase the download size however I found that Unity doesn't support vertex shading out of the box. I ended up using textures, this was a blessing as it meant I could add a subtle texture to each of the pieces. It hasn't affected the download size too badly as it comes at 10mb for the browser version which means it loads in less than 16 seconds on a broadband connection.

Animation

With these complete I used a simple bone rig to animate them. The animations were set up so that they could loop from start to end seamlessly. Although importantly, each vehicle animation had a different length.

Once the animations were imported into Unity they were all set to loop. Because each animation had a different length, over time, they would go out of sync creating an illusion of randomness and therefore a sense that they had lives of their own independent from each other.

Sound

I searched around for a while to find the right piece of music. My inspiration was Bladerunner. Specifically the scene in which the Vangelis blues track is playing as Deckard leans out of his window. I liked the way the music and vehicle sounds juxtaposed and yet complemented each other, creating a sombre and grimy atmosphere.

I watched a couple of episodes of the American drama Mad Men to get some inspiration. I felt that jazz would be a good place to find the music and after a bit of searching I found an old recording by the Saxophonist Stan Getz. Once I had the music I put together a rough ambient sound track made of cars, foghorns and plane fly overs to create the feeling of being by the docks.

Combined with the music it feels like a lazy evening sitting by a harbour, perhaps with a solitary drink or two.

What went right

Thanks to my familiarity with art programs and the ease of use that Unity offers, it looks and sounds pretty much how I wanted it to.
Thanks to the help of my girlfriend (a coder) the code does pretty much what I wanted it to.

What went wrong

Debugging in Unity is a little tricky, you certainly can't break and see what's happening in the script for example.
Asset management is also a little tricky. I used drop box to store and maintain assets however there's nothing like having a database to check assets in and out of.
I also found that my scene and project hierarchy was pretty messy due to my unfamiliarity with the program.
As usual the project took longer than I would have liked. This was mainly down to a significant workload to get through in my day job that rolled into the evening. Time which I would have used to develop and publish this project and more.

Conclusions

Unity is an extremely powerful game making tool, especially as it comes for free. Its well worth looking into if you're looking to create fun and simple projects that don't require much maintenance.
I'm looking forward to becoming much more familiar with it as I try out new ideas and experiments.

Hopefully as I do become more proficient with it I will develop a finesse with Unity that will enable me to focus on the ideas more than the tools.

What's next?

My next project will be a mad little something small involving this:

Earle & Getz team up

2011-02-13T15:13:00.011Z

It's done!.
My first "mini" Unity3D project weighs in at only 16mb.

Click here: OClarke_EarleAndGetz.zip
Download it to your machine. Double click it to play it, sit back and enjoy the music whilst the image animates in front of you.

The app is based on an old recording from the great saxophonist Stan Getz and the image below by the great artist Eyvind Earle:

Here's a screenshot showing how my take on it turned out in Unity:

and a link to it on youTube:

If you're interested in knowing more about the genius of Stan Getz and Eyvind Earle, click the links below.

Stan Getz
http://www.stangetz.net/index.html

Eyvind Earle
http://www.eyvindearle.com/default.aspx

If you want to know more about Unity3D click here:
http://unity3d.com/

Next Steps
Over the coming weeks I plan on working out how to get it uploaded to a website that plays the media automatically and write a port mortem on it for this blog.
If you do have any feedback on the app I would be happy to hear it, the good and especially the bad!

all the best!
Ollie

Blitz Games - Looking for a Concept Artist

2011-01-20T12:58:00.009Z

Blitz Games Studios (Leamington Spa, UK) is looking for a Concept Artist to come in and work at the studio for a period of two and a half months. The concept work required is for an imaginative, magical & mystical video game. The art style is painterly, stylised and caricatured.
We are offering excellent working conditions and a competitive pay rate.

The kind of work required:
• Landscape concepts
• Character concepts
• Special Effect Concepts

• Key Art
• Thumbnail sketches
• Grey Block Paint over’s
• Key Art/Grey Block Paint over’s
• Breakdown of features/props into additional orthographic or detail views

The right candidate should have:
• Good communication skills
• A positive attitude
• Ability to take feedback and work iteratively
• Industry experience
• A proven track record of reliability and flexibility

If you are interested in this role please email me at:
oclarke@blitzgamesstudios.com

All the best!

Hunted to the end

2010-10-03T11:14:00.004+01:00

I've finished my Hunted themed animation!

The original brief outlined in a meeting of fellow Animators at work was to create a four second animation based on the theme "hunted".
Okay, so I bent/broke the rules a little. My piece is eight seconds long however I felt it had to be eight seconds long. I've really enjoyed putting this one together. As always, I am learning much about many aspects of animation and rendering. Including a little more of how much I have yet to learn!

During the course of making the animation I found a series of jpeg backgrounds from Disneys "The Sorcerers Apprentice". These strongly inspired the backgrounds that you see in the final animation. I love the subtle noise, the texture from the paint, the minimalist shapes and volumes, the dramatic and moody lighting that suggests magic and mystery. I've tried to bring some of that into my final render. For comparison you can find a link to the Disney backgrounds at the bottom of this post.

Using vertex lighting I created a colour pass and rendered it using a Hardware renderer. I then split the scene into several layers, created an ambient occlusion render and combined it all together in post.
Here is the final animation looped a few times:

and if you're interested, here is how it progressed through a series of quick videos of progress stitched together towards the final animation:

I'm quite pleased with how its turned out, the project has served it's purpose which was to improve my animation skills and teach me something about creating an appealing render.
Looking to the future I feel I should develop finesse with colour temperature, composition, atmospheric perspective and texture in the timing of animation. I feel I also should look at further developing my skills with poses and weight.
I've shown it to a few fellow animators and they've given me some constructive feedback to work on. Poor guys, they must be sick of me asking for feedback by now!

Thanks to everyone that gave me feedback and advice on it!
Special thanks must go to Al Barber, Darren Watford, Richard Blackley, Stephen Sloper and Aron Durkin.

It's time for a new project now. I've found a picture by Eyvind Earle that I want to model and bring to life in a short animation. Its not going to be anything fancy, i've just got a real itch to have a go at it. Here's the pic:

As promised, here's the link to the animation backgrounds from The Sorcerers Apprentice:
The Sorcerers Apprentice animation Backgrounds

If you haven't seen it already, take a look through that site at the wealth of animation backgrounds there. They are fantastic.

till next time!

Rendering and rendering

2010-08-31T22:59:00.009+01:00

Since my last post ive been working away on my rendering skills. Ok, im trying to Animate better not Render better however I'm learning a lot and having fun, so sue me.
Please open up the images in separate tabs to flick through them, the differences are subtle and yet they are there and they are important to the final render.

The image below is an update on the concept from the last post. I showed the concept in my last post to TheDaz* and he said "you've for the principles but you've gone a bit batshit with them".
So below is an update, a more conservative, balanced take.
I've focused on using atmospheric perspective to create depth, strong highlights to define form and mood and colour temperature to create believable colour. As TheDaz* says, I think I've got the principles. Now I need to practice with them so I can develop finesse and convincing subtlety.

Below is my first render from of the scene based on the concept above.
Initially I started trying to texture everything but it was taking so long and it wasn’t going in the direction I wanted it to based on the concept above.
So I turned to vertex painting and hardware rendering, I will compile and treat the image in post with added noise, bloom and a shadow pass. This way is a LOT faster, easier to tweak and frankly, more fun.

In a paint program I’ve added a slight noise. I’ve also duplicated the image, blurred it, laid over the top and set it to lighten mode to give it a softer atmosphere.

I’ve still got to do an ambient occlusion pass so that the stairs have proper shadows which I will place over the top in multiply mode, again, in post.
Then I’ve got to change the character textures so that they complement the mood and lighting of the scene, create a light rig for them and render separately with an alpha channel.
I will also create an ambient occlusion pass for the characters so that they have convincing self shadowing.

I showed the render above to TheDaz* and he came back with the image below. He's implemented colour temperature more effectively around the main wall light. He's also added more atmospheric perspective and a bounce light that fills in the area around the stairs, column and opposite wall slightly.

Hopefully by next post I will have a new playblast of the animation in the lit environment with characters also lit. I may even have the colour pass of the render ready.

*What are you looking here for? TheDaz* always has a star next to his name. At my company he's like TheStig of art and his time and advice is very much appreciated.

Passing over

2010-08-18T23:44:00.004+01:00

Hi,

this is a quick post to say I've uploaded a new pass to youTube which can be seen here. In this pass I've implemented feedback from colleagues and friends. There are many small changes however the main changes are the foot sliding as he recovers from the roll. Plus a new final pose for the henchman at the end of the scene which is meant to make the hero look trap in the corner of the screen.

I've also performed another pass on the background concept to give it more depth and to draw the eye to the area where the hero will emerge into the scene.

I will now be focusing on getting the background ready to be modelled and lit.
till next post!

Animation Passes and Paintovers.

2010-08-15T22:35:00.007+01:00

Hello,

I've been pretty busy on the short Hunted animation I've been working on in my spare time.

I've got to the point where im looking at what the background environment should look like, below is how it currently looks. It's just a rough mock-up made of a few planes.

For inspiration I've been looking at the backgrounds in the Sorcerers Apprentice with Mickey Mouse.
There is a great animation blog here called Animation Backgrounds with a set of background images from the animation:
www.animationbackgrounds.blogspot.com/search/label/THE%20SORCERER'S%20APPRENTICE

I took the image above and painted over it in Photoshop.
My composition, texture and colour is nowhere near as strong as those images above however I do love to try. Hopefully with a few iterations I can get a bit nearer the quality shown in Disney's backgrounds.
As it is I like the idea of using moody midnight blues to convey the mood. I think the overall composition could do with some work to make it more interesting. I should also look at using colour to help describe the volumes in the scene.
I'm going to look at a few books of old castles to see if I can find items to punctuate the scene with. Maybe those books will point towards the colour scheme I should use too.

Animation Passes

Following on from last weeks post with the first blockout of the overall movement. Here is the next pass which gives some idea of how I want the character to move during the animation:

Here's an update, I had an idea that there should be an antagonist right at the end to end the scene with a question. What happens to the main character when confronted by a chap with a sword.

And here is the latest pass with all the animation blocked out. The next phase is to ask as many people as possible for critical feedback before moving onto polishing the animation. Hopefully there arent too many fundamental errors that require fixing. The further I go into an animation the more time it takes to change it fundamentally.

That's it for now, my next tasks are to set up a basic face rig for the main character and carry on working out what the background should look like.

cheers.

Hunted!

2010-08-09T16:58:00.006+01:00

It's time to start a new animation. My last animation clocked in at 30 seconds long which, as I learnt, was far too long. To enable me to create, make mistakes and learn faster this animation project will be much shorter. Hopefully I can move onto another project more rapidly and speed up the learning experience.

My primary aim is to create a short four second action animation around the theme "Hunted". The animation should be to a very high quality, ideally Gobelins quality.
My secondary aim is to improve my ability to put texture in the timing of my animations.
My third aim is to create an animation in the style of Gobelins. If you've never seen a gobelins animation, here's a link:
http://www.gobelins.fr/galerie/animation/

So far I have some rough pose sketches (read very rough), see below, im trying to capture the feeling of legging it from something with some extreme posing.

I tried creating a few sketches for some backgrounds, frankly, they were a bit rubbish. But that's not to say they were a waste. They showed me what I didnt want to see and gave me an idea of what I did want see. I sat down with Maya and played with basic geometry until I saw what I wanted to see. The bonus is that when I come to do paintovers of the geometry I wont have to work out the perspective and can get on with being creative.

With regards to animating the piece, I'm taking a different approach to blocking out this time by using stepped keys in Maya. It creates the feeling of stepping between the frames and shows no inbetweens. I've avoided it in the past as I felt it was difficult to get a sense of timing. However I've been practising with the technique and found it to be a quick way of feeling how an animation will turn out in terms of timing.

I've started a public wave to keep track of feedback, click the link below to take you straight to it.
HUNTED ANIMATION WAVE

To go off topic for a moment. Im sad that Google have decided not to continue with Wave. I certainly find it useful, I hope the features of Wave make their way into other internet applications.

Below is the first block out of the timing that I'm almost happy with.
Next post I will update with a more broken down animation using some of the poses above.

Evaluation

2010-06-16T15:23:00.006+01:00

Below is my evaluation of how the animation I recently created went. Also, here is a link to my YouTube channel if you want to see the videos that show the progress including the final piece:
www.youtube.com/user/BarryBland

Here's the video embedded again:

Overall this evaluation comes across as negative however this is deliberate. I've learned the most from what went wrong.
It doesnt mean i hate myself or anything...I do apologise for the lack of pictures in this post. I'll try and get more pics for the next post...

So lets get started!

The Short Version
The short version of the evaluation is this: I should have created a shorter piece of animation to enable me to focus my time on quality. I should have done even more planning and created an even tighter structure for the animation in terms of workflow and idea creation.

My big take away is that there should have been much more texture in the timing to make the animation more appealing and interesting.

Biting Off More Than I Could Chew
My first classic mistake was simply being too ambitious with what I wanted to achieve. A thirty second dialogue between too characters was far too long to allow me to focus on creating a very high quality piece of character animation.

Im all for running before you can walk as I believe in doing so I will learn a lot more quickly. However the piece I decided to undertake took far too long to teach me valuable lessons because it was simply too big. I could have learnt the same lessons by working on a ten second clip, saved myself a lot of time and probably ended up with a better result.

Research, Reference and Planning
As always, this part of creating the animation should have had much more time put into it.
I should also have submitted the planning to colleagues much earlier for feedback.
This would have provided the animation with much more structure and have identified the structural weak points in the animation, of which there are many in the final render.
With more structure it may have stifled some of the creativity however it would have dramatically sped up the creation, iteration and feedback process and in the long run created a better animation.
Research wise, as well as filming myself, I should have referred to a film, animated or otherwise, for a similar scene.
With that I could have identified the strengths and weaknesses of the scene more and focused on maximising the impact.

Texture in Timing
Near the end of creating the animation I had the clip below forwarded to me:

www.animationmentor.com/webinar/replay/2010-timing-and-spacing-in-animation-explained.html

Part three of the video above is particulary relevant and useful. Two animators at Pixar explain their take on Timing and Spacing in animation.

In particular the section on "Texture in timing" was particularly useful. Texture in the timing means that the animation plays out like a piece of music. There are quiet parts and loud parts, crescendos and lulls. By applying this to animation it helps to create interesting moments and life in the animation.
From watching the third clip that I realised all my animation was too flat and even in the timing, this killed the life in the animation. From then on I went through and tried to speed some movements, slow down others and add interesting inbetweens in terms of timing to fix the issue. However it was already too late to fix. I should have planned with texture in the timing in my mind from the beginning.

note: I think the habit of creating even pacing comes from working the games industry. In a game cycle animations have to progress with an even timing otherwise they glitch and grate on the eye as you watch the same cycle multiple times.
Character animation however is radically different in respect to timing.

Texture in the timing is an area I really want to practice and improve on in my next animation.

Arcs
I remember seeing Brad Bird banging on about arcs, arcs this, arcs that. I also remember Keith Lango describing all animation as 2D shapes on the screen, how to make them interesting and how to transition effectively between them. Arcs are critical to fluid appealing movement that appeals to audience. With the arcs in place overlapping movements, overshooting movements and variation in the timing can be applied making interesting appealing animation.
I spent a lot of time trying to get the arcs right not just on the arms but on the tip of the nose and (admittedly) on the sides of the mouth.

To create arcs on the tip of the nose I used a trajectory script called: cMotionTrailUI.mel

I believe it was originally created by the legendary Cameron Fielding for Maya 7. The script is a real godsend when it comes to implementing arcs into an animation properly.

It is freely available to save off from here:
iam.tugraz.at/zedi/formotions_org/formotions_org/wp-content/uploads/trail_curves.mel

I applied a trajectory curve to a simple polygon sphere that was constrained by the rigs head controller. With that I could see what trajactorys the nose was following and add arcs. Overall it dramatically helped improve the flow of the heads of the characters in the animation.
Once again, with better planning in the animation i could have made better use of arcs to make the movement more appealing. A colleague made an interesting observation, to paraphrase them [the hands move perfectly, the heads feel floaty]. When I they pointed that out I agreed and slapped my forehead thinking "how could I have missed that!" After thinking about it I believe that the heads feel floaty for the following reasons:

The shape of the head is large and rectangular meaning the overall movement becomes exagerated and hard to counter act on the body.
The counter action of the body agains the head movement should have been better.
The overshooting of the head movement should have been more polished.

I did try to scale the heads down around the jaw area but by that point I would have had to do some serious re-engineering of the rig and blend shapes. I didnt want to spend the time doing as I felt I could progress better by getting the animation to a near finished state and moving onto another piece.
(apologies for the horrific amount of name dropping in this paragraph)

IK/FK
The rig I used to create the animations is getting on a bit now, in particular i had problems switching from Inverse Kinematics where I would pose the arm by controlling the hand, to Forward Kinematics where the arm joints are controlled individually to pose the arm. My rig does have an IK to FK switch that can be animated however I found that the arm would click unconvincingly when switching between the modes. In the end I simply used IK all the time. Unfortunately with FK it is much easier to create smooth appealing arcs with the limbs. In future I would set up a proper FK/IK switch or simply plan the animation better to be aware of when I would use FK and IK. To remedy the situation I used a maya script to create trajectorys. By being able to see the trajectory I could smooth out the arc and create more or less the same effect. As above, I still need to practice implementing and polishing arcs in an animation.

Rendering
Rendering, what a time suck. To be honest this is another area I did not plan properly, tried to cut corners and ended up spending much more time on it then I should have.
In future I will use backburner to render between multiple machines.
Learn more about the rendering features in the latest Maya, many of these have leapt beyond Maya 7 and could save me a lot of time and fiddling, not to mention frustration.
With all that in mind im not too disappointed with the final piece however im really looking forward to getting started on the next one with the lessons I've learnt from above.

more on that next time!

Final Animation Pass on YouTube!

2010-06-15T10:32:00.005+01:00

So England drew because we have a goalie with feet for hands. I say sack him. Moving on...
After an epic struggle with my PC, (*rant below if you're interested) the render is now done. I've uploaded the final pass of my animation to You Tube. YouTube has kindly saved it in HD too!

Im going to write up an evaluation for my next blog post to say where it went right, where it went wrong and what I have learned from it. Quite a lot fortunately. That's the anim pretty much finished. It's time to move onto a new project. More on that in good time.

However, it's done and I'm happy!
I'm really looking forward to starting something new. Thank you so much to EVERYONE that helped me out by critiquing effectively, giving good advice, looking at the same anim again and again. For their unwavering support, special thanks to Aron D, Rich B, Al B, Rosh K, Stephen S, Alex W, the animators on Team iMP and the lovely Helana S. Go Brazil!

*Rant Warning:
My Video editor decided it didnt recognise TGA's (only certain TGA's that is). It also decided it have to .NET installed plus a service pack and then I found my ambient occlusion layer was out of sync with my colour layer. Also when my wireless dongle gets too hot it locks up my entire PC, no blue screen or anything, it just locks up. Brilliant. Finally, to top it off, Windows decided it HAD to install an update and shutdown whilst in the middle of a render last night.
I got through a few glasses of Whisky. The good stuff.

Foley Magic

2010-06-05T11:42:00.004+01:00

Happy Saturdays!

above is the latest pass on my animation, there are some big changes in it.

My good friend and colleague Richard Blackley kindly created some foley sounds in his own time. A very talented guy, the audio adds a lot to the animation, some of it is subtle such as the doctors hand opening and closing near the beginning. Some of it is vital such as adding some ambient sound to the beginning and the captains hand slam near the end.

I've added some environment scenery such as chairs, plates, cheese, a cheese knife, another glass and a coloured background. I chose the dark slightly desaturated green to complement the captain. To the right of the background it changes to an orangy brown to complement the doctors blue hues. For the chairs I made the captains chair have baroque connotations to reflect the captains rockNroll personality. The doctors chair contrasts with sharp angles and straight lines to reflect his personality. I deliberately left the detail out of the chairs so that they complement the minimal style of the characters and don't become distracting. The bolts on both chairs are there to tie both the chairs together. Im trying to say that they both belong in the same world.

For the animation, i've been trying to add some texture to the timing of the movements to make it more interesting. I see this as the weakest part of the animation, the area i need to do much better on next time. To add the texture some movements have been sped up, some slowed down. I've heard people describe it as the crescendos and and low points in music. If music is the same volume, speed and tone all the way through it becomes very boring. Maybe that's why i dont listen to a lot of hardcore techno.

Of course, any feedback i get will be added to the wave:
Animation Wave

I showed the latest pass to Doctor Durkin last night and he had some very good feedback which may mean there will be changes to the camera cuts and compositions in another pass.

Next steps are to polish a couple more little bits of the animation, make a lighting rig, render it in HD720p, render an ambient occlusion pass, combine the layers in a video editing programe, render out a video file and evaluate the whole thing objectively in a blog post...phew! Better get cracking!

The Four Second Club

2010-05-28T10:42:00.007+01:00

Token doodle made earlier:

On Thursday night we had an Animation and Discussion session, it was a good turnout and an interesting discussion. It was good to see the stuff the other animators have worked on and give some feedback.

I got lots of feedback on my Anim which I've typed up below. I'll be implementing this feedback, performing another polish pass and then evaluating the animation. Make a render and probably move on. I feel like im going as far as I can with it and would like to take the lessons learnt and benefit from them.

*Shot 01 is too even in timing, it should have more texture
*The lean back when the doctor starts examining the weevil should have less even timing
*When the captain thumps the table the hand should clearly be in the previous shot or *the hand should not be in the scene at all.
*When the captain wipes his eye the right hand should be more fluid.
*The captains eyebrows should raise up on the word “dished!” …and hold.
*When the doctor sniffs there should be counter action on his body.
*The doctor is too out of frame on “length and breadth” the composition should be more like the previous shot
*The captains hand does not read well on “in the service” perhaps remove and focus on the captains face.
*The captain should only make one or two scratches on “one must choose the lesser” to focus the attention on the captains face.

The four second club

During the session we talked about the 100 frame animation challenges that are seen on http://spungella.blogspot.com/

The challenge is to make the best animation possible that is no longer than 100 frames around a specific theme.
One theme used was "Guilty" you can see the results here. Entry number 12 won.
http://spungella.blogspot.com/2010/05/spungella-anim-contest-voting.html

We all really like this approach as it takes a bit of spare time and some passion. The results been inspiring. However in games we animate at 30fps instead of films 24fps. So that we don't lose those valuable frames we've decided to do the same challenge ourselves but with four seconds worth of animation instead. The four second club.

After a bit of discussion we narrowed it down to three themes for our first animation.
"Hunted", "betrayed" and "boobs". Ok, the last one was a joke, but I could work with that.

With a flip of a coin "Hunted" became the first theme for our four second club. I'm pretty pumped about it and looking forward to getting some ideas down. Im aiming to get some rough keys together for the next Animation session in two weeks time.

New Animation Pass

2010-05-26T21:12:00.003+01:00

Tomorrow I have a meeting with the Animators at the studio out of hours.
It's a get together to analyse and discuss animations, what makes them work, what we can learn from them, what we like, don't like etc.

I'll be using the opportunity to show the latest pass of my animation. Which I am about to start uploading to YouTube....
I'll be taking lots of notes which I'll add to my public wave and this blog afterwards. So you can expect another post within the next two days.

Without further ado, here's the latest pass:

As a reminder, here's my youTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/BarryBland

and here's the Public Wave:
https://wave.google.com/wave/waveref/googlewave.com/w+kuLKyPoWA

Feedback and comments welcome, they can only make it better.
till next time, cheery oh.

Arcs and Tangents

2010-05-20T17:23:00.014+01:00

Hello!

I've been working on another pass of my animation to show the guys at work next Thursday. They've given me some great feedback so far and I don't want to disappoint.
We're having a get together to share animation, look at other animations, discuss and analyse. Im really looking forward to it.

Here's my youTube channel if you want to see the progress so far:
www.youtube.com/user/BarryBland

The latest pass is not quite ready to show so I haven't uploaded it yet. It should be up there by next Thursday.
This week I thought I would do a post of Arcs and Tangents and how they effect my animation.

Arcs
Why arcs?
Apart from robots and mechanical devices pretty much everything moves in arcs. The arcs of arms and legs as we walk. The arcs of pointing to the tiny movements of scratching chins. Arcs are everywhere in our as we move about our daily lives. By building them into my animation it helps to build a sense of believability into the characters.
Another point is that arcs, curves and splines are generally more attractive to look at so they help give the characters more appeal. One of the 12 principles of animation.

I read that Keith Lango thinks of all 3D animation as 2D because they are shown on a flat plane. I'm trying to reflect that in the poses of my characters and how they move by paying attention to their arcs.

As im working on a character piece, a good place to look for arcs is on the tip of the nose. If the arcs are clear here then it will help make a better animation overall.

Ball on nose example
To make it easy to maintain and modify animation arcs a script like the one below for Maya is a really useful tool:
fliponline.blogspot.com/2007/01/track-those-arcs.html

To use this I simply parent constrained a sphere to the head controller of the character and created the arc on the frames I wanted to tweak. The beauty of using a script like the one above is that the arc is updated in real time making it much easier to maintain.

Here are some screens of how the arcs on the nose look on the character, click to see them full size:

Tangents
What are tangents?
Tangents are points in an animation where it's difficult to tell what is in front or behind of what. For example when a hand is right next to the face it is harder for the mind to read what is in front of what. By layering animations carefully it's easier for the mind to read the image and therefore communicate the message. Which is what we're all about, communicating the message as clearly as possible.

Below I've highlighted a few areas in my animation where tangents are a problem.

For further reading here is a PDF originally by Walt Stanchfield on the subject. Scroll down to page 6:
www.animationmeat.com/pdf/misc/waltstanchfield/16ws_dimensional_drawing.pdf

Yup, that's right, Walt Stanchfield is the legend. If you dont have the book of his compiled notes "Gesture drawing for animators" then get it, it's a must buy.

That's it for me this week, ill be posting an update to the animation next week however right now im having a beer, enjoying the warm weather and getting ready to go out for a curry. Good stuff.

A little piece of character animation

2010-05-11T11:37:00.012+01:00

Sorry about the tease yesterday.
Here's the deal, I've been creating a short piece of character animation in my spare time using a piece of audio taken from the film Master and Commander. The Captain and the Doctor are aboard a ship having a dinner party with the ships officers. They're all a bit tipsy. The Captain feels the Doctor is being a bit uptight and decides to play a joke on the Doctor.
The animation I'm working on is being created in Maya using my own rigs and character models. I've really been enjoying it so far, its good to get back into some creative work.
I've been studiously uploading videos to youTube that document the creation process from the first videos of myself acting out the two roles to the latest passes on the animation.

If you would like to take a look at how it's going here's a link to the youTube page.
My youTube Channel

Feedback is welcome!

There is also a Google Wave being generated to document feedback and changes, if you want to take a look, here's the link:
https://wave.google.com/wave/waveref/googlewave.com/w+kuLKyPoWA

again, feedback welcome!

Currently I have just finished playing around with the timing and composition of the camera shots. Now I'm going right in to remove tangents to help with the readability and add flowing arcs to make the movement more pleasing on the eye. I'll do a separate post on these next time.

till then!

Long time no see!

2010-05-10T16:03:00.004+01:00

Ok, its been a while since the last post...ok a long while. I've been very busy.
My job is always the higher priority and till now it has been exceptionally busy. However, things are a bit quieter now and I have been working on a little animation project in my own time that i'd like to share. I will be writing an post on it soon.

in a bit!

Backlogs I love you...

2009-10-23T01:27:00.009+01:00

As promised in the last blog post, here's a bit on the backlog for the game. Don't worry there's also pictures at the bottom of this post. Hopefully I can start decorating this blog with an Abstract No1 style soon...also, ive added a flickr widget on the right there. I'll be uploading the odd image of predevelopment as I go along...

For predev I'm stealing parts of the agile methodology. One of the most useful parts of agile is the backlog.
For my purposes, in short, a backlog is a list of features that the player should see in the game.

Note the word should used above and in the backlog, a backlog is a list of features that should be realised. They do not have to be realised. It's phrased this way because backlogs always change and should change based on feedback from focus tests. This is part of what makes agile...agile.

Take a look below at a sample of the current backlog for Abstract No 1.
The formatting is very limited in Blogger however be assured that my backlog is extensively formatted to enable me to easily tell what is a feature, what is a task to realise a feature and the tasks current status. At work I use Hansoft to maintain a backlog, for this project I'm using open office. It's far less fancy however it does the job!

Abstract No.1 Backlog

Key:
Bold text = feature
Normal text = task that should be done to realise a feature
Black text = task to do
Green = task that is complete
Red = task that is in progress

There should be a mood board – complete
there should be an ideas storyboard
rough ideas sheets - progress
There should be an ideas storyboard edited to the music
an edited video of the when to jump, dodge, avoid - progress
create assets for video – Jump, dbl jump, avoid, dodge – progress
There should be an HTML(PDF?) two sheet game design pitch - for focus testing
There title of the game should be presented with a custom font
font ideas sheet - complete
font implemented into poster- complete
custom font should be made - progress
There should be a game poster – in progress
There should be a concept of how the game should look
There should be an in game shot mockup
There should be a colour script
there should be colour variations of the poster - complete
There should be a deer character
there should be a deer mess sheets – complete
there should be a deer box sheet – complete
there should be deer silhouette sheets – complete
focus test1
focusTest1 follow up tasks - progress
colour variations - progress
antler variations - progress
deer rendering style research - progress
there should be a deer interior sheet
there should be a deer texture sheet
there should be a deer colour sheet
there should be a deer lighting sheet
there should be a deer rough mesh
there should be a deer mesh
there should be a deer rig
there should be a deer pose sheet
There should be deer animations
There should be multiple wolves
there should be wolf mess sheets
there should be wolf box sheets
there should be wolf silhouette sheets
there should be wolf interior sheets
there should be wolf texture sheets
there should be wolf colour sheets
there should be wolf lighting sheets
there should be a wolf rough mesh
there should be a wolf mesh
there should be a wolf rig
there should be a wolf pose sheet
There should be wolf animations
There should be quick death animations
there should be death sequence idea storyboards
there should be death sequence storyboards
there should be death sequence animations
There should be forest backgrounds
there should be a forest mess sheet
there should be a forest colour sheet

Pictures
I also promised there would be pictures in my last blog post. Based on the completed tasks in the backlog above here are a few images...

Moodboard
Its a lot of fun to get really involved with an idea, totally live with it, be somewhere else. To that end here's a few photographs of the images I have on the walls of my flat....

the image below shows a lot of the abstract art ive been looking at, im interested in them for the moods they create with their colurs shape and forms. I think abstract art lends its self to music which is an area I want to explore with the game. Recently i've been looking at their colours schemes for the poster...

This is more of a technical wall, I really want to understand everything about the creatures i'll be animating from an anatomical and expressive viewpoint.

Poster development
To help with branding its a good to have an image that instantly identifies the game.
A poster. I'm trying to make something that is reminiscent of early 20th century vintage posters. So far im happy with the composition and with the help of some good art friends am working on finding a strong colour scheme. I'm being open minded trying out everything. I'll go into this more in depth in another post, in the meantime here's an image of the colour variations im currently trying out.

till next post!

The Rules

2009-10-09T00:25:00.002+01:00

Below are some rules for development of the next game. Believe it or not, creativity flourishes within a good set of tight rules. They help to prevent development getting lost in and becoming directionless. Note how I've used the word “must”. Normally I use the word “should”. I'll make a blog post on this aspect of communicating project management in the future.

THE RULES OF DEVELOPMENT

Before development begins pre-development must be complete
before a single asset is made the entire project should be storyboarded, tightly briefed, specced out, thoroughly concepted and thought out to the nth degree. Illustrations should be ready to work and develop with in the production phase. There must be a Pre-development video of how the final game will look.

The format of the game must be scaleable
It must be possible to develop and play the game on iPhone, browser, PC, XNA, 360, PSN (this does mean that the game will be on these platforms, it should be as easy as possible, without sacrificing quality, to port to these platforms)

The game must be supported with a concerted Marketing effort
there must be blogs, tweets, trailers, competitions, videos etc

It must be effectively, qualitatively play tested throughout the whole of development
During pre-development there must be weekly reviews of the materials as they are made.
During production there must be a focus test every two weeks. There should be developer playtest every week.

It must be playtested every week.
There must be developer playtests to see and log how development is going. To see what's missing, what could be improved and what's still to be done.

The game play must be iterated upon
the Agile methodology must be used to iterate on game play during pre development and development.

Next steps
My aim is to document every part of the development process. To create a very open development that everyone can see, examine and learn from by observing the successes and the failures.

Rubbish drawings and good drawings, good game designs and bad game designs. The expected and the unexpected.

Which means from now on there will be more pictures! :D

With these rules in mind my next steps are to create a backlog and start making materials to focus test. This is where the exciting stuff starts happening. More on what the backlog is and my initial explorations in the next post.

Till then!

Next steps for Abstract.No1

2009-09-23T23:48:00.002+01:00

Violin Concerto No.1 in G minor Op 26: III Finale – Allegro Energico.
(if you have spotify installed, click the link below to hear it)
http://open.spotify.com/track/0AQgdCMaVwtTMERCznaa1i

When I hear this music I see a deer running, the obstacles appear in time with the music. The game changes with the music as it plays.

The box idea generation technique

I have been mocking up some ideas for my new game using the box technique.
This is a simple approach that allows ideas to come out without getting caught up in unnecessary detail. I first used it back in college and it's still one of the best ways I know of getting ideas out. It's hard work as the brain is always trying to be lazy and get out of generating ideas. The brain tries to distract you by doing easier tasks such as shading or perfecting lines. This technique helps prevent that from happening because your mind is focusing on generating ideas quickly for each new box.

This is a good book on creation processes. It illustrates how to use the box idea techniques ill be using and many more:
http://www.designstudiopress.com/books/skillfulhuntsman/

1.create a sheet with lots of empty boxes in the 16:9 format (HDTV format)
2.draw ideas in each box until there are at least three sheets filled sheets
3.evaluate the ideas in each box
4.strip down to the best ideas
5.scan the ideas
6.focus test!
7.evaluate
8.develop next steps

Based on the results of the first focus test, the next steps will be either to go back to the drawing board or to continue the predev. The aim being to get into production with a full exhaustive plan that leaves little to question other than the feedback from players.

So far so good - the box technique wins again

To date I've been putting down lots of deer silhouettes using as many mediums and styles as I possibly can. Its been a lot of fun and I'm pretty much done here for now. That area is ready to be tested.
So from this evening I've been putting down ideas for how the game could work in as many boxes as possible. I've been re-listening to the track over and over again putting ideas down as I go. In fact right now I'm listening to the track on Spotify. Once I've exhausted my mind for ideas I will run a focus test on these ideas.

I will scan in the images and write up the results of the focus test so that they can be seen in all their ugly beauty as soon as possible ;)

Low Fidelity Prototyping

In the meantime this is an interesting article on “low fidelity” prototyping with pen and paper. It lists the benefits of taking this approach...

http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/09/15/why-every-consumer-internet-startup-should-do-more-low-fidelity-prototyping/

ace.

Post War abstract painting

2009-09-16T13:53:00.002+01:00

Got this from the interminet:

Helen Frankenthaler:

"A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it—well, she did this and then she did that, and then she did that—there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute." (In Barbara Rose, Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1975, p. 85)

As game developers it takes us months and often years of labour to make one game, how can we possibly be spontaneous, exciting, innovative and explore ideas?
To my mind, with all of our technology and software developments, if we can't find a way of developing interactive entertainment faster...we're never going to have the confidence to explore ideas, take a risk on something new and therefore the industry will stagnate. I believe this is and has already happened to the games making process to an extent. (Although I don't believe that the games industry will ever totally stagnate.)

There are inumerable ideas to explore and yet we're holding back, not because we can't realise them but because it takes so much time and effort to realise them with the current production methods. There is a fear in taking risks on new ideas because if they fail too much money is lost. And rightly so! We all have to pay bills. However at the same time we should be trying to reach beyond ourselves at the same time.

Small teams versus large teams

Small games are easier to innovate in. They involve smaller tight knit teams that are more flexible. However in the current marketplace they are very difficult to make a profit from.
Larger games are easier to make profits from however they are harder to innovate in as the teams are larger and lose their flexibility.

I think there should always be thorough pre-development. I just don't know how much and how it should be funded.

Multiple pre-development teams

Perhaps one solution is to have have multiple larger $3-8million games in pre-development. It would be assumed that multiple pre-developments would fail however the tech, ideas, skills and teams would still grow and the games that do make it through to development would be stronger, better developed and better received as a result.

That's enough rambling for today.
I've been doing lots of pre-development for abstract.No1 and its already formed into an idea. More on this next time.

The sound of Music

2009-09-13T15:11:00.000+01:00

I've been scouring as much music as possible looking for a piece of music. I finally came across this one:
Violin Concerto No.1 in G minor Op 26: III Finale – Allegro Energico.
(if you have spotify installed, click the link below to hear it)
http://open.spotify.com/track/0AQgdCMaVwtTMERCznaa1i

it's by Max Bruch (what a name :) a 19th century German romantic composer and conductor. It's a beautiful piece of music that's light and uplifting with plenty of drama. Lots of fuel for the imagination to generate ideas from.

Sound
I believe at its a core, a game should be a program where, when you press a button, it makes a cool sound. With that, the game should have a fantastic soundtrack. Sound is one of if not the first sense we develop in the womb. It goes reaches deep into our subconscious. To really effectively communicate it is vital to correctly engage someone through sound. Whenever we hear comedy's tapes such as Blackadder and Yes minister we don't need to see them because the scripts are so well written that the visuals aren't needed. I think its vital to get the sound right as it will make the rest of development easier.
Unfortunately sound is for some reason totally overlooked by too many people, perhaps because it is taken for granted, perhaps because it is rarely consciously processed and perhaps for both those reasons.

note: I'm worried about what will happen if a game is tied too tightly to a piece of music. What will happen if a player gets stuck on a sequence and hears the same piece over and over and over again like a broken recored increasing their frustration and leading to a loss of interest in continuing?
This should be examined in a focus test.

First post! (its going to be a long one)

2009-09-08T00:05:00.003+01:00

Welcome to my blog! I've had a lot of ideas to do with games development clanging around in my head lately and I will be using this blog as a way of documenting them into a workable order.

First off, a warning, this blog will be full of way out ideas that may come across as pretentious, meandering and, to be honest, a bit arty farty.

But you know what? Screw it, I really want to do this, I feel I have to do this. So please humour me as I go through some pretty odd ball posts trying to get these ideas into focus.

There will be ideas expressed that refer to film makers, the use of sound and music in games, stealing ideas from different art styles, management methods and lots and lots of predev. Its going to be broad, reach far and reach wide with the constant aim of working out how to make better games. First up:

Invincible Tiger is complete!

Im so so pleased to be able to say Invincible Tiger: The Legend of Han Tao has been completed and available to download on 360 and PSN (US only as of writing, EU coming soon). It was a very long journey and Im so proud of the team :

360:

http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-GB/games/media/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258410982/

PSN:

http://www.us.playstation.com/PSN/Store/20254

A great many lessons we learned and these lessons should be remembered and I'm in the process of writing a blog post to document some of them.

The next project

So! With many of these lessons fresh in my mind, what to do next?

Start a new project of course! One of the lessons learned is to make projects smaller. This way I can try ideas out and get feedback more quickly. I've already got an idea for a project:

The working Title of this new project is colourfully entitled :

Abstract No.1 (told you this was going to be odd)

I've been reading a bit of “understanding comics” by Scott McCloud again. The section on images creating feelings through images has caught my imagination.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Understanding-Comics-Invisible-Scott-McCloud/dp/006097625X

With this in mind I've been looking at a bit of Abstract art on the web and trying to work out how they make me feel. What places do they take me too. It raised a couple of questions in my mind.

1 What if images like these were tied to music and the game progressed in time with the music? Almost as if the game were edited to music. Would it work? I want to find out.

2 What if an avatar were exploring the images almost as if they were becoming an extension of the players self? The players mind may become transferred to the image. Again, I'm referring to chapter 2 – the vocabulary section in the book Understanding Comics. The part that shows how when driving the car becomes an extension of us. I want to find out.

2001

To go off on a slight tangent for a moment. Do you remember that famous scene in 2001 where the spaceship is docking with the space station? The part where Kubrick used Johan Strauss II' On the Blue Danube.

Here's a Spotify link:

http://open.spotify.com/track/4EInsYD17L0w7jXY9PMSUS

One of the main reasons the scene is all the more powerful is because he edited the sequence to the music.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_(film)#Music

Here's what the man himself had to say:

"I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to „explain"

Have a look at the sequence here (starting with one of the greatest cuts of all time;):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDAWszeZtNg

I want to try something similar and see what the effect is like in a game context. The first thing to do is pick the music, more in the next post.

Abstract Art

In the meantime here's some links to some abstract art that's got me wondering :

Kenneth Noland

http://www.kennethnoland.com/

Check out the weird jazz, normally I hate music on websites but this kinda gets me

Clyfford Still

http://www.albrightknox.org/ArtStart/Still_t.html

I love the education idea at the bottom and will try this out, might make a good blog post

Hans Hofmann

http://www.hanshofmann.net/art/art.html

Amongst many things he explored how some colours appear to be closer, some appear to be further away, he also said "the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak."

Ad Reinhardt

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=12353&searchid=13455&tabview=image

Check the image linked above out. See nothing right? The subtleties in this painting are lost in this reproduction, that was his plan all along.

he said “Art is too serious to be taken seriously. “ I like that.

Hans Hartung

http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&hs=Fx7&resnum=0&q=hans%20hartung&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1251&page=1

I like the feeling of movement in this guys pictures. To me it feels like natural movement without looking at all natural.

Morris Louis

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=1527&page=1

http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=morris%20louis&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi

I love colour, therefore I love Morris Louis