Showreel of 2012

What I've been working on this year.

Cardiff Comic & Animation Expo 2012

Note: I got a mention from Sidekickcast Blog and Swansea Comics Collective Blog. 

Bit of a late post, but I had to wait for the photographs to be sent to me so I could upload them here (especially the one to the right). :) With that note, the majority of the awesome cosplay ones were taken by my friends DizzieDee, Mute and Jack.

My weekend was pretty amazing, I can gladly say I wasn't expecting half the amount of fun I had at the comic expo at Cardiff. On Saturday the place was bustling with comic lovers and cosplayers. There was a section for the animation, which was mostly stalls for University courses in animation, and in my case we were representing a games design course- a fellow classmate and I had a stall to represent the Swansea Metropolitan University. The week coming up to the event was very busy and a nightmare since I also had to try to juggle my Major project, create business cards and print out my portfolio ready. As I type now I'm short on time to do some work!

I had finally decided I'd give a go at cosplaying, and I must say considering it was my first time, it went very well. While I didn't win first place in the competition, I still got a special mention (an unofficial 3rd place). This is far better than it sounds- the judges had a hard time deciding on the winners because of the amount of well hand-made female costumes (this is a category of its own). It took them 20 minutes, but from what I understood they split up the prizes initially planned for the 1st and 2nd place winners, to at least give me something for my effort. Here is the prize in all its glory:

I didn't want to open it since the package was so cool. I guess my hard work paid off! 

With so much talking "Hello!"s and "Can I take your photograph?", I got to re-acquaint myself with some old/lost friends and possibly have made new ones. A very big part of the stalls were to give me and my classmate Shane a chance to get ourselves known, I think we did a pretty good job- at least in Cardiff. This is definitely an incentive to go again :).

 

The comic expo was a fraction of MCM, size wise it was big enough to roam a few hours, and small enough to feel homely and casual. I quite like this feeling compared to the giant MCM. A lot of people attending were local, and of course the comic artists and store keepers were from all sorts of places, this made it all the more interesting to talk to them.

There was particularly one Japanese culture shop I liked (my prize comes from their shop!), and the owners introduced me to their online store. Just before the competition proceeded, I had expressed enthusiasm with their stock- there is a chance they knew I would like my prize? :3 This kind of thought makes me very happy.

All in all, there were a surprising amount of cosplayers, and I hear this is a more recent thing for comics and Doctor Who which started three of four years back. I heard this at a Doctor Who talk, with some of the people responsible for the comics and radio. They say they had never seen so many (in particular) teenage girls, cosplaying the characters, until three years ago. Well I'll probably will have to end it here.

Here's a video that Dizzie Dee recorded of CICAE:

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And here are a few of the cosplays!

 

^ This is actually my friend Ricky standing besides a theatrical costume, xD still very cool!

Starting back on my Final Year

The semester has just started and already I'm going a little CooCoo from anticipation of thinking up a really bad game idea. Yes, this year us third year Games Design students need to concept and make a game. While I love the idea of painting out concepts, I am also given the task of 'designing' the actual gameplay. Tsk, this is my fault for wanting to work alone.

I've started a new blog for that (yay, I must have zillions by now) and called it something rather boring like Final Year Project...

I'll at least say that my game idea is Horror themed- and by 'themed', I mean it's not necessarily the type that will creep and scare, it may thrill people though. I'm pretty excited/scared this year :) the busy-ness might cause me to not blog so much (except for the blog meant for the project).

Any-who. Just thought I'd make a post explaining future absence and lack of blogging. Here's also a caricature I  just finished for fun (it's me by the way).

I'll be linking my Project blog on the side.. and here-  gsfinalmajorproject.blogspot.com

Games Design 2nd Yr Results- so close to an overall 1st!!

Just got notified by a friend of my module results, I did very well! Got two 1st's and three 2nds. I'm a bit bummed at the overall since it came to about 69.4 (70 is a 1st overall) D:!!!! Oh the woes....

Small Game Collaborations

This was a while ago, back in January 2011. I collaborated in the making of two small games with a friend. I was the artist/modeller, so I didn't really play a big part. :) Still, it's nice to post it here.

Duck VS Flies

http://skauert.users.avalanchehosting.com/DvF/

The music was taken from games like Bejewelled, I'm not entirely sure, so if you hear something familiar- that's the reason xD. In the end it was a university assignment, so as a Disclaimer: neither me or my coder buddy stole anything on purpose okay?

Space Match

The game we made before was a Pairs game called Space Match, it's downloadable only since it's 3D and uses openGL. To try out make sure to:

Download and install this first: Microsoft Visual C++ Re-distributable

Then download the game: http://skauert.users.avalanchehosting.com/rars/SpaceMatch.rar 

Group Level Design- Design Document

Illustrating Character Stones

Group Work: Level Design

Today we had our last presentation of the academic year, showing our group level design. It wasn't meant to be finished, and just required us to make a game level that was playable. In the end I think we did well, although I regret not putting more time into it: I modelled a few assets and the character (textures and rigging too). Here are the concepts and video showing a demo of the level:

Concept of our level Asguard

Concept of main character Loki

KKK

ORZ: Multiple channel complications and UDK

One UV map, two Separate textures placed on two sets of selected faces.....

...equals UDK to display it properly.... ORZ

Two days ago I asked for a lecturer's help on trying to get my textures to show correctly on UDK, the problem was that the material channels were never showing up, there would be one less, and one of the ones that did appear would be displaying the materials wrongly. For the pas two weeks I dibbled and dabbled with this problem, looking for tutorials and forums that had discussed problems that were on tangent with my own. I had wanted to use two textures on one model, and I figured have two separate uvs was the right way about it- and according to many sources it was. I just couldn't get it to work.

Today, I had finally given up, after trying to use 3Ds max and realising there was no time- I just merged the two uvs (outer part and inner part of the chapel) by first separating the model into two pieces and copying/pasting their uvs on 'map1' (original uv map). I combined and merged my two pieces back into one whole, and noticed that the materials were being displayed correctly still. This reminded me of what a friend had tried to explain to me, his methods of using two textures in udk. So I exported and re-imported the bastard into udk- low and behold : it was working fine, had two correctly displayed channels with the two very same textures i had tried to apply- nothing was ammiss.

So tell me- world-of-Maya-and-overly-complicated-software..... WTF?

Thomas Hamilton

Murderer of 16 children and a teacher.

Madeleine Mccann

I did this for an assignment- it's obviously being posted on the actual blog for it.

Why did I choose these subjects? Because Gerhard Richter is the influence haha...

The blurred eyes are what Richter did a lot to his paintings- in fact it was a lot like fuzzy tapes that fuzzed out the whole thing (more than just eyes). But I don't like having to deform everything, otherwise the whole image would become incredibly boring- even if it reached the goal of being eerily ominous.

Newbish Mistakes & UV sets

I have been working on a level on UDK for a while now, and not so long ago I had reformatted my computer. I had nearly lost 6hrs of work simply because my 'Incremental Saves' on Maya 2011 wasn't ticked- please people, always check your UI thoroughly (especially if it's something as spastic as Maya/UDK).

Anyhow here is what I have so far:

 I made a chapel with the insides included (since that's the way in an outdoor environment level that has no 'zoning'/'load screens'), and wanted to try to use two different UVsets so that I could assess my textures easily and keep them neat and tidy. I'm still learning and have never attempted it before.
So the first thing I do before UV unwrapping is that I split up all the pieces that would be otherwise be more inconvenient to select when trying to 'Planar Map' them. And use the 'Layer Display Editor' (to the right) to try to toggle pieces on and off easily.