Diary-thing: It's hard to be a tonttu

My second short 3D-animation is finally finished. Most of the work was done around late february / early march, but after missing the assigned deadline, I pretty much dropped it due to other projects. This was one of those projects where you just start to get frustrated the more you keep working on it, and by the end you just see more flaws than successes.
Still, it's better to try and finish your projects, if for nothing else, at least for the sake of learning to complete your work.

Anyway.

E3's been happening this week. First person shooters are still not going away. Tomb Raider looks like Uncharted. Kojima is still godlike when it comes to making trailers. Dragon Age made everyone yawn. Ubisoft is losing respect of gaming community because animating girls is super hard because reasons. Uncharted looked like Tomb Raider. Nintendo actually had new IP; kind of like Team Fortress 2, except fun-looking. Bayonetta 2 is still happening, and Smash tournament was HYPE!

At this point, I think I'm about ready to jump on Smash-wagon. How hard can it be to catch up to people who have been playing it for like 15 years?

 I'm probably spending most of my summer by further honing my skills on art of game design. Probably going to come up with some small project of my own and keeping myself busy with that.
That, and playing Mario Kart and Shovel Knight.
I'll keep you all posted!

Groovy time for a movie time!

So this is what I've been working on for the past 6-7 weeks.

While still decades away from Pixar-quality, during January I learned to build 3D-character that resembles human enough to be described as such, and succeeded in making it move with passable quality.

Sarcasm aside, what we need to learn from this is that making videogames and animation is slow, slow process that takes remarkable amount of skill and often more than 10 hours of work per day. Before your project is over, you have worked on, and looked at, your creation so much that you have started to hate what you've made.

That being said, seeing the result in the end is rewarding, and if your dream is on the field of animation or game-design, nothing I say can -or should- discourage you.

Diary-Thing: Creating Worlds

 Instead of spending all of some of my time playing videogames this weekend, I've been practicing 3D-modelling. Earlier today I crafted this neat battleaxe, using it's 2D-drawing as referenece point.

Some of you might recognize this. Maybe. I'm not even sure if you are there.

I actually had to do quite a lot of 3D-modelling during holidays due to school assingments. We're practicing character animation, so expect that in the future. Probably maybe.
This friday I did some character unwrapping. What that means is "breaking" your 3D-model to pieces that can be "flattened" to 2D-surface so that you can apply textures on them.
See picture below.

Can also Not to be used as reference for how to skin actual humans.

In both videogames and animation alike, it's textures that make characters, objects and enviroments look like anything. Take that away, and what is left is shape and motion of characters, in a world that's literally nothing but few different shades of grey.
Below is character with no textures.

Imagine Nathan Drake looking like that.

 ...And here's the same character with poor textures.

Imagine Nathan Drake looking like THAT.

...You get the idea.
Anyway, been learning this kind of stuff. Haven't drawn comics in a long while. I might try to draw something funny later this... year...?
I don't know. At least you can expect this blog having more videogame-related things and less comics in the future.

CONTENT, y'all!

So apparently I didn't update on september.

Anyway, I've moved to Helsinki and started new school. Animation and Game Design. It's been a challenge and a blast!
First weeks' studies were mostly everything script-related, so there's little to tell about that.

And this week we started learning 3D.

So let's see what I've learned since tuesday.

Whoops.

There's some other stuff of which I don't have JPGs right now. Point being, things are moving FAST!
Next week we'll make Half-Life 3.

Besides that, been playing some videogames and not drawing comics. Mass Effect is alright storywise. Gameplay-wise... Meh, has it's flaws. Not a masterpiece per-say.

Rayman (original from -95) is about the hardest platformer ever!