My Goodness.

Wow, it's been awhile since I have posted anything on here. I guess I should do a real quick explanation of what I have been up to the past...couple years?

Well, after graduation from Full Sail University in September of 2010, me and a friend travelled across Europe in a car for a couple months. It was great fun. Afterwards, I went back to Chicago and lived there for a couple months until I moved to Salt Lake City for a job at EA. The job was in the QA department. It was supposed to be temporary until I could get a job as an artist. That hasn't happened yet, but fingers crossed!

Anyway, I have done some artwork in the past couple years, but nothing that really excited me until now! I started a Futuristic Alley and it's going pretty well. I have worked on it for a couple hours and it's looking good in my opinion. Hopefully I can finish it in a couple of weeks. I have posted a couple images on what it looks like.

Updates =]

So I haven't posted in a couple of weeks now, and that is very sad =[

I have been busy with a lot of things lately. To start off, stuff like Final Project and our game Parasite.

The game is going well. A lot of things keep getting cut and the is sad, but it keeps looking more and more like an actual game, which is fantastic =]

The whole level in our game is done and it looks fantastic. Even when some great people came into our class from Rockstar , they loved it. Daft is on his 4th texture now. It keeps getting better and better with each revision. Same goes for his animations. I am re-tweaking them for the 3rd time. I just need to get it in my head that this is a cartoony game and I need to go crazy with his attacks. Tomorrow I will get another critique from our art director on what he thinks, and go from there.

We also gave FF2 and Alpha presentations a couple of weeks ago. I am the "Salesman" for our team and basically, it is my job to sell the game to the audience. So I wrote up a whole script and tired to memorize it. Bad idea. On the FF2 presentation, I completely locked up, started stuttering and even forgot to change the slides. So for Alpha, I didn't try to memorize so much and made a bunch of slides to help me along. It went much much better. I still need some practice and I need to get my enthusiasm onto the stage. Everyday I am full of energy, but when in front of a crow, I calm down a bit, which isn't what I want. Beta is in a week, I plan on doing much better!

Next off, this month we have a class called Game Cinematics along with Final Project. Basically what we do in this class is find a picture with an environment we want to do, and then try and re-create it for our demo reel. I spent loads of time trying to find the right picture, but couldn't. So I decided I would use a picture I kind of liked, and then adjust it to what I wanted.

I decided to pick this wooden church, but I am going to model the whole interior of the church and add lots of foliage. My goal is to zBrush all textures in the scene and try and hand paint all textures as well. It's a lot of work, but if I spend enough time on it, it should look good. Currently I have the blockout done and with base lighting in the UDK. Today I will finish all of the models and UV's. So next is on to zBrushing, then texturing. =] I still have 2 weeks left on it.

On a side note, I also started P90X 2 weeks ago. It's a pretty intense workout program that lasts for 90 days. Wish me luck! =]

Evolve!

So this past weekend I went to Evolve CG with a couple of friends. It is a job fair that is held in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Everyone would be going to this event to get jobs. This was not my purpose, I just wanted to meet some cool people and learn from them.

Well all I can say is that it was a Major success. I learned a lot from the various speakers there, especially Teagan Morrison who is the Lead Environment Artist for Naughty Dog. His lecture inspired me to revamp some of my techniques and try to make my Demo Reel as awesome as it possibly can. If I can make a Demo Reel good enough for Naughty Dog, then I am bound to be able to get a job somewhere.

Now I just wanna work on my Demo Reel 24/7 but cannot for I am still in Final Project and must work for the team. This is kind of a bummer, but I am going to try and balance the two. Team comes first, Demo Reel comes second. I do not want to abandon my team half way through Final Project. That just isn't cool.

Rolling through.

So I haven't posted in awhile and a few things have happened in the past 10 days.

First of all, I had fixed my rigging/animation issue. I re-rigged the character one last final time, but this time I was very clean and careful with everything. It may have been all of the minor precautions I took, but I believe that the reason it wasn't working before was because the mesh was on a layer. Even when deleting non-deformer history, a node was left by the layer. Those pesky layers. I was so excited when I fixed it, that I was speechless. It was an amazing moment.

Next is that my throat doesn't feel likes it's getting harassed by Donkey Kong anymore! This was also pretty exciting when it happened. Donkey Kong is cool and all, but I am not a fan when he is using my throat as his punching bag.

Lastly, I found out that we didn't do so hot on PoC (Proof of Concept) grade wise. I would have to agree with our teachers. Our level was just cubes and our animations were way out of wack. It was a functional game, but I believe we could have done much better.

Now onto current news. In a couple days, we are going to have Feature Frag 1. It is our next milestone and everything is looking pretty good. I am ahead of schedule and I finished all of my animations for FF1. My group mates are also doing pretty well. This time, we are going to do much much better. Our actual level is looking amazing. We have awesome looking meshes in there with character and a sense of style. We also have functioning animations that go well with our game. The programmers also seem to be in much better spirits. They are getting things done and seem to be confident for FF1.

My animations aren't exactly what I want for the final game. I had met with our Art Director the other day to have him critique my work. He liked some, but others he said need some work. I agree entirely. Our game design doc states that the heavy attack should be .6 of a second. But that just isn't enough time to make a good looking animation in 18 frames.

After our meeting having taken notes from his critique, my plan is to put the animations I have currently into FF1 without changing them. I will see how they look and then based of game play, I will go back and tweak animations to make them more stylish, cool looking and better yet, fit the character.

Hopefully next time I post, I will have good news about FF1!

This is Rubbish.

Today was Proof of Concept (PoC). There are many words that I can use to describe it. All of them good and bad at the same time. Our build of the game had hiccups, bugs, and glitches. But nether the less, I still thought it was really awesome that we got that far in only 2 weeks time.

Especially the programmers, they kicked ass in the las two days. They managed to get assets and animations into the game. Super sweet! The only problem was that our animations, mainly mine, looked horrendous in the game. And it wasn't the programmers fault. For some reason when exported out of Maya, some verts glitch out and go all over the place.

At first we thought it might be the exporter tool, but then we tested other teams animations and they worked perfectly. Then I thought that it may have something to do with our earlier rig hiccup that we had.

No matter, I had a new Daft mesh and rig to be tested this morning. It still didn't work. What the heck?! I've done everything the other teams have done and then some but my animations still glitched out. Even from my previous class, my three legged character worked, but not Daft.

Then breakthrough! I did not bind the God Node to the mesh, every other team had done that! This must be the issue we are having! So I re-rig and test.

...It still breaks. ??????? Why??? I have no idea what is going on at this point. I've even had other people look at it and they say I am doing everything correctly.

The only other thing I can think of is ask our Art Producer tomorrow on what he thinks, but if that doesn't work, my only conclusion is that the script that makes the rig must be making some other random node somewhere in the deepest darkest depths of Maya that it's breaking my half decent animations! Whew, that was a mouth full.

Therefore, I am going to either use a different script, or make my own rig. Now if we only had 1-2 characters, I would be OK with rigging it myself, but we have 9 characters. I don't think we have time for 9 rigs!

I am a little flustered right now with this rigging/animating malarkey, and that my throat still feels like its getting squeezed by some tiny little gorilla every time I swallow. It's OK though! Tomorrow will be a new day, and I will find a solution!!

Throat Lozenges

So since my last post, I have gotten all animations completed, bound to a game rig, and ready to be exported to the game! Thanks to Aleasha's help of course.

Today was to finish the death animation, which turned out pretty well I suppose. I have always been a person who never really liked his own work, or praise on his work. I would rather someone look at it and tell me what I should fix. That's the best way to respond if I ever show you some of my stuff. Haha. On a side note, I hate it when people thank me, I don't know why, I just do.

So anyway, the programmers are having trouble importing my animations into the game. I have been trying to figure out if there is something that I did wrong when exporting the animations? I'm not sure, only they can tell me. Until then, I will be helping out on finishing the asset list.

I had a meeting with Chops (our AP) about our Asset list which only had up until Alpha filled out. We have been working on it since then, but "A" priorities are the most important to us right now. It didn't turn out as bad as I thought it would. Most of the issues were prioritization. I believe once everything is in the asset list, it will be much easier to prioritize. And once we get that done, nothing but production from there on out! We will hit Light Speed in terms of creating and finishing assets!

On another side note, my throat has been killing me all week, and I've been a little slower than usual on working. It's really been bother me, so I went to Target today and got some Cherry Throat Lozenges. What's a lozenge?!?! All it looks like to me is a candy that doesn't taste very good. It doesn't even taste like a cherry. I think they put pictures of fruit on medicine just so people think they are safe and won't taste like ass. But they do taste like ass! Name one medicine or vitamin that taste good besides Flintstones Vitamins. None!

By the way, these so called throat candy lozenges cherry flavored aren't helping. Maybe I'll go see a doctor in a few days if the pain doesn't go away. At least doctors tell you if their prescribed medicine tastes like crap. They aren't sneaky.

Quite a Setback

So I have been knocking out animations for our main character Daft. They aren't the greatest but will have to suffice for Proof of Concept (PoC) turn-in which is Monday, April 26th.

I had gotten the run, jump, idle, light attack 1-2, and air hit cycles done, when I realized I had animated them all on the animation rig. Uh Oh. So me and my group mate Aleasha spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how to make the game rig similar to the animation rig, transfer the same weights to it, attach them together, and then when exporting the animation, delete the animation rig altogether.

I assumed this wasn't that much of a problem since we were ahead a couple days of schedule. The penny dropped. If we couldn't figure this out, I would have to re-animate all of my animations and then be behind schedule. This was a total bummer.

We tried to get some help from the teachers present, they helped us figure out how to transfer weights in Maya, but my weights were not transferring correctly. Then I sent an e-mail out to some of our previous teacher that might know how to fix the issue. But, it could take a couple days before they even got back to us because they have busy schedules. This was turning out to be an issue. I admit, I was getting frustrated and felt lost. But I wouldn't give up that easily, I would take a break from the issue, and hit it head on with fresh head and fresh ideas the next day.

I went home and was trying to calm down. I get a text from Aleasha that she had figured it out but the only downside was, that I would have to re-paint weights. Awesome! I love painting weights, and that she figured it out was fantastic. Way to go Aleasha!