Some Weekend news and experiences, its relevant

as the title says this post is relevant to my course.

First of this weekend i am watching Blizzcon (huge 2 day event for all blizzard games: WoW, Starcraft and diablo) and there are alot of panels / QnA about how they make their trailers, models, art, etc; really interesting stuff (will try out the starcraft 2 editor myself at some point). Lots of great stuff coming out here

Second After seeing this video:

(fanart of a League of legends character) done in photoshop in (apparently) 1hour and 20mins! I can see how simply skills have been utilised and are put to absolutly amazing use; i will at some point make a profile on deviant art and try do more work myself, (once i buy photoshop again -_- damn these errors...).

Thats all for now folks, i will be updating over the halfterm with any little tutorials i get, work i have enjoyed looking at and the history of animation work i ahve to put up on here.

3-D animation Basic

So from the text and textures we come to animation! To use animation in Max i use the "auto key" to input actions along a timeline, that i could then play as a video; So i added in a couple of object and used the "name" i made earlier. So here is the video of the animation i made, later i will be designing my own: enjoy:

I would also add the second animation i created in the afternoon... however, it didnt go very well and this one does a better job ^^

3-D Max, text and fonts

In 3-D max today we wrote our name!, theres a tab in the objects bar that lets you make Splines, (2-D objects in 3-d space), from this we created 2-D text, then turned it into an editable mesh; giving it polygons. From there we extruded the shape, making them 3-D. After that we messed around with the settings in "materials" (like i did with my car) and used a new option in there "difuse" it lets us put a texture on the objects. Below is a screenshot from max and 7 different textures i made (my favourite is the 6th down, has a lava type of effect ;). Enjoy:

Desktop: FINAL image and review

So after 6 weeks of work, planning, design and photoshop work here is my finished project, the final product. In photoshop i made use of alot of new skills and tools, magic wand (tolerance settings), the pen tool, inserting my own fonts, and ***insert what mel did here*** (something that outlined my picture of my drawn design) that really helped me outline my character on the desktop. here is the final piece (all pieces of design are in earlier blogspots, each with there own descrition etc) Enjoy:

 

I am quite happy with my final desktop:

There is plenty of room for the icons, it has the shipley college logo, the words Media Suite; some rules for the college (single words) and it has turned out very close to my design. The "guardians" colours i did well, adding darker brushes, adding shade etc. The glow on the centre affecting the guardian and asteroids worked better than expected. Now comes the bad news: I think it looks abit too colourful, some of the "rules" are not too readable, some of the words dont fit into the "sci-fi" style (however they were meant to stand out). 

   The "guardian" aswell does look abit garish compared to how i designed it, abit too bright and not spacey. I couldnt get the star-like background either, and the asteroids look abit rushed.

All in all however, i am happy with my desktop and really enjoyed doing it ^^

*** Review/Feedback from Group***

Many  said how some of the colouring  with the 6 points is too dark, so as you can see in the image above (e.g. with misconduct, used to be black) i have made changes accordingly, few other issues came up; as i said i can do better and have plenty of time now to learn more about photoshop, as i am only scratching the surface.

*** UPDATE*** i acidently saved over my final design with the upgrades, however as i said the only major changes were font colours. 

My Car Design

***NOTE*** Car is still unfinished, this blog post is just to save the space ^^

Well here is my "car"... well battle tank kinda thingy (inspiration is that it is "mordekaisers" vechile -see link for 3_D models and league of legends earlier in blog- so dark colours and "spiky") i made use of all we have learnt so far in max, basic primitives, editing the meshes, copying objects changing the sizes, and the new things we learnt, more box modeling techniques and adding textures. Enjoy

As entertaining as my vechile is, there are tens of thousands of 3-D cars out there, in games and animations. Below are just a couple of proffesional examples from games like: "Gran Turismo 5" and "Forza Motorsport 3" of course my "car" is alot more fantasy-like, however this is how proffesionals make em, enjoy

http://www.clutchd.com/wp-content/gallery/08_october_2009-forza-motorsport/forza-motorsport-3-9.jpg

http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/862/862827/gran-turismo-5-prologue-20080328045650641_640w.jpg

As you can see, these are smooth, clean, shiny, realistic/life-like. Great examples of how great vechiles in games can look.

3-D Max Car tutorial

Today, Chris showed us how to use box modeling to make a "simple" car, using just a basic box and some cylinders; which we made into editable meshes and played around with for an 1:30 hour or so; really fun and learning alot more about 3-D Max. We also started using "materials" to add colours to our model, and create multiple colours at once edit them, etc. Below is an image of my... car?... batmobile? i don't know... enjoy...

Will be designing and making my own later today, look forward to it ^^

Robs homework: understanding web animation technology 1:

Here i will be posting 5 different types of web animation, what they are; a definition and an example/screenshot.

1. Banner Ads
"A graphical web advertising unit, typically measuring 468 pixels wide and 60 pixels tall (i.e. 468x60)."
http://www.marketingterms.com/dictionary/banner_ad/

On just about every website you'll see these things, flashing away or promting you to shoot five ducks to win a prize; they still occasionaly get you to click away at them, even if its just for a joke; it is a very affective form of advertisment and often very simple flash animation or game.

Here are a few screenshots:

2. Animated Inferface Elements:

"Animated Inferface elements" are on just about every website you will come accross, they can be as simple as changing an icon or buttons colour, make a drop down menu (as seen below); or can be more complex depending on the website, i think the majority of sites would be pretty dull if all you did was press buttons that did nothing... these simple Animated elements of websites largely go unnoitcied however, websites would be terrible without them

3 Linear and Interactive Animation:

Linear animation, is an animation that is always the same, no matter what you do, it simply repeats as you watch it; e.g. most flash videos (such as the "awesome series on youtube")

Interactive Animation, is animation, that yes, "interacts" with you (e.g. the samorost puzzles) you can control some aspect of the animation bascially.


4. Promtion, instruction and information:

Promotion:
We have already seen an example of how flash animation is used for promotion with the banner ads (see top of this post), "pop ups" are another example of how they are used for promotion; these are shapes, words etc that can sometimes cover your entire page, again annoying but effective advertisement.

Information:
Websites have various ways the relay information using animation; one example i found was on the Cadburys website (although it has changed since) it used to have a full section for learning abotu the site through an interactive walkthrough of the a cadburys factory with information popping up each time you "explored" a section; several sites have also adopted a similar method (e.g. npower have a similar section in there site)

Instruction:
Lots of websites use flash as instructions; using an interactive medium often makes learning new information easier, and often more bearable and interesting than reading so many walls of text. One good example I found was a "how to play" on the Warcraft trading card game website (now moved) it looked like a flash game that gave you a rundown of the games basics. methods like this are much more interesting than, like i said, numerous amounts of text.

PSD: Logos Research

In our last PSD lesson the class looked a logos involving "equality and diversity" and each took the same logo off the internet and used photoshop and its various tools (e.g. a new one for me was the "pen" tool, was very useful and let me essencially copy the image as my own). everyone in the class then edited the image individually to give it a different look: below are the orginal image and my own inturpritation:

***
Have to upload my own images later, forgot to save a jpeg file :S

***

There are thousands of popular logos worldwide, use in all the worlds industires (see large image below)
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/60/172320206_6afd460270.jpg


















However since this is a games development course, i'm will upload examples of 2 of the more popular logos in gaming; explain why they are good/bad and show an image for each.

1.EA
http://www.blogcdn.com/news.bigdownload.com/media/2009/08/ea_logos_landscape_smalljuly7.jpg

Despite all the bad things about EA, it has to be said they are one of the biggest and well known gaming publishers (3rd party) around, they started off with a simple black and grey logo (black background, silver "EA") which is easily recognizable, but one of the best things about EA and there logo (as you can seee in the image below) they have adapted it to numerous titles and audiences, each with its own design and colours ranging across the gaming market, the same design simple altered each time.

2. Xbox 360 logo
http://www.electricsistahood.com/images/ever/xbox360_logo.jpg

One of the "big three" in the gaming industry today, microsoft has incorperated a simple, but effective logo that is a simple sphere, coloured green and silver, and althought it at first seems pretty simple, the colours and the "shine" are memorable and recognizable and out of the "big 3" (microsoft, nintendo and sony) i think microsoft has made the best logo, nintendos is just the word nintendo coloured red with a border, and sonys playstation network logo is a sphere with the four controller buttons overlaying it (in a graffiti like style) it is much betetr than nintendos but feels less attractive to the eye than microsofts i think (but thats just my opinion)

***UPDATE***

Over the weekend (due to some problems with the blog in college... no idea :S should be fixed at home) i will be uploading several pieces of work: Some of mels work invovling my final design (if i finish it up over the weekend), Robs work (listed in planner) which involves finding examples of various online animation (e.g. banners) and finally for PSD lessons, i have to find some well known logos and say why they are good/bad or popular, or well done, etc.

More will be updated over the weekend.

Rob Flash work... BUTTONS!

In robs lesson this week we learnt more about rollover buttons, (these are used all over the web and in games i have examples in one of my eariler posts, the below images are all done by me)

so this first set of images is the 1st, one i made, very basic, playing around with the effects and shadows and (in this case) failing to make the button work the way i wanted (i.e. when you move the cursor over it, it should look like your pressing it in, however i messed up with the shadows and it doesnt look right). so here are my basic buttons:

so it really doesnt look like its been pressed in, more like the shadow has made a jump forward...
moving on:

the image below is off the second button i made, using more methods, brushes, layers, effects and colouring to give it an effect. The task was to get an image of a favourite character of ours (yes i know i have two... but it works and i like it ;) and put it on the button with an interesting/attracive background, and then add the rollover effect (i.e. so it looks like its a button when pushed).
here is the image i will comment below:

Now the 1st most noteable thing is that unlike the first button where the shadow moved, this button looks like its actually been pressed down as the shadow remains (just about) the same. For the colours i used one of the custom brushes in photoshop and layered it, giving the very misty blue effect. I also made the two characters (Ike from fire emblem radiant dawn and date masamune from the sengoku basara series) black and white so they dont contrast with the background colour and fit in nicely. As i said this was all done in layers, so i then added a very low opacity white to add the 3-D shiny effect to the top. also if you look closly there is a grid along most of the image (rubbed out in some places to not cover the characters) which i did on a separate page of photoshop, (very small page) and then made into a pattern and made it an overlay for this image.
i really enjoyed doing it and am very pleased with the results, and i think it looks very good (maybe not as good as some of the creative button I linked in my older post however for my first attempt i'm happy)

please comment and feedback :)

Uploads finally working, Design for desktops upload

Finally the uploads appaer to work at home again; now, below is a picture of my 4 designs and descriptions for a desktop. I will go into detail into each after the image but bear in mind each image must:
-Have the shipley college logo
-have plenty of room for around 22 desktop icons
-contain the works "media suite"
-contain the "rules" we think in college are the most important somewhere written on the desktop

***NOTE: i realise the quality is not great so i will give a full description of what each design is and says below, also the inspirational images for my design were printed on both sides of 2 pieces of A4, i will try to upload at some point in the future***

Idea 1 (top left):
"The idea was a dark background, with a smokey/whispy effect in front of it. coming down the middle a very bright/light sword (to contrast with the darker background) it will also attract the viewers attention, a camera will be atop the sword and the words "media suite" will be written on the hilt; the shipley college logo will be on the camera. There is plenty of space for icons, and the rules/points will be written along the whisps of smoke

Idea 2 (top right):
"The idea is a hand holding up the shiply college logo (which is "melting" through the fingers like sand) "media suite" is wrriten on the arm holding the logo, it will have a light background (bringing the viewers attention to the logo and icons) leaving plenty of room for icons and rules."

Idea 3 (bottom left):
Large drawing of the college ominously looming next to the character walking past, with the college logo near the top of the desktop (looking almost like a film title) there wont be as much room for rules or icons than the other ideas however the visual aspect may appear more impressive and be harder to achieve.

Idea 4 (bottom right)
This idea is very mystic and spacey, (combined a variety of inspirational desktops i found) it would have a very dark/space blue background, littered with stars, with a large looming "planet" filling most of the background, with lighting shining through behind it, and the words "media suite" being on the top of it and the rules coming down it. there will also be a constalation of stars that look like some kind of warrior/guardian/protector whose shield bears the logo of shipley college. i really like this idea, and it may actually be easier than the other three, depends on the "star guardian"


So those are my suggestions, any feedback would be appreciated or if anyone has a favourite and why :)

***NOTE, i will only be comparing my finished final design with proffesional work, otherwise i won't really know what to compare each individual image too.***