Pigeon Impossible?

I recently started reading two 3D magazines called 3DArtist and 3D World, and in one of the issues for one of them, I discovered this amazing, awesome, hilarious and extremely well made short film!

The name of it is Pigeon Impossible and I'm sure you can guess what to expect generally from the fact that the title is a pun of the secret agent film series Mission Impossible.

The film was made by an animation student called Martell Animation and it's fronted by a man called Lucas Martell. On his Youtube account which can be seen via clicking the actual video above, he did a series of blogs leading through the production of the film including rigging the characters and other 3D modelling and animation tasks.

You get to see him working on the film over time and see how it became the final product as well as gain an insight into how he actually made the characters and so on.

The film is all about a secret agent who is pretty clumsy, accident prone and gullible (I think he was based on me!) and he gets tricked into going on a wild good chase to protect this hi-tech briefcase I think. The actual film is all about him eating a bagel and getting harassed by a bagel loving pidgeon who attacks him for it, getting trapped in the briefcase by accident and causes mass havoc whilst inside it using the inbuilt weaponry.

It's pretty amusing what happens and I loved the way the pidgeon interacted with the briefcase as well as the "Tom and Jerry" style battle he had with the secret agent. This film clocks in at about 6 minutes but I enjoyed it all the way through and happily will watch it plenty more times too. I believe it was just as good as a lot of feature films I've seen despite it's length, it's creator shows a hell of a lot of promise and seeing as the 3D animation industry is really taking off now as shown by Pixar, Sony Pictures and Dreamworks particularly, I have a feeling this guy is going to be big one day as well.

I subscribed to him and actually cannot wait for him to bring out another film, even though this one took many months to create! The humour in it reminded me of the other animation studios but also more like classic cartoons with the slapstick involved and also simplistic plot as well. The simplicity isn't a bad thing at all, it's perfect for a short film and it's common knowledge that people enjoy the simpler things in life more, I certainly do!

I seriously cannot recommend this film enough, I hope he actually does make money from this some how, I know it had a $10,000 budget on it roughly, so not to make any income at all would suck. If he doesn't though, I couldn't be any more sure in that this has opened many doors for him with plenty of prospects for him. It came out on 8th November this year and has racked up almost a million and a half views! I personally think it needs more attention but it's doing damned well regardless!

Watch this guy, he's going to be big! You only have to watch the film and you'll understand why, the film is an absolute gem and would love to have on DVD if it came at a price respective to it's length!

SPP2 - Task For 27/11/09 Seminar

I was asked to write a few lines about a Multimedia practitioner based around my pathway and there is one I've known for a long time now who I am going to show you.

His name is Simon and he is the CEO and budding creator for a 3D avatar based social networking website called Frenzoo. I actually mentioned Frenzoo and Simon during a blog in my first year on the course but I never got to spend time on the website as promised due to numerous extreme difficulties I encountered up till now.

The site is all about creating your own person 3D avatar to represent yourself and communicate with other members on the site, thus making new friends and discovering people from around the world. You can buy new clothes for your avatar using thei

r currency system on there from the online shops set up by members and staff. Pro Members can create their own clothes and soon furniture, pets and so on. It's been a long time since I went on the site truth be told, but Simon told me progress has been good for them, they are expanding the site including Pro Members being able to create more types of objects and also securing a big deal.

Although Simon is the CEO, he does contribute his own fashions for his own online store on there and it can be viewed via the link provided below:

http://www.frenzoo.com/beta/shop_store.php?bazaar_id=23

As well as that, one of the animators/meshers from the company created a new look for his avatar for Thanksgiving Day but it has it's own personal twist as you will see below...

I asked Simon for a brief summary of his background before Frenzoo and this is what he said in response anyway:

Me: Can you give a brief biography of your career pre-Frenzoo?

Simon: Sure, before jumping into the online 3d world with Frenzoo, I worked in Internet networking with Juniper Networks, the upstart competitor to Cisco.

There I was leading the Emerging Technologies team for Asia. That was a great job, dealing with customers in Korea and Japan through to emerging countries like India and Vietnam. Learning how and how not-to introduce new solutions to market, winning over early adopters, feeding requirements back to development teams – a lot of fun.

Before that I was in Melbourne with Juniper where I worked with Telstra to help design their 2nd generation broadband infrastructure (their DSL network). That was a great job for a young engineer, although I recall a lot of late nights living in their labs

As you can see, he's had quite a lot of experience working with networking in particular, and has experienced and gained a lot from his prior jobs. He also has had the opportunity to work in different parts of the world as you can see as well as interact with customers from other countries from where he was at the time. At the moment, he is working in Hong Kong with some Multimedia graduates on the Frenzoo website.

It is quite fascinating seeing what he did previously as he did get to travel around the world, interacting with people from different countries and learning a vast number of things whilst trying to emerging countries and also as he said, having a lot of fun along the way.

Even though dealing with networks isn't something I'd do, it's inspiring to see how Simon built his way up to where he is now and what he experienced along the way. He ended up doing online 3D in the end and the 3D industry is what I'm currently studying as well hoping to have a career in one day.

Also, our current essay is all about networking and building up our networks of contacts to help promote ourselves, so I think talking to Simon has been pretty beneficial for me especially seeing as he works in the 3D industry now. To have someone I know who works in that particular industry can always be very helpful for me, because I can gain advice from them, get a good insight into the 3D industry, show them my portfolio to get some feedback on it and also get references for any future jobs I want.

If I could get the references, it would be excellent as it would be from someone in the industry I'm trying to get into so getting a recommendation from someone like that would have a lot more weight to it I imagine and also show a lot more promise.

Looking at what Simon does now, I wouldn't mind doing 3D work for a site like this if I didn't make into the games industry as planned, by getting to know other areas more where 3D is used in apart from games and films, it helps me to understand how much more open my possibilities can be and it gives me more options for my future should getting into the games industry not work out, or if I need to build myself up in terms of my experience, skills and portfolio before I join a games company.

Even though Simon is based in Hong Kong, this is a great start to building up my own personal network of people to help promote myself and I hope to be able to gain more contacts like him in the future to help promote myself as well help me to learn the necessary skills and knowledge that can help me with getting the jobs I need in the future.

I am going to try and find people nearer to me as well, preferably ones who know me in person if possible as that can help, but the more people I can meet, the bigger my network can get and the more opportunities that await as a result of that.

Disaster Looming

I should have good news to report but I'm afraid I don't really. Just earlier this week, I discovered I have 2 separate viral infections to fight off and I've been off uni again for the whole week due to being severely ill.

Due to my condition, I've been unable to work as well. 3DS Max finally arrived on Tuesday but I feel so crap it's difficult to work. I have insomnia again and my stress really is peaking, I'm going to have to go back to counselling to be truly honest.

As it stands, I don't have anything built for the rollercoaster project. I've modelled a bit of water, island and city but thats it. I'm still kind of figuring out how to build parts of it.

With the robot animation project I am fine thanks to Andy's completed file but I need to animate it. That's the problem, I'm struggling to animate it as I missed the seminar on it. I can understand what we need to do, but I'm having problems posing the robot right to begin with hence I'm already sunk and stuck.

I'm stressed out as high hell at the moment, my sleeping pattern and diet are destroyed again and my deadlines are less than 3 weeks away now, I'm terrified.

On the upside, I've rung the office and after messages were passed on, I got emailed by Jools asking for me to book a surgery as soon as I can, although I think I'm going to need a voodoo ritual to resurrect me after these projects are over xD.

I need to speak to my tutors for Virtual asap but it's going to be hell trying to go to uni in my state, I may email them and hope to get a response. I already emailed Andy so he's up to date, it's just contacting Simon now.

There's a reason I haven't mentioned Games Design yet and it's actually my shred of good news amongst the hell...

I've completed the project! Just typed up my foreword and rules for it, and it's all set to be handed in whenever. I wanted to write an evaluation for it tbh, the lack of an offline journal is a problem and I need to rectify that before I hand it in although I have plenty of time.

This project has gone amazingly well for a change but it seems too good to be true although it's my ray of hope in all this darkness right now.

But yeah, I wanted to show my ambitions with the project and how versatile it is, I couldn't really as I already hit the 1 page limit for both the foreword and rules but ah well, this should be good enough hopefully.

I'm really excited about the card game project and hope it does do well otherwise I will cry D:.

I'm going to get extensions for the other 2 projects, I'm going to need to hand them in after the holidays if possible, my illness isn't exactly going away quickly and I even had swine flu scares and being rushed to A and E for nothing so my stress is being intensified hugely by the illness alone right now :(.

Roller Coaster Designs: Car

I hadn't really thought about the car's appearance to be honest so I thought I would get round to visualising it immediately so I can start modelling it. I only have 4 weeks left on the project so I need to crack on with modelling asap, hence instead of drawing up designs for the car, I decided to do a moodboard different rollercoaster cars and try and get a design from that.

The idea is that I can get inspiration from their designs and mix and match elements from them with my own design. The moodboard c

an be seen below anyway.

The designs I am most keen on are the blue one in the bottom right corner and the little grey one in the middle. I particularly quite like the design of the blue one actually, it reminds me a lot of a hovercraft type vehicle and I wouldn't mind modelling something similar to that, but it would need be as transparent as possible, so the passengers can look out all the time.

I would probably opt for modelling the bottom half of the car to something like that but having a huge glass screen to cover the top half so people can look out of it.

I'm going to try modelling it now and see where I go with it, improvisation is something I do a lot of and I'm good at, I'm always adapting as I progress so I'll be adapting my design as I model it.

A Sudden And Very Fortunate Windfall?

My 2 seminars today actually went really well! For the Visualisation seminar, we had to present our work on the rollercoaster so far, the designs, research etc and my presentation went better than I thought tbh. It was credited to being a good concept which Im happy with and I agreed with the feedback I received as it was what I needed to do with the concept, which includes reducing the amount of things I include due to the time frame I have left to work in.

Simon also recommended I work on each of the areas of the track as separate files to make it as a lot easier for me and connect them up in one file later on instead. Or instead of connecting them, I could just render a movie clip for each file and compile the final movie using the clips, making sure the transition is as smooth and unnoticeable possible otherwise that will ruin it.

The Games Design seminar actually really shocked me because I was pretty stressed about the card game. I was struggling to get a decent design and I even came up with a 4th idea, but that was too similar to Blackjack and Solitaire in all honesty. The reason for the shock is what happened with my 1st design actually. None of the 3 original ideas I came up with were anywhere near complete and they had their major flaws. We had to test the prototypes for our ideas so I just went with my first one and decided to improvise as I went along.

Me and a friend of mine tested my first idea and we ended up improvising as I hope, we actually made a much better design in the end! Brad sent someone called Matt I think to give us feedback as we played, and he gave me some pretty helpful feedback and also found my project to be really damned good which what cheered me up so much! I already was happy with it but then he made a couple of minor suggestions to improve it and he said the idea was one of the most versatile and unique ones he's ever seen. He's never seen a card system like it before, he designed 3 in 3 weeks that all failed in their first week, and he said the card game was so simple yet strategic and fun, it was brilliant! Matt pointed out that the card game is easily adaptable for all ages by changing the rules slightly and thus creating a range of difficulties.

The fact that I used original playing cards kept it simple and I didn't go down the path of designing a completely new card game with it's own characters, cards etc, it's a new game that utilises the original playing cards in a new way. He said is actually quite educational as simple maths is involved in it with a frantic pace which adds thrill and excitement to it as well. Due to the educational factor, it can be used in schools by teachers and seeing as the difficulty can be altered based on the ages playing, it can appeal to anyone too and also he said there is a good market for this as there's nothing out there that is like this really!

Hearing that really made my day to be honest and it's given me a lot more confidence with myself and the project! I'm really pleased with how things have turned out as well as shocked still, and I'm actually quite excited about finishing this project and actually playing this game!

My friends liked playing it a lot too and their projects turned out brilliant too, I ended up giving them helpful ideas and advice too and they've used it to help better their projects too, all in all the testing and feedback worked out extremely well!

I actually posted on Facebook that I was on fire due to how well I was doing today and recently, but I'm just receiving replies from friends worried if I'm ok and if I got burned? :S Something tells me, they have never heard of that phrase being used as a way of saying how well you are doing, I cant think why...

Rollercoaster Designs

Click thumbnails to enlarge

Apologies for the terrible quality of my sketches, my presentational skills have always been terrible, I'm quite a messy, all over the place person as you may see. Neatness was never my strong point and hence I emphasise these ar pretty rough sketches.
My rollercoaster is going to have the underwater theme as mentioned in a previous post and it starts on a huge theme park island. Starting at point 1, you have the beginning part of the track where the people board the rollercoaster.
It then starts moving slowly and naturally ends up accelerating as it goes down the slope. A glass tunnel visible in the water is where the track passes through and the car travels in a U shape to end up back outside where it goes up a short slope and then pauses for a second. After the pause, the car ends up moving backwards down the track due to gravity mainly and down a new branching track which also is in a U shape. This was designed deliberately so the car would end up facing the right way after the 2nd U bend. As it comes back down now facing the right way, the track ends up twisting in corkscrew fashion along the walls and ceiling for a certain distance before resuming it's usual form.


This 2nd area comes after the corkscrew part and the car accelerates as it's going up a slope and about to hit a huge jump. The track leads outside once again and the jump takes place in the air as the diagram shows. Once the car hits the jump, time will "slow down" with the sound of screaming drowned out by wind and extreme wide eyed expressions will appear on the passengers too. The camera will pan around the car slowly too and will snap back to the front immediately when the car hits the track again with time speeding up to normal speed again respectively.
The car goes underwater again and hits a huge U turn before ending up going in the opposite direction to where it came from but this is leading up to the last part of the track that is behind the island itself.

After the turn, it hits a loop de loop and then passes through an area with wildlife, plants and possibly a shipwreck too. I was planning on having dangerous wildlife here like sharks and octopi to add to the thrills and scares.
After the first wildlife section, we come to the "Dolphin Jumps" area. Here, the track takes the form of 2 large hills rising out of the water, with a gap at the top. I was trying to recreate how dolphins jump in and out of the water rapidly as they swim, I would have liked to have more jumps here actually.
After the Dolphin Jumps, we come to the Minefield Madness area. As the name suggests, an underwater minefield is located here and the track weaves in and out of the mines before running into the 2nd and final wildlife area. The 2nd wildlife area is a tamer place designed to act like a breather before the grand finale and only features safer animals like turtles. I was thinking of having a treasure chest here too. Here we have the Grand Finale area, featuring a huge loop de loop and an exciting jump to the end platform. The loop de loop rises out of the water and is placed to help gather speed for the jump at the end. After it, the car will accelerate as it will rise out of the water and the back of the island will be visible too. The track stops before the end platform but has a little ramp at the end so the car will have to make a leap of faith to the end platform and stop there. The gap won't be far though anyways.

I really like the ideas I have come up with to be honest and I'd love to be able to make the full thing I designed. Trouble is, there is an immense amount to be built and animated, and it literally would be impossible in my timeframe so I will have to make scarifices, but I am happy with the concept and should be able to pull it off without too many problems I think.

Phoenix Wrong: The Movie!

Hey guys, as you know, I make a series of video game spoofs called Phoenix Wrongs. The last time I posted about them, I had made 12 of them and now I've made 15 of them altogether since that time, with over 200 subscribers to my name now as well! I took a huge break out to concentrate on my course, but I'm planning to go back to making them...in Summer that is D:. It's a long time away and it gives me plenty of time to refresh myself and build up tons of ideas as I've been making them nonstop for 18 months!
Before my break, I really went out with a bang though...As you know from the title of the blog, I finally made the movie length Phoenix Wrong! I collaborated with 14 other PW makers to make the movie over a 2-3 month period and its a Youtube hit, its still to gain more attention before it truly becomes famous and makes an unforgettable stamp, but all 15 of us worked hard on the project and we all are exceptionally proud of how it's turned out! We had to sacrifice some ideas for it and also we are now keen to make a sequel as well as inviting people on board to make it in the future, no idea when but hopefully not till Summer as I'll be free then!
This is part 1 of 7 of the movie and I hope you enjoy watching it as much as we did making them!

Ideas So Far: Term 1

Concerning my 3 main projects, I have come up with ideas for each of them, I already mentioned I had some for the card game project for games design.
With animation, I've got a few ideas floating for the comedic gag that the robot will succumb to and I'm actually pretty excited about it as I'm keen on both animation and comedy especially the latter, so making something humorous is right up my alley! I can actually feel inspiration gathering and I can't wait to see if I can actually recreate my ideas as I would love to! Whether the final idea I choose is going to be funny, unique, creative and memorable enough for the standard required is just a matter of time, but I hope I do well on this to be honest as I'm pretty keen on it.
With those Phoenix Wrongs, I get pretty creative with them and I specialise in slapstick, random humour in them so I'm really hoping to apply what I do there to this project and hopefully make something memorable for the right reasons and good enough to pass with a decent mark.

For the rollercoaster project which is what I wanted talk about mainly, I have 2 main sources of very convenient inspiration actually. One of them is a 3D rollercoaster game on my phone, which I only just realised I had! I play it a lot and have picked up a lot from it through playing it, which is going to be extremely helpful for this project! My other source of inspiration is another game called Audiosurf. Normally, people would say RollerCoaster Tycoon as as source as its a popular and well known game, but here I'd like to focus on something more unique and abstract.
First things first though, we had to choose whether to have our roller-coaster set in space or underwater, and I've opted for underwater which is the harder one as I realised. With underwater, I will have to recreate accurate physics of travelling underwater, but I already have a counter measure against that. I'll probably need to model wildlife and plant life to add to the atmosphere of course, otherwise it will be quite an empty and disappointing ocean. I may have to leave them out due to time restrictions, but I will try to include some in including a shark and a turtle as well as some shells and seaweed possibly.

The counter measure against the water physics I mentioned just now by the way, I will not have to worry about that really as I plan to have the roller coaster go through an underwater tunnel with some "freaky" movement along the walls and ceiling, which is something I picked up from playing a Sonic game called Sonic Heroes.
As you can see from the 2nd screenshot, that is the level that inspired me. Its one of hte bonus stages from the game and you're inside a huge transparent glass tunnel which you need to chase that hot air balloon to the end. What I love about this level is that you can run along the walls as well, other games have incorporated this in their own way I think, actually the F-Zero games do have something like this as well. I imagine the rollercoaster car going down a tunnel like this underwater and it moving along the walls and the ceiling in a corkscrew fashion as the track spirals through the tunnel.
What would be the icing on the cake would be the fact you could see the wildlife outside whilst travelling through at high speed which can be both entrancing and also scary depending on what appears. Actually, that reminds me of another source of inspiration to think of it, the film Jaws 3 I think it is. It's where they are at this water resort and at one point, I remember them being underwater in a tunnel like this and the shark smashing against the tunnel, which could be a good surprise to be implemented in this.

I also got some more inspiration of a friend of mine who said I should have the rollercoaster go through an area populated with underwater mines and have the roller coaster weave in and out rapidly to increase tension and thrills. I'd like to also implement a ship wreck somehow too if possible, but I doubt it will be possible due to time restrictions. For the car itself, I'm probably going to have some sort of submarine/roller coaster car hybrid so that it can travel outside of the tunnel, by automatically closing a watertight shield over the car when it reaches outside the tunnel. I'd like to also have it come out the water at certain times to go through the air and rapidly drop back into the water, with the track ending the back of the island you start on.

Back to the first 2 sources of inspiration anyway. The game on my phone is called 3D Rollercoaster Rush and it is by Digital Chocolate.
I noticed whilst browsing images of the game, that UFOs appear in the background during a nightime setting which is an interesting touch, I'm not far enough in the game to know that but I'm sure I'm close. This game as you would expect gets more intense and difficult the further in and I find it to be a great deal of inspiration right now. They include features like breathtaking drops, very steep slopes, closely put together gaps and huge loop de loops to add intensity to the track and you really have to balance your speed throughout to make it through safely, never mind scoring the 5 star rating!

The other game I mentioned is Audiosurf, a game emphasising use of your own music to produce the actual game! Basically, you ride a spaceship down a track collecting coloured blobs and creating matches mainly, and the actual track is formed by the song used, it changes completely to suit the song loaded, with bumps, tunnels and other features representing particular moments of the song.
The shape of some of the tracks you get can be very wild, twisting, mad and eye-appealing really. The speed you fly down the track is affected by the tempo of the song and also the amount of blocks you have to deal with (the "traffic"), is affected by the song too. I've always felt the game to be like a musical rollercoaster to be honest, it literally is like the sci-fi racing game F-Zero fused with music recognition and a typical puzzle game to me. The tracks themselves are the source of inspiration here as they can have corkscrews, huge drops and climbs, hills and the like, which remind me of a rollercoaster and hence I can get inspired by it too.

A screenshot above shows a typical screen from the game whilst playing on a track anyways. It cant really be seen, but in the top left, you do get a mini map of the outline of the track showing what horrors are coming your way xD. Quite a strange choice of song too there...

Anyways, I am planning to work on some outlines for the track later today, I did try to do them digitally and it went badly, so I may use an A4 sketchbook instead to sketch out designs, as it will be easier. I do have a graphics tablet, but I still find it hard to use in this sort of situaiton so doing it on paper will probably be best, I can try using the mouse with the paths tool in an image editor to think of it, but Ill see how I get along on paper first. I'll scan my drawings in if I do opt for the paper option and I'll post them on here.

Back From The Dead? Progress So Far 6/11/09

Well my 2nd blog is out, much, much later than it should be.
To tell the truth, I've been ill with a nasty viral infection for about sweet sixteen days and it's been a killer. It conveniently happened at the end of my first week at uni which isnt too suspicious at all >_>.

I've made a nearly complete recovery now, still have a chesty cough which tends to pick up once a day but be dead for the rest of the day. I came back to uni this past Monday completely stressed as hell because of how much time I had off and the impact it was going to have on my work especially seeing as my deadlines for the 3 main projects are all 15th December...Just over a month away and Im crapping myself in all honesty.

With my first day back on Monday, it actually went really smoothly. I had my Animation seminar and it went really well, much to my surprise and delight! We had begun building the robot for the project and they had already made the legs and arms. This week was moving onto the spine and head, thus completing the modelling of the robot in 2 sessions including personal time if necessary. I actually sailed through the seminar, even stopping occasionally to help my friend out. I built the robots spine and head easily with no major problems, I was working from a pre-set file where the arms and legs had been already built.
I actually stayed behind at the end of the seminar to finish the final part of the work where we rigged the robot for animation. We had to build gyros which were pretty simple to do, albeit a little fiddly as they involved some rotation but it was doable. Pleased with my results, I had to connect the top and bottom of the spine as well as the head to their respective gyros. Andy already had left so what happened next was quite a problem, the body twisted a fair bit in a corkscrew fashion when I connected the spine gyros and it looked pretty weird. I got confused and frustrated to what had happened and left due to it as I had been working for 3 hours straight. Although, I spoke to a friend later this week and he said that does happen and it is fixable, so it's all good now I know how to sort it. I'll tweak it in next weeks seminar before we do the work and also later in the week if I get the opportunity, to look at and work through the Orrery and Arms and Legs worksheets.

The Visualisation seminar went well too, had some problems but I managed to sort them out throughout the seminar and I also was able to understand the seminar well and also what I missed. I hadn't missed that much I dont think, it was all about working with splines really which is important for the rollercoaster. We looked at light and colour, and my prior knowledge of them from A-Level Physics made understanding it a doddle tbh, although it was the simple version of what we needed to know. Apparently we need to know about Photography too, so I'm going to have to look into that at some point as we need to know about shutter speed, aperture etc.

Games Design was the one I'm most worried about and had the right to be after the seminar. We continued designing our card games or in my case, begun D:. After struggling a hell of a lot, I came up with 3 ideas but there are major flaws with all of them and it's making my life a nightmare, although Brad is speaking to me next week about them which is what I need now. The briefs says we need to make the card game playable for 2 people, simple, fun and strategic plus also be targeted towards the 16+ age range which is where the strategic element is vital too.
Only one of my ideas has any strategy to it and it isn't that strategic either, although it's currently the best one I have as flawed as it is. This card game project is pretty difficult tbh but I do have to try and do well with it as this is what I'm going into, which is Games Design and I'm sure to face scenarios like this even though I'll be working with video games.

I also actually managed to go to my tutorial yesterday with Deborah and Jools' lecture today after missing 3 weeks worth thanks to my illness. The tutorial was pretty helpful for me and it's helping me to get organised within the chaos I am in at the moment. The lecture was done by a guest lecturer who is a Careers expert for Art And Design who works at NTU. She gave us a pretty detailed insight into getting a job including building up your CV, how to compete with hundreds of other applicants and bucketloads of resources for us to look at too. We also had guest speaker from a recruitment company who is a former NTU student and also gave us a informative lowdown on getting a career and the current state of the industry as well as other things.

Entering The 2nd Year

Well we've been back for a mere 9 days and ive been off university for 4 days as well as 2 days for the weekend and my day off twice in the 2 weeks so far. Im in my 2nd week of being back in this 1st term and ive been off since last Wednesday as I contracted a serious viral infection.

Before I even came back to university, I've been so stressed out to the point I've had to seek mental counselling due to the state I was in all the time. A load of nightmarish things happened to me during the time I finished year 1 and joined this year including major family problems, my neighbours dog barking all day everyday and also 3DS not working at all, no matter what I did.

I was so stressed out and dreading the course so much, I considered quitting to be honest. I finally solved my 3DS Max problem but I have to wait for my new copy to arrive as its 8 days late and apparently its due on Friday now, after I rang the company. Im undergoing counselling too but after 3-4 days at being back to uni or w/e, I fell hugely ill with a viral infection hence Ive been off since then and still not made any signs of recovery so far.


As it is i'm stressed to breaking point, but now Im very worried about how far behind I am with this now, it doesnt help I dont have 3DS Max on me yet nor having any practise with it in the holidays either. I chose the most demanding pathway of the 3 too, Virtual Environments. In order to pass, we have to at least 40 hours a week with it, although Im hoping that does mean divided along the 3 modules, 120 hours a week is just impossible of course o_0.

Before I fell ill though, I did get to meet all the tutors for Virtual Environments and get a grasp of each of the 3 modules. Im studying Animation, Visualisation and Games Design, the latter being the one I'm most excited about tbh :).

The Visualisation is being taught by a 3D Artist from a company specialising in 3D design work and Games Design is taught by a 3D Games Artist from the former company Free Radical and now based at Eurocom. I actually found to be able to be taught by people from backgrounds like this quite a privilege and fascinating, their showreels were definitely impressive as well!

After looking at the projects for the 3 modules, I do love what we have to do actually, it does look fun, interesting and rewarding in the end definitely. All 3 are very demanding beyond belief though and I am intimidated whether I can actually manage to do well in them tbh, especially designing an outer space or underwater based roller coaster for Visualisation, Animation is probably going to be the one I find easiest somehow. For Games Design, I have to develop a completely new, unique and fun card game to play which I feel pretty intimidated by, but I need to be able to do stuff like this and get my creativity flowing bigtime if I want to land the career Im after, so theres a lot of pressure on me at the moment. Animation has us building and animating a robot which will be the victim of a comedic gag, one that will be something like a banana skin on the floor but with our own unique twist to make it fresh. I believe Im more capable of doing this than the other 2, as Im forming ideas of how Id like to do it already.

Since Ive come back, Ive had to miss my tutorial session and my first SSP2 session as well as this weeks seminars and the like for VE, which is a huge setback, as Im off for the rest of the week too.
I've had to make huge sacrifices too, I quit my Japanese supplementary course to ease a lot of pressure and free up as much time as possible, I also have taken a 9 month break roughly from my hobby work to focus on my uni projects as well.

To be honest though, I dont mean to be so negative at the start of my new year, but I will need a miracle to get through this. The work we have to do is pretty exciting and interesting, but due to all these complications I keep suddenly suffering and fear of not being capable enough to succeed enough, its going be a battle on the scale of life and death in some ways to get through this, but im sure it will really have its rewards when I do get through it.
Although, I have to say...next summer cant roll around fast enough =/.

Some More Awesome Stop Motion Videos Yo

That second one is just AMAZINH, FREAKING AMAZING!

This is exactly one of the strongest reasons why I love Japan! :D

My Invitation To Artician = Very Potentially Beneficial Participation

http://krazykakashiii.artician.com/

I just got an email earlier asking me if I would like to join this huge artistic community called Artician. After looking at the site and getting highly impressed, I noticed it's literally like a hybrid of Carbonmade, DeviantArt and Blogger! You can set up your own online portfolio and also import your own work directly from your DeviantArt account to be viewed on here! As well as that, you can set up an RSS feed of you're own blogs as part of your own domain on here, it literally is perfect for me! I was meant to be using Carbonmade but I may just stick to this solely or use it as well as Carbonmade, I'll see :P. Ill upload my Identities project to here too, which will later this week! :D

P.S. Sorry for lack of updates, its the last week to build the project so it's a mad last minute panic for me and I've had to make sacrifices to free up more time for me to build the project. Everything is built apart from the box itself in Flash which im working on at the mo, and I seirously have so much to update on here, it's terrifying. Brace yourself next week, as I'll be doing LOADS of blogging as so much has happened and such, its going to take me freaking ages to describe it all, -sigh- >_<.

Ciao for now anyways!

After One Intense, Hopless and Unfruitful Struggle...

THE AVATAR IS COMPLETE!!!! :DDDD

Sorry, but I just feel incredibly fantastic after completing the avatar that I've been trying to make for over 2 months now I think! 0_0 I wasted so much time on it solely and I paid the price for it with falling behind with the project itself and having to sacrifice Japanese revision and life drawing as a result. Last week Monday or maybe slightly earlier, I had a sudden revelation of sorts, I suddenly figured out how to build the head for the avatar. On Tuesday when I went in for a seminar instead of going to the one on Thursday (I went to another groups seminar due to complications on Thursday), and I ran into a good friend of mine who knew how to build the avatar which was a brilliant stroke of luck.

I showed him the head I had built seperately and the body as well, and asked him how to join them together. After some tinkering around, he managed to join the two parts together and form the avatar's whole body :). Trouble is though, I still had no idea had to do clothes and hair, so I went home after the seminar to attempt it anyways. I struggled like hell to figure out to make the clothes, I tried some methods but it always went wronf and I barely could find tutorials on adding clothes on the Internet, hence it was very frustrating for me. But I had another relevation later in the week and I realised, what would happen if I tried to model the clothes on the body seperately using the same method I used for the head?

Basically, I built a plane in Front view for the coat in front of the chest, and I applied the Symmetry modifier to it and then used the Extrude Face option combined with the Shift key to create new polygons from that single plane-cum-polygon now. I created a box around the chest, basically imagien people who wear cardboard boxes with their arms, head and legs sticking out thats what literally recreated. I then made the box transparent and edited the vertices of it with MeshSmooth active on it to help me mold the box into the shape of a coat on the body, and it worked out really well! :D

After that recent success, I immediately applied the same method to build face mask, eyepatch, trousers and shoes and what you will see soon is a result of my discovery :). It took me freaking ages to mold the vertices of the coat alone just right, but it paid off in the end. After modelling all the clothes on, the next step would be to texture them. Handily, since I made them as seperate components to the body, they will end up using their own invidual materials and hence each component can hsve a different material assigned to it. I used the UVW Unrwap modifier to create texture maps of each component one at a time, then I exported them as image files, where I thus edited them with The GIMP (yes that is its actual name). I went a little crazy with the coat, and I changed the look of it by adding red dragons to the front, some blue lines and butterflies (I brush I downloaded for the butterflies) on the back of the coat and I also used a Japanese character brush to put my name in Hiragana on the coat, but it ended up on the inside (dont ask how -_-').

Finally, the hair was left and this turned out to be the biggest demon to conquer. As it stands, Im not really as happy with the hair, but 3DS MAX does create some truly awesome and realistic hair. I had no idea how to do the hair, and I tried following the tutorials but only the official ones were of any help to me. I was meant to model the hair using splines so I could create my ideal hairstyle, but it was very fiddly, difficult, time consuming and frustrating to work with, hence why I didnt use it in the end. Instead, I used preset hair and I tweaked the hairstyle of it using the Styling options as well as recolouring it too. It still looks pretty damn good, but it's not the hairstyle I wanted ideally. Hair in 3DS Max is probably the most difficult thing in bar human and animal animation possibly, and the hair you will see is what I managed to get after hundreds of failed attempts and retries due to limitations and how unforgiving the Hair system is.

Anyways, no moee further delays, here is the avatar! I'm still trying to figure out how to get it from 3ds max into flash, but Ive just asked a friend on it anyways:

The avatar has turned pretty awesome in my opinion, I created a hybrid of my two imvu characters, but it's nowhere near as detailed and refined as my ideal avatar, although for my first attempt its not too damn bad! ;D. I am going to create my ideal avatar one day definitely, its going to be one of my ultimate challenges, I was too ambitious witht the concepts for the box, elements and avatar, but Ive always been better at concept than technical skills anyways :P. if you could leave me any comments on here, Facebook or in person or w/e, Id be very pleased :). Ciao!

Drawings Update 18/04/09

In the first drawing for today's list, I wanted to do some more sketches of human faces hence I picked out a random picture I had, and Mr Bean was the one I got. I found the picture ideal to draw from and the result of it is above. I kept it greyscale rather than colour because I prefer it this way for this drawing, and I also used the premade tones in Manga Studio again for the clothes in this sketch. It's a pretty pleasing result anyways and its slowly helping my confidence with drawing humans now.
This next drawing is actually a sketch my friend Tebby did for me. He wanted to test out my inking and digital colouring skills, so he drew me a sketch of a character he made up on the spot and handed it for me to turn into what you see now. All I did was ink the drawing after scanning it in and added colour to it using a colour scheme I felt was perfect fort his character after lots of experimentation.
He's going to be one of the main characters in the manga me and Tebby are going to be working on and we haven't decided on any other specifics like his name, but I think I have a good idea of how I'd like him to be in personality.

This next drawing is of Shigure Sohma from the anime and manga series Fruits Basket. I'm a big fan of his character because he is always very goofy and outgoing but he does have his serious side as well which seldom appears in contrast to his outer personality. I couldn't quite find the pattern I chose for the background with dogs in it, but I loved the style of it so I used it anyways. The style of the background is very similar to the artist's drawing style hence I felt it suited this character to a T.

This next drawing is of Ranma Saotome from the much loved and highly inspirational manga and anime series Ranma 1/2. The manga artist is considered a living legend partly because of this series and many anime have been inspired by it in many ways. Here's a twist for you though, Ranma is actually a boy but he a curse put on him and now he transforms into a girl when splashed with cold water, and back into his boy self when it's hot water. I love the colour scheme and the design of the female Ranma hence I wanted to draw "her" and I gave her a background to suit her beauty as well. Since I love the colour scheme so much, colouring this drawing was an absolute must and you can see the awesome results above :D.

This next drawing is of Roy Mustang from the Full Metal Alchemist anime and manga series. I'm quite a big fan of his personality as well as him being the Flame Alchemist in the show wo produces flames from just clicking his fingers, which is so simple but very effective and impressive. Again I chose greyscale as I favoured it for this drawing too, and I used a premade tone for the background. I'm not exactly sure why I choose colour for some drawings but greyscale for some others, I'm just weird like that XD.


Finally, this next drawing is from the same series FMA, but there's a twist. The series just got remade to match the storyline of the original manga series instead of following it's own storyline and it currently has aired it's second episode now. The author has changed his drawing style slightly in the remake making one of the 2 main antonganists Edward (pictured above) look more mature and hardended but the series still does have plenty of goofy moments with exaggerated, comedic expressions and poses. Due to the altered drawing style, I thought I'd do a sketch of the 2 main antoganists Edward and Alphonse Elric as you can see above. I did the drawing in 3 sessions over 3 days and as you can see, I accidentally did Alphonse with a thicker, darker brush setting but I think it works well in some ways now xD. I'm still currently debating whether to colour it or keept it greyscale, or just to leave it as is even.

2 Absolutely Brilliant Stop Motion Videos Using Action Figures

Just watch them please :D. They are both seriously amazing in their own ways, and deserve a lot of recognition. I would love to be able to make videos like this, they definitely have inspired me and Id love to make something similar with my own unique twist on it xD. I love the music in the Iron man vs Bruce Lee one and the implentation of well known sound effects in the Godzilla one helps to immerse you into the setting very well actually, I forgot I was watching a stop motion video xD.

Krazy Kakashi: An Official Fundamental In Making Other's Lives Better

I just logged into to my main Youtube account today as usual, and checked the new comments on my videos, only to discover the most shocking, enlightening and motivational comment I have ever received in my life for anything, and I quote:

Riaxaria

I just have to tell you my man, I have a good friend dying from cancer; If it not for the utter magnificence of your unique and brilliant Phoenix Wrong videos all this time I don't know where I would be right now in life. Thanks a great deal Kakashi, dont ever stop doing what you were meant to do. Continue inspiring others with your outrageous talent and five star sense of humor. A smile a day can change a life. A thousand laughs per minute can change the attitude of the world. HpyB!!!

That was posted on my Ultimate Wrongs Part 2 video and it can be seen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HEEXWVLBw

Well, I think you can see why I was so shocked and amazed by that comment now. I actually managed to help someone out greatly in that sort of situation by just being myself essentially, not a lot of people can say that! All I ever cared about with these videos is also my life long passion, to be able to make others laugh as much as possible mainly with just being myself! This comment has been an unbelievable motivational boost for me, if ever required any motivation to keep myself goign with these videos, this is it. Im a veyr keen supporter of fighting cancer as my grandma very nearly lost her life to it a year ago and also recently a best friend of mine came down with a cancerous lump but is doing fine now with the treatments and all that. I also support several charities and I work for Cancer Reserarch so this is just an amazing discovery for me really, this is definitely going to keep me going with these videos, knowing once and for all just what kind of impact they really do have.

There you go anyways, thought I'd let you all know about it :).

Identities Box Project Update: Final Concept and Construction

With my Identities Box project so far, I havent got as much done as I would have liked to ideally. My concept for it is finally solidified now though, and Ive chosen how the box will be and the 5 elements that will form it.

With the core of the box, I have decided to go for the idea of the manga books on a table as I've learned how to build everything I need for that with 3DS Max now, and I can use Manga Studio to greatly assist me with it too. I'm not making the conents of the books interactive anymore, I believe that I definitely don't have enough time left to do that, but each book will still contain one of the 5 elemements.

My logo has already been built, and I'm currently building the 3D avatar now. I've endured weeks of frustration on how to use 3DS Max and modelling my character, but the penny has finally dropped and I know now what Im doing hence Im trying to make up for lost time now. The avatar will be a merge of the two outfits I showed for my character from IMVU, and if I do get time somehow, I'll try to model the secondary avatars as well, who are going to acts as pets for my main avatar.

The audio-visual element is going to be based on the tributes I do to the fan created parody series of the Phoenix Wright games, Phoenix Wrongs. I'm currently developing a video of my greatest sketches out of all 12 of the videos I've made so far and I may make it longer than the (just under) 10 mins that I usually do depending on how it goes.

My 4th element has finally been sorted on what it is going to be. It's going to be two seperate videos, included as one video, as I would like to have both videos in the project to be honest. The first video wil be a stop motion animation of a wooden mannequin I have dancing to different songs, or maybe just one depending on how long it takes to do all the photo shooting. The other video I will be submitting will be a whiteboard animation, but I'm throwing in a little twist on it. I own several whiteboards due to buying a bundle off them instead of 1 by accident on a website, and hence I thought Id make the most of them. Im going to have them arranged in a horizontal row and basically, imagine an animation starting on the leftmost board like someone kicking a ball. After he kicks it, I can use the whiteboards to show the ball traversing from one whiteboard to another as it flies to the right, getting larger on each board until it hits something or someone. I believe if I manage to execute this well enough, it will be a highly impressive video to watch :P.

And finally, the 5th element is going to be a slideshow of my drawings I have done, since I started using my graphics tablet to the last one I did, just before I made the slidehow.I've got an insane to impossible amount to get done in the time I have left, so Im currently trying to get as much done as possible whilst actually staying calm for the most part. One of my biggest weakenesses is how much I panic over things like unfamiliar new situations with high risks like exams and also nearing deadlines for projects, but I'm slowly learning to be calmer and more composed and focused now with them. Im not letting myself go into a panic frenzy like I usually do, I will get as much I physically can get done with this project and I for once, will be happy with what I managed to achieve regardless.

Drawings Update 7/4/09

Sorry I havent updated in a while again, have been so caught up with doing my Identities project work as well as my upcoming Japanese oral exam, so Im very stressed out right now, but I have done a lot of new drawings which I will show now:


This first drawing is of Rangiku Matsumoto from the anime and manga series Bleach by Tite Kubo. I'm a big fan of the series and this character so she was was on my list of characters to draw, and I chose this picture especially because it was done in the Chibi art style. I am extremely keen on this art style as I love how cute and adorable the characters look (xD), but I love how colourful and joyful they appear too, as well as the oversized head proportionality to them lol. I'm trying to learn how to draw Chibi style properly at the moment using some Manga drawing books, and I hope to be able to draw my own characters in it.

This drawing is of Link from the Zelda series, but this is a new art style invented for the series starting with the game Zelda: The Wind Waker. It was an all new cel shaded art style that caused both a lot of controversy as well as appreciation and divided a lot of the long dedicated fans. Up to this day, the style has grown on people more now though and has been used in other games, some of them starring the same Link from that timeline, which are: Zelda: The Minish Cap, Zelda: The Four Swords, Zelda: Phanthom Hourglass and Zelda: Spirit Tracks (W.I.P.). I added a black border around this drawing too after seeing how well it worked with the previous one, and I have to say, it's worked pretty well with both the coloured and original black and white versions of this one. I absolutely love black and white graphic style effects, but not in insane amounts as offered in that new Wii game Madworld -_-'.



This 3rd drawing is of Konata from the anime and manga series Lucky Star. I'm a big fan of this character as I find her personality pretty similar to mine and I love the colour of her particularly (xD). Hence I had to draw her too, and this picture I used seems to depict her in some sort of a Phantom Of The Opera outfit, which I haven't seen before, but I never watched the series through though. It could be a fan art for all I know, as poeple these days can actually replicate manga artist's work perfectly from scratch which is actually very intimidating for people like me now lol.





These next 2 drawings are of characters I created by "accident" when working from some step by step guides in my Manga books. What happened is as I was following the instructions, I drew the characters to close to the paper's edge and hence I couldn't fit on the whole of their hairstyles so I had to improvise and change their hairstyles to make them fit on the page. On the second drawing with the character at the top, that si a pretty accurate recreation of the original character as that one I managed to do fine. The first drawing was ironically a boy to begin with, but as I continued to draw him, he started to look more feminine due to how I drew him, hence I decided to make him a "her", and there's the final result of what happened lol. The bottom part of the second drawing went through a pretty drastic change too, he had huge spikey hair in a semi circle fashion, but as you can see, I changed his hair quite a lot lol. Also, I changed the colours of this drawing and that boy (who's now a girl), and I added face markings to this character to make them more like my own creations in essence.


This next drawing is one of my favourite characters, Rukia Kuchiki from the anime and manga series Bleach by Tite Kubo. I really loved the original picture for this, hence I decided to sketch it out and this is what I got eventually. It was a pretty demanding drawing especially compared to some of my more modern ones, and I decided to start using different shades of gray and highlights for the black and white pictures to add more depth to the composition anyways.



This drawing is of my closest friend for quite a long time now, Leila Fox. She is a serious art fanatic and is one of the best artists I've seen especially non professional of course, and she is extremely popular with my old school's Art department for obvious reasons. I've been trying for ages to sketch a decent drawing of her, but I always struggled due to my lack of skills and experience with drawing human anatomy, hence I never managed to do one successfully. I finally managed to do this drawing though recently after a random, unexplainable surge of determination I got to fulfil this wish of mine and I used the same style I did with my self portrait to to draw this. I started using the Tones feature in Manga Studio, to help with the shading of this drawing as well as make it more eye appealing, particularly the background as you can see. Completing this drawing was a serious achievement for me and it gave me a fairly strong confidence boost as a a result too, and it was all thanks to getting a graphics tablet in the first place :D.



Finally, we get to another drawing of Phoenix Wright I've done, but this time in his original form as drawn by the artist. I loved how this one turned out after it was coloured, it really does resemble the original artwork for him very well, hence it did my confidence a good boost. Embrassingly, I was lazy with shading and colouring the bench he's on actually, as I was too tired to finish the sketch and I wanted to get it out the way at the time, so I cloned the bench from the original picture to save a lot of time and effort. It looks good of course being the original bench used, but it's also a pretty cheap result because I didn't draw and shade in the bench myself >_< bleh. Im still pretty pleased with the whole picture though regardless.

A Truly Amazing 3D Animation Video I Found

This video is a fan of the Naruto anime and manga series' attempt to animate scenes from the manga which haven't been animated yet. The person who made this used a combination of Maya, After Effects and Photoshop to produce his own animated versions of the manga scenes, and I was seriously blown away by it. This is something I'd love to be able to do, and it's the sort of thing I was hoping to work towards as Im aspiring to be a manga artist or a character artist/animator preferably. I thought it would be better to combine these two careers as much as possible into one, hence Ill be a character artist focusing on the manga style really. I'm going to try and work to this guy's level as much as possible, obviously it won't be an overnight process, but with enough time and determination put in, I could do it.

Drawings Update 29/03/09

This first drawing is of Sadaharu, a giant alien dog from the anime and manga series, Gin Tama. The picture was done in an orthographic style with 3 different views of him, hence I found it quite useful to draw as draing from different angles is one of my weaknesses.

This next drawing is of the Akatsuki leader from the Naruto Shippuuden anime and manga series, Tobi or his true name Madara Uchiha. He's one of my fave characters in the series with a really goofy personality that also really matches mine well and a brilliant voice actor to boot. I decided to colour this one on a whim and it soon caught on for me after it was done. It did turn out pretty well and now I aim to colour each new drawing when I do one if possible.

And this next drawing is of one of my most favourite characters in general from a game as well as an anime and manga series now, Sheena Fuyibashi. She is from Tales of Symphonia and she's another character who I adore for her personality, but I love her clothes too, especially since they are a kunoichi (female ninja) style. If you can, open the image in a new tab or window to see it in it's true quality and size :P.
This drawing is of an "legendary" character from the Zelda CD-I games called "The King". He never had a name as far as I know, that's how he is always referred to, the poor guy. The games are spoofed immensely because of how cheesy and childish they were, and the King with his extremely "memorable" quotes has become a huge internet phenomenon and gets parodied all the time. The writing in the picture is his most famous catchprase and it is abused a lot, people just love to say it, the man has been a massive influence but not for the reasons he was intended to be I dont think xD.

Finally, we get to the drawing I did a little earlier. This one is of Rangiku Matsumoto from the anime and manga series, Bleach. I absolutely love the chibi style of drawing and wanted to learn how to and master drawing with it, hence this picture was ideal for me, and it has turned out fantastic in my opinion! :D I particularly love how well I managed to colour it and replicate the original picture it was based on, even though this was a trace =/. I am doing drawings on a daily basis now, hence I will be blogging on them more frequently as I'm doing at least 5 drawings a week now :P.

My Personal Progress So Far

At the moment, I've got a 101 things going on, so I thought I'd blog about what's happening and what I'm doing for the course as it stands, especially as I keep forgetting to.
First things first, I've definitely decided on my pathway, I already had it in mind when I chose the course, and my mind hasn't changed at all, the pathway I'm taking is Virtual Environments. It combines 3 things I'm very keen on, Virtual Reality, Games Design and Animation, it's a sort of mecca for me right now XD. I'm currently in the progress of writing my 2nd essay which is all about design pathways for the course and pracititioners from the area you're interesed in. Embrassingly, I've only started the intro, but I will amp up the work done on it immediately, I'll explain later why I haven't gto as much of it done as Im meant to.

After being recommended a book by Roma and Jools doing a lecture on books, I decided to set out and get borrowing books from the library...finally lol. It was definitely a great idea, as I was a kid in a candy store when I found the games design and animation sections, hence i've gota lot of books to talk about now XD. Roma recommended me a book called "The Skillful Huntsman", which is all about the recreation of a particular book by graduates and students/teachers from one of the world's leading art schools which is based in America (Art Centre College of Design, Pasadena in California). the book is all about the design process the artists when through when they were designing the visual piece. What attracted me was how they devleoped the characters, they started out with hundreds of miniscule but pretty detailed thumbnail sketches of a character, and built up the character through increasingly complex stages, involving larger, more detailed sketches, silhouette forms, drawings of the head alone etc. It's really fascinating to see how they go from simple, tiny sketches to extremely detailed, awe inspiring, much larger sketches in the end which become the character you see eventually.

Moving on, I bought some books after borrowing them from the library and finding them really useful for the course, especially with the pathway I've chosen and they will also help wih my personal work and eventual career a lot too. I'm jsut going to list the books instead of describing them, as this blog is going to be very, very long without me describing them anwyays! The books that I think are really useful, and definitely worth a look for anyone considering Virtual Environments are:

1. Animating Real Time Game Characters - Paul Steed
2. Video Game Art - Nick Kelman
3. The Complete Guide To Game Development, Art & Design -David McCathy, Ste Curran and Simon Byron
4. Inspired 3D Short Film Production - Jeremy Cantor, Pepe Valencia
5. The Skillful Huntsman - Khang Le, Mike Yamada, Felix Yoon, Scott Robertson

I haven't actually read these books through ironically, I'd have to be Superman to have read all of them by now -_-', but from what I saw upon looking through them quickly, I was highly impressed. You can get all the books from the library, (after I return them on Friday of course :P) and if you wanna get them after seeing them, I seriously recommend Amazon, they are pretty cheap on there usually. As well as those books, I bought 3 books from the "For Dummies" range, which are Drawing, Manga and Manga Studio For Dummies to help with my drawing as much as possible, as seeing as I'm a complete beginner, I need all the help and practise I can get 0_0. Again, I havent read them but I'm going to try and read them as much as possible soon especially Manga Studio so I can get closer to drawing better as soon as possible.

As it stands, I'm currently undergoing life drawing classes as well as doing as my own sketches to boost my drawing skills as much as possible, as I'm aiming to be a character artist or an animator. I've done 2 classes now, but the term is finished so I have to go in the next term now. Our tutor reckons we shouldn't think about textures till at least 20 weeks into the course though, which could be in the 2nd year possibly. I have no real experience with drawing to be honest, I didnt really practise that much in the past, and I had such a "rollercoaster" experience with my drawings in the past before I upgraded to a tablet, I got put off it and decided to try wing it purely as a technical animator somehow. I've regained my determination to draw again though, as you can tell from what I've done above and my previous blog posts.

It is extremely difficult for me right now though, thankfully the life drawing classes are over, as in 2 weeks time, I have major exams for Japanese which are the last ones for this year, the super evil sounding oral exam is after the easter holidays though. In that same week, I have a 10 minute presentation to do for the Identities project, and also hand in the essay I mentioned earlier, due to my neighbours dogs barking for hours everyday and sending me into a near mental breakdown alone from that! I am going to try coming into uni to work now though as I've had enough now, I may use Boots Library's study rooms actually, or just go into Waverley, especially for computer based work. I have been reduced to tears practically from stress lately, and I'm currently finding things extremely difficult, the hardest part of my life so far, but I'm pulling through slowly. With life drawing, it's going to take me AGES to even do anywhere near decent drawings, and for someone with low patience and a tendency to get put off easily due to too much self reflection, comparison to other examples and lack of immediate results, this is so going to be "fun".

Finally, with the Identities project so far, I've got some of the elements built already as you will have seen from my blogs. Ive got my ideas sorted now, and Im trying to go for the table idea with comic books on it for the hub of the box. My logo has been made now, I've already got 1 of my additional elements ready which is one of my Phoenix Wrong videos (a compilation verison made exclusively for this), and the other additional element is gonna be a slideshow of all the drawings I will have done by mid April ish. Since I can easily make the slideshow quickly through Sony Vegas, Im leaving it till last and gettign everything else sorted including building the actual box. I'm still trying to master Bipeds, Walking and Facial Animation in 3Ds Max, and also learn how to make a table in it (I learn how to make a book). Hence, Im still trying to build my 3D avatar, but I definitely know how it will look, if you want to know what it will look like, check the blog before this one ;D. I also want to make some additional 3D avatar pets for my avatar himself, which are characters I made up and are quite fond of, so Ill try to make them in time for this project.

That's everything about what's going on with me at the moment I think anyways, ill update again in the future to let you know how the project is coming along then.

Drawings Update 11/03/09

Blimey, it has been a fair while since I last posted, but I have got some more drawings to show off. These were all done specifically for the Identities project, with the the 3D avatar in mind of course:


This drawing is off a new character I invented through total randomness XD. Im a massive fan of Ninjas and Meerkats, and I felt like combining them for some reason lolol. This is a basic sketch of what Id like my Ninja Meerkat character to look like anyways. I used a photo of a meerkat as inspiration and guidelines for this sketch. Ideally, I want him to be the pet of my main 3D avatar, although hes fine to be a stand alone character too.






With these pictures, I wanted to create a 3D avatar version of Jeffrey the Seal who's a character invented during the editing of my version of my group's one shot film lol. He started off an as ordinary imaginary character in the film, but I dubbed it with seal sound effects and thus Jeffey the Seal was born due to that XD. To produce these drawings, I bought some ceramic seals from the charity shop I work at, and I took photos of them, and used photos for one of them as the basis for the drawings. As you can see above, I took photos in an orthographic style, hence I have drawings of the Top, Left and Front views of Jeffrey as a result. I'm going to use these to help model the 3D version of Jeffrey neways.



If you've been following my 3D avatar diaries, then you should know who this fellow is^^. It's my character from IMVU, KrazyKakashi! Its the avatar I also want to recreate in my 3D avatar work for the Identities project, as the two different oufits there both contain the exact elements of how I'd love my ideal self to be! Anyways, to help with recreating my avtar from IMVU in 3DS Max, I thought I'd take screenshots of both outfits and draw them out, so I could look at them whilst I'm sculpting the avatar in 3DS. These were tough to do, as the quality of the screenshots (due to the quality of the game) weren't fanatstic and looked fairly horrid when imported into Manga Studio, it made zooming in difficult as a consequence, but I finally managed to draw them in the end. I drew basic versions of them by the way due to this problem as the finer details were much harder to see as well, but these will do perfectly fine for my 3D avatar, although the wings may benefit from some added detail.

My All New Logo

In order to develop my logo for my Identities project and personal work too, I originally started with Macromedia Fireworks CS4, but I eventually ended up creating the newer designs in a program called "The G.I.M.P."
The definitive nickname I want to go by for both my university work and my personal projects is: "Krazy Kakashiii", and hence I chose to base the design of my logo around this moniker as much as possible. I started out in Fireworks developing the text part of the logo, I experimented with some premade effects and textures to develop the logo, and ended up making quite a few different designs as a result.

As you can see above, I ended up creating logos with very different styles to one another. I was hoping to have a blue or green colour scheme, as they are my favourite colours and also, green is often associated with both the characters used in my existing logo. Hence, even though I do prefer the colour blue, I'm swinging more towards using green actually, as I feel it will blend and correspond with Tama-Chan and Kakashi due to their colour schemes. To be honest as well, green is definitely looking better than blue does with these logos so it would be good to have a logo based on several shades of green.

Looking back over the previous designs, I found the light blue one that I made with the "Hobo" was the most ideal font for my logo and was the one I felt most comfortable ad pleased with. I love how the shadow and highlight are used to make it stand out like that, it's something I enjoy adding onto text when I working in GIMP.

Anyways as you can see above, I set to work developing the final version of the logo text using said font. I decided to focus on a blue and green colour schemes as you can see here, but I also gave orange a try as a part of a very random whim. The bottom most logo is the one that I'm happiest with, and is the one I chose to use as part of my logo. Since I have sorted out the text part of my logo, all that is left to do is create the background/graphics for the logo and it will be complete. Ideally as I found out from a friend, the best thing to have done here, was to create the background for the logo in Adobe Illustrator BEFORE creating the text in Fireworks, as if you make the text in Fireworks first and export it, you can't really edit it easily in Illustrator, hence you lose a lot of freedom with the design of it that way.

So instead of using Illustrator, I decided to use GIMP instead as I'm a lot more comfortable with it and it means I can easily work on the logo from home. I set work developing a range of new designs for the logo neways featuring several different background in them, which I shall show now:

As evident from the pictures above, I created quite a lot of different designs for the logo, but my personal favourites from them are the Africa one and the one with a Geisha woman holding a Japanese umbrella. I was going to use one of them for my logo, until I came up with my newest idea...


I decided to sketch the picture I originally made for my existing logo, and make the sketch into a new logo! As you can see above, that is the logo I made after sketching the characters and colouring them in and then fitting the text on as well. The first version of this I made has no background, but I included a background on this to make it stand out better. I really like this logo actually, and I am going to use it as well as my final logo, but then again I'm still tempted to use the Japanese Umbrella one alongside this one too as a secondary logo. If anyone could give me their opinions on the logos and which one to choose, I'd very grateful :P.