DMA344: 3D Animated Commercial

For this project we were asked to create a 15 second commercial for a product of our choice. 
The text at the end of the video was unfortunately not rendered properly, but will be fixed as soon as I get the chance to do so.

DMA455: Flash is Dead(?)

Just a quick write-up posting for my DMA455 course on my opinions about the death of Flash.

http://chromacube.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/dma455-assignment-1-flash-is-dead.pdf


I may continue to update this blog for now, but will likely end up migrating my information onto Wordpress, or my own server.  In the case of that happening, I will post a link to the new host, where my new progresses will be updated.

Flash Animation Walk Cycle

For this assignment, we were given the task of creating a walk cycle with our own character, and having them walk across the screen realistically, while objects passed by. 

After much deliberation, I felt that it was in my best interest to be horribly torturous to myself, and choose eight legs, instead of two.  While I still wanted to give it that human aspect, I merged the torso and upwards of a human, with the body of a spider, much like a centaur.

As I am fond of character creation, I first sketched out a very rough design of what I wanted the character to look like.

As it would be much too taxing to do a realistic animation, I chose to "cartoonize" my character into a more simplistic design.  Merging the aspects of a spider and a person into a decent balance, after doing a good bit of sketching and studying of basic spider anatomy.

 

 After a brutal scouring for the animation of a spider walking directly sideways, I found a video of an animation done in 3D.  To aid in my creation, I took frames of the animation, tracing over them with my own character.

I sketched out the image of my character entirely in Illustrator, and did this frame by frame, to get the greatest possible accuracy, and cleanliness in imagery.  Unfortunately, in my rush, I made things a bit overly complicated for myself by not creating as many moveable paths as I had ought to.  Though I managed.

I realized also that her hands looks like mittens.  Felt I should clear up that they're pedipalps...

I did a good bit of editing to check the animation of the frames before importing the file into flash.  I made a few more edits after this stage, as the torso was originally very static compared to the rest of the body, and her pedipalp was doing a nice train imitation.

I finally imported the file into Flash, by exporting each layer as a .swf frame.  I made a few more edits to the arm and the breasts at this point, before realizing I should probably start working on the actual animation.

I deliberated a bit on the setting, before deciding it was in good interest to choose a cave scene.  I used images of a cave, and of dirt, and filtered them in Illustrator, cutting them and importing them to create layers of movement, and direction.

The dark box around my character is an alpha lowered solid colour, for the sake of creating an ambient haze.

I added images that would pass by Eydra as she walked, as well as a zoom effect to create an interesting loop effect for the animation.  To finalize it, I added a bout of music (Cold Fever - Moshimoss) to create a chilling ambiance for the scene.

After finishing, I published the works as a .swf and .html, and uploaded them to the server of my website.  

The finished product in located in the link below:

http://www.chromacube.net/DMA205/DMA205DB_McConnell_Robin_FBF2.html

Video Game Review

 The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Developed and Published by: Bethesda Software

Available on: PC, Xbox 360, PS3

Genre: Open-World, Action RPG

ESRB Rating: M for blood and gore, intense violence, sexual themes and use of alcohol.

Synopsis:  Taken place 200 years after the “Oblivion Crisis” of Bethesda’s previous installment, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Skyrim is not a continuation of Oblivion, but instead a new chapter in the Elder Scrolls series. 

    In Skyrim, you awaken on a caravan as a prisoner, mistaken as one of the rebels known as the “Stormcloaks”, you soon discover that a civil war has been raged after the assassination of the High King, by his brother, Ulfric Stormcloak, forcing the Imperials, those who govern Skyrim, and the Stormcloaks, the original Norn settlers of the land, into a brutal war.  After being taken to Helgen to be executed with the rebels, the execution is halted by a dragon, named Alduin.  Upon escaping the burning Helgen, the player has the choice of siding with either the Imperials, or the Stormclocks, a choice that affects the outcome of the story.  After following the main storyline, the player is granted the knowledge that they are the “Dragonborn”, and that the civil war, and arrival of Alduin have been prophesized as the destruction of the world, and that they have been sent by the gods as the only means of stopping Alduin from consuming all that remains. 

Throughout the story, the player meets many essential and unessential NPCs who guide them along their quest.  The player may choose to be benevolent in their action, or malevolent, in the open world gameplay of Skyrim, affecting how the NPCs of the world view and behave towards the player.

Rating System (On a scale of 1 to 10)

Gameplay:

9/10  

    The gameplay of Skyrim is fantastic.  You may chose from playing in third person or first person in an open world setting, and the choices of what you play are entirely limitless.  Want to be a mage?  You can do that.  Want to bash some heads with a massive hammer, while still having the ability to plink them from afar with arrows?  Sure, why not.  Want to sling fireballs with one hand, and hack away with a sword or axe in the other?  No problem!  You can sneak and steal, bash with a pickaxe, pick pockets, destroy locks, destroy lives, help build them up again, get insanely drunk, marry a drunk, and run around half naked in the snow, punching bears in the face.  I wouldn’t be writing it if I was exaggerating.  

Onto the more important portion however, the game is extremely diverse.  It prides itself in not limiting you in the choices you make, and doesn’t punish you for making a decision you may later want to change, in regards to how you play the game.  The combat system keeps itself diverse.  Some areas you may find it simple to run through, without fret, whereas other areas may simply be too difficult for your level.  However as you progress and gain levels, you can always return to unfinished business to clear an area up with ease, as the difficulty of previously found dungeons do not scale difficulty with level, as previous Oblivion games had.  This creates gameplay that challenges and rewards you for your achievements, without ever making the game too simplistic, or too difficult.  Every combat skill contains its own skill tree, that can be improved with “perks” to assist, and reward you for training certain aspects.  Smaller aspects of the game, such as lockpicking, pickpocketing, smelting, forging, and speechcraft, all have skill trees as well, with their own beneficial perks that often also affects larger aspects of the game play.   

The game is however, not without its issues.  Bethesda has made itself famous for its hilarious glitches and bugs, from catapulting across the map from jumping on the back of a dragon, to the more unnerving, misplaced mannequins that I found stuck to a ceiling and staring at a woodcutter’s axe.  There are some odd choices made that are bothersome as well, such as the inability to switch to first person mode while playing as a werewolf, and riding a horse, as well as having arrows shoot a few ticks about the crosshair, but these are more trivial annoyances, that don’t make the gameplay impossible by any means.

Graphics:

10/10

    The graphics in Skyrim are acclaimed as amongst the greatest yet.  Bethesda has managed to force out an engine powerful enough to deliver dynamic graphics, incomparable to many other games, even on low settings.  The character design is refined, and the landscape is full of lush foliage, stock full of particle effects depending on the area, such as snow, steam, sulphur  gases, and fog.  Caves are exquisitely delicate with detail, especially in areas such as Dwemer ruins, which commonly merge into Falmer territory, the two of which clash techmagery with nature, creating a spectacular scene of caves riddled with golden metals, steam, fungi, and particles of spores and fog throughout the air.  Occasionally, textures are broken in certain places, but this is a rare occurrence that encompasses almost any game you play, regardless of developer or platform.

User Interface:

7/10

 

    Truly the only debilitating issue presented with Skyrim is its choice in sacrificing the traditional keyboard and mouse interface for one that appeals to console gamers.  Keybindings, an aspect of PC gaming that allows the aspect of freedom that differentiates itself from console gaming, has been next to entirely abolished in favour of a console layout.  One must now pause the game, and navigate through lengthy menus to reach one specific item, equipt it, play, and repeat the process upon their desire to possibly switch to a different weapon.  Being as Skyrim is largely based upon fast-paced gameplay, it would be a desirable, if not logical, choice to allow console players to switch between items using the traditional 1-8 keys, each with a specific binding, as to avoid unnecessary delays in action, and lengthy navigation to complete dull the excitement of a situation.  It is irritating, debilitating, if not insulting in the choice to port console interface onto a PC, ignoring the vast flexibility and capabilities that the keyboard and mouse offer.  Ignoring such, however, in the navigational menu, aspects of the game such as magic and potions are all properly labeled, and can be “favourited” to open into a quick menu that may be opened during gameplay.

Audio:

10/10

    With a soundtrack composed by Jeremy Soul, familiar pieces from previous games have been ported, and remastered for Skyrim, including the composing of brand new tracks.  The nostalgic aspect of previous tracks is a welcome aspect, and the all tracks have been properly coded to play in moments that most fit it.  A battle is easily make more intense by the addition of music, and Skyrim successfully achieves this and gets your adrenaline rushing.  Moments of calm, admiring the snowy landscape of the fantastically composed flora and fauna, are accompanied by tracks of ambiance, and the entirety of audio composition is flawless.

Storyline and Content:

10/10

    Skyrim is a game packed full of content and storyline.  With the ability to delay the main quest indefinitely, you soon find yourself discovering caves, ruins, mines, forest clearings, small huts, towns, mills, the list is endless.  Given a compass with minute markers, the curiosity that each one piques is unfathomable.  On the way to finishing a side quest, you may find yourself in ten others before you finally reach your goal of finishing the first one.   The story line is simple, there is a great threat, and the player is the only one who is capable of saving the world from imminent destruction.  It compensates, however, for putting interesting back story into even the smallest aspects of the game.  Every cave or ruin that you explore often contains a journal that hints towards those who have explore it before you, and the deep history imbued in how the area came to be.

T-Rex Study

For our Sketching for Communications class, we had to create the tooth of a t-rex out of Sculpey.  Unfortunately, my camera battery was dead throughout the process, and as such, I was forced to use my camera's phone for photos.

     My materials for the project consisted of Sculpey, newspaper (as I had no aluminum foil), masking tape (as I had no wire), paintbrushes for texturing and painting, a turkey tin (as I had no cooking sheet.  It did, however, work surprisingly well.), some reference photos, and a lot of time.

This photo shows my initial sculpting process, shelling out the first layer around the tooth.  I made it significantly larger than intended and used the whole box of Sculpey.

 Almost done the sculpting process.  You can see here, the butcher knife in the corner that the Russian tenant that lived in here before me left behind.  It was very useful for cutting the Sculpey!

 Beginning to paint the tooth, giving it a base coat and some simple details for future reference.

 Here I've almost finished, gotten the colours down better, and now just need to refine it.

Here be the finished product!  Yes, in fact, it is that massive, and my hand is that small.  Overall, I suppose I did a subpar job, had I the materials, I'd have been able to do a better job in both the painting and the sculpting, both in which, I quickly ran out of, due to the sheer size of the tooth.

After the tooth was completed, we were given the task of creating a poster meant for the ROM, in relation to their upcoming display of "Jimmy", the largest T-rex ever discovered.  We created an initial source file, and a poster after, using the information given.

     I firstly created a monochromatic poster, aside from the logo, so that I could fill it with swatch colours freely, and compare how much I liked the coloured, versus the white on black.

   Overall, I enjoyed creating these studies, specifically the poster, in which I exercised typographic format in creating, showing how knowledge from other classes have ultimately played into my work.

Character Illustration

    For our New Media Tools project, we were instructed to take a sketch of a character, and create an illustration of it in Adobe Illustrator.  I took this image from Dantesapostale on Deviantart, and began my work.

    In tracing, I usually start off with the darkest, and most prominent feature in the image.  In this case, the feature was the eyes of the girl.  I used the pen tool, on fill, to trace out the eyes with solid colour, and to have more precise control over the created lines.

    After the inital feature, I look for like features that I can use the same colour for.  As a general habit, I start off the the small, and work myself to the bigger aspects, as they are more time consuming, and require more attention.

    Once the facial features have been dealt with, I move onto creating the skin.  From the initial take on the image, I receive a light, elegant feel.  I felt as a result, that it would be beneficial to create my image as wholes, and work with a lineless style, to keep a simplistic aspect to the work.

Blue is an excellent colour for initial lines and backgrounds, and I almost always utilize it for digital work, most often in creating a sketch.

    I start to refine the aspects of the image, making small adjustments, and beginning work on the hair.  This is where the use of a blue background, coupled with opacity, comes in handy. 

    As the original work was unfinished, I had to do a bit of re-imagining of certain aspects, to create the full image.  Throughout the hours of work, I made an unfathomable amount of adjustments to each part, even things that had been long covered.  Illustrator is a perfectionist's best friend, and bloody worst enemy.

    Here, I start detailing the shadows that I want to create for the hair.  I use a combination of the stroke tool, and the fill tool, depending on the nature of the line.  I have the lineart in the background, which I use as my direct reference point, by hiding the blue backdrop.  To get a glimpse of how the work is coming along, I use the background for clarity.

In addition, as the image shows, I do many aspects of the artwork as more than one piece, creating numerous layers.  This helps me to achieve an effect, (and make significant less work for myself) by utilizing the way objects layer over one another.    In this case, the bit of hair that has had its opacity lowered, is in a separate layer than the rest of the hair, do that the skin layer may be shown underneath one bit of hair, and on top of the rest.

    As I can be obsessively precise with my work, it takes me an extremely long time to do the hair, and I have a good few battles with the pen tool.

    To create a more realistic, flowing effect for the hair, I use different stroke sizes, and a soft brush that increases pressure around the middle of the stroke, and decreases at the ends.  This gives the effect of an amount of hair clumped together, to make a prominent shadow.  

    To keep myself sane, I stop working on the hair for a period of time, and fiddle around with the other aspects of the image.  I had previously started to pencil in the definitions of the face, and play around with the shadows and lighting that I am going to create.  I also take into account, the compositional aspect when it comes to colour, and change the shirt many times.

    I figure, as frightful as the idea was, that I had ought to stop messing with the hair and tackle the most complicated part of the image.  The tattoo posed an immense challenge, and I abused the life out of the Pathfinder to create most of the imagery present on the tattoo.

    The tattoo has some odd aspects to it, namely the presence of a texture.  I strugged a period of time, figuring my way around how to add the texture to such aspect, before utilizing the a brush stroke filter that was containing in Illustrator. 
Unfortunately, however, as a result of my choice of using a filter, I was then restricted to using only such colour for the tattoo, which caused a good number of compositional complications (say that 10 times fast) that I spent some time ironing out.

 

    After having all but the most difficult part of the tattoo finished, I opted to take a break from destroying my brain on the eye boggling colour combination, and finished my work on the hair, as well as creating lighting and shadows.

To create the light and shadows, in knowing I was restricted by certain aspects of the image, I found a colour, a dark teal-blue, that I created as a universal shadow.  All shadows in my image have been created from the blue colour, by using the colour burn option.  I fiddled a while with this, choosing then, a light purple for the highlights, set to overlay.

      As I neared the completion of my image, I finally finished the portions of the tattoo, and played for a while, with the composition of the image as a whole.  Completely redoing some aspects of shading and lighting.
I then went about and highlighted all my paths for no reason in specific, other than I think it looks pretty cool.

    After the final few tweaks and touches, and some complete overhauls on shading, I reached the conclusion of my image.
All in all, I do not like it one bit.  I feel as it started off great, and slowly dropped in quality as I went along.  The tattoo was a painful headache that I wish I could have spent more time on to finish in a more personal way. 
Illustrator as a program, is amazing, and absolutely anxiety inducing.  I likely spent 80% of the time making the smallest tweaks to the image out of sheer, obsessive force.  Though in spite, I love finalizing an image with decent work, that you as an artist are aware of the amount of blood, sweat, and tears go into shaping a bloody eyebrow.

Predator Skate Deck Design (WiP)

     For our sketching for communications course, we were assigned the task of creating a skate deck design in the theme of a "Predator".  I explored many themes in my head, with predator being a large ranged topic of interpretation.  I wanted to do something a little outside of the box of simply an animal predator, and looked for inspiration in other fields.

Eventually I settled on a druid-type, feral human.  Initially inspired by Skyrim, I added in my fascination with animal skulls as masks and headpieces, and soon worked heavily off of such idea. 

    I started off with a simple sketch, using my form from a photograph to create, and trace the body.  I referenced a photograph of a wolf skull to draw the skill myself, sketching out the details after, and testing the figure on the skatedeck.

    I changed around my initial idea numerous times,before settling on one that'd allow me to use the whole figure, and create a movement across the board.

    I wanted to create a lineless art style, as dark lines would not have fit the look I was going for.  As this was the first time I have attempted such a style, it took a great amount of time and trial and error to create the desired look.  

    I started off with a monochromatic painting, before adding a colour layer over top.

    The hide movement took an extremely long time to create, and I obsessively fussed with it, hours throughout the image's completion, coming back to it even, after the image was finished to fix small errors.

    After the first bit of the image is finished, I work on finding a compositional background, adding and taking away from it as I go along.  The background also helps me to create the figure when I start work on it.

 

    I colour the dark lines so that I am able to see, and colour them over the red background.

    I create a base to start the monochromatic shading on, and get a whereabouts of how I want the image to work, and where the best shading would create a fit composition.

    In order to achieve my method of painting, I hold a black and white slider to the left of my screen, and adjust it avidly throughout the creation, so I may have full control over the image.  I do not use the eraser for this process, simply paint over it with a lighter colour.  I keep the opacity and flow of my brush at low, so I may achieve a "painterly" look.

    I come nearing the end of the painting process, as I have fully shaded the figure.  I come back to it often, still, to fix small issues that I may have missed.

   The previous are a number of different coloured compositions I went through to finally achieve the final.  Also by switching colours, it helps to see issues with the image that you may have not noticed before.

I finally chose a black and green theme, and finalize the image into a file, before fitting it to the skatedeck.

 

Overall, I am extremely happy with my skatedeck, and it marks an image that I have never reached the potential of creating before.

To finalize, I spent likely, approximately 24 hours on the image, on and off, pulling all-nighters when necessary to fully complete, and enjoyed the process the whole way along.