Posted on October 15, 2011 |
Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation, Character design, EA
My ex-coworker Ross Burt posted some of the character designs he created for Spare Parts.
The cute robots weren’t selected for the final game but I really loved them. We did model one of them and I got lucky to animate the green one with spray can nozzle head on the far right. Those who know me will rightaway understand why I fell in love with that little fellow 😉
Spare Parts Heroes and Villains
Related posts:
BAFTA Young game designers
EA (category)
Posted on October 14, 2011 |
4 Comments
Filed under Education, Miscellaneous
I was reading some articles this morning and realised few things.
Five years ago, a successful game career involved joining a big corporation like Microsoft, EA, Sony.
Five years ago 2d animation was dead.
With the current recession, gaining full time employment at a major studio is pretty unlikely nowadays. At best, most of them prefer to stick with contract workers as the market doesn’t allow a long term strategy at the moment but on the other hand, thousands of independent game developers are producing XBLA and smartphones games and applications, creating hundreds of jobs for senior and even fresh graduates in the field of, 2d animation, UI and concept art.
As recalled in that ex Rare employees interview, if it wasn’t possible to make games for less than $10 millions and a team of 70 and upwards in the past, things have changed. Even the tools are now available and affordable making it possible for anyone to make their own independent games. What an exciting time!
Most of those companies will soon grow to become the next leaders or get bought by the former ones hoping to get their glory back.
Not all big corporations are taking the back seat though, Microsoft with XBLA was probably the first one to create an independent game developer ecosystem and empower creative artists and programmers. Without XBLA, Behemoth’s “Castle Crashers” would have probably never known the success it received. How many people had heard of Alien Hominid before Castle Crashers?
An other thing I wanted to mention today is a very interesting move by Valve and Jagex. With the release of Team Fortress 2 for free to the public, I was wondering how the company could still pay for their servers but their strategy seems to be paying off as they recently announced a hefty profit for items creators.
But what is in for the very independent artist?
Well check out this article featuring legendary Bay Raitt. Ok there is nothing groundbreaking like his work on Gollum but one sentence at the very end of the article raised my interest for Team Fortress 2.
Making of a Skull hat.
“If this was a community-made item, the money from item sales would get split between Valve and the item maker!”
As much as I love the art style I don’t have time to play the game. Creating items for it could however become a source of revenue for the most successful artists. Imagine if your item became viral as Bay’s hat probably became?
Unemployed 3d artist? Make CG hats! 😉
Interesting read:
This is what the Transformers MMO will look like
Why the Next Game From Braid’s Creator is Skipping Consoles the comments are funny as usual
Steam Workshop
Related posts:
Jason Schleifer interview – Speaking of Animation
Posted on October 12, 2011 |
Leave a Comment
Filed under Animation
Paper fox
Check out that cool project from one of my australian subscribers, Jeremy Kool. Jeremy is looking for funding for “Paper fox”, an interactive short film with a very non CG look.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/28337832[/vimeo]
You can also follow “Paper fox” on Jeremy’s blog
http://thepaperfox.blogspot.com/
This is looking really nice. There has been several project in that style lately but I can’t get enough of it.
Also check out that fun TV show teaser that emerged on the internet half a year ago. A really nice show in a similar origami/cut out style with a pop-out twist: “Quick Quack Duck”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voc_qlaFyMA[/youtube]
Posted on October 10, 2011 |
2 Comments
Filed under Animation, Education
Here is the blocking for my “This is what you need” shot. I also shot some new video reference footage for Anakin as the previous video wasn’t very strong or interesting.
I am incorporating Blender more and more to my workflow as it has some amazing tools really suited to the Animation pipeline. Here I am able to write some notes on the video reference to single out some elements of interest. Other people like Jeff Gabor would edit their video reference in Premiere but I find it simpler and cheaper to use the Grease Pencil keys in Blender’s Dope Sheet editor.
New video reference, no sound (yep I am a cartoon but you knew that already):
Blocking:
The box at the beginning is a placeholder for the boxed Darth Vader outfit. I might add 12 frames at the very beginning it just so the first cut doesn’t come so early. I ran out of time and didn’t manage to fully flesh out Anakin or even the facial poses but with the help of the video reference, I think we know exactly what I am aiming for.
Related posts:
“This is what you need”, planning
“This is what you need’, gathering references
Blender
Jeff Gabor webcast recording online
