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!

Diary-thing: Oh no, there goes Tokyo.

So yesterday I ended up going to see the new Godzilla.
It was -unfortunately so- different from what I expected.
[SPOILERS FOLLOWING]
The first half of the movie was mostly just exposition of plot and introduction of this giant flying spider-lizard that runs on nuclear waste. It's alright, good at best, and Bryan Cranston pulls a good role, but for the first hour Godzilla is nowhere to be seen, or heard. Then it kind of just appears, and the rest of the movie is army planning how to kill both monsters, while they fight against each other.

My main problem with the movie was how Godzilla itself was surprisingly meaningless deus-ex-machina side character. The main focus of movie was always in the main character guy, and while Godzilla and the other monster do fight at the end, even that happens at background, while the main focus stays on main character and his team of soldiers trying to plant nukes or whatever.
I don't come from the background of being huge Godzilla-fan, but I get the feeling that long-time fans may unfortunately be bit disappointed. It has entertainment value, I'll give that, but Pacific Rim came out year ago, and did this kind of movie much better.

That being said, if I didn't like the movie at all, or didn't care, I wouldn't have bothered writing this much about it. It was just kind of "Why isn't Godzilla bigger character in it's own movie?"-experience for me.

Still, it inspired me to make that picture earlier today. Made it entirely on Adobe Illustrator in about 2-3 hours. Good practice, and one of the best works I've done in a long time, I'd say.


School is going fine. There's been lots of stuff about 3D-animation and post-production, with week or two of Photoshop's and Illustrator's basics. I'm learning stuff, even if final products are far from Pixar-quality.


With videogames, I've been hooked HARD on Metal Gear-franchise!
I could quite literally talk hours about Metal Gear's attention to detail, amazing gameplay gimmicks, dumb-awesome plot, gameplay-flow and anything really, but the post's pretty long already. I'll just say that especially Metal Gear Solid 3 has become my favourite game.

Still waiting for Shovel Knight's release. Should be any day now, really. Hopefully before E3, maybe?

Finally, I want to mention Hover - Revolt Of Gamers. It's interesting-looking project that mixes some Mirror's Edge (no guns though, fortunately) and Jet Set Radio, and seems to even throw some elements from old Tony Hawk's Pro Skater-games. Concept looks definitely interesting, and Hideki Naganuma, composer of Jet Set Radio is making the soundtrack, so if you're into backing Kickstarter games, I'd strongly suggest this one (I threw $30 into it's direction). There's still week to go to pledge, and every dollar makes the game a bit better.

That's pretty much everything. See you again!

Last update was gloomy and boring

My friend Jerico Pretzel (who is not only still alive, but out of hospital and getting better!) wanted suggestions for new hair color.
I got some ideas. Just go and pick one, Ziisa.

Diary-thing: Breaking point

Two years ago I was alone. Back then, I was fine with that.
During these past two years, that has changed. I met people, and we became friends. Good friends. Even more than that, for the first time, I felt I had friends who I couldn't afford to lose. I feared -and I still do- that losing them would break me.

Meawhile, they had their own struggles to go through. Some of them were physically weak and had to fight for their literal survival. Some of them had started to believe their bullies, thinking that they were worthless. For some of them, life was almost too much.
For me, I wanted to help them, because they accepted me.

So I forced myself to grow strong. I wanted to be someone to depend on, someone to share the pain with.
And maybe I did help. My friends are all strong, and I would never take take the credit of something they achieved, but today things seem better for them than what they were, and maybe I managed to help on their darkest hours, even if I didn't notice it myself.

And now it's starting to break me.
I feel like I'm losing one of my friends. I don't know why, I don't know if there's anything to do, and it's tearing me apart.

I feel I grew strong for the wrong reasons. Even if I can be there for others, I don't feel strong enough to help myself. Have I even been a friend, or just a "pillar" to support others? If so, if I break, will there be anyone to help me back up? Does thinking about these things mean I don't trust my friends enough?
If I can't do friendship right, then what the fuck am I even good for?

I can still see colors, but I don't want this to get worse.
It's scary to know my family will read this.

I think I grew too strong
I'm starting to break

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.

Diary-thing: I drew a Tardis

Doodled this one in 10 or so minutes just now. Earlier this week school gave us drawing pads, so I might as well learn how to use it. Seems to work all right.

Started watching Sherlock today. After pilot and first proper episode, seems like decent series. Benedict Cumberbatch pulls a good role, whereas I feel Martin Freeman overplays his character at times. Some individual shots, especially close-ups, seemed to have odd camera angles, where person who's talking isn't at shot at all, and instead camera's zooming on back of Cumberbatch's neck.
That kind of small stuff.
Writing's good though, and that's really the core part. Moffat can be good at his job when Tumblr's not hating him.

I don't recall anyone ever telling me I'm a bad artist. Right now I feel like I could maybe use that.
Value of straight-up negative feedback is not appreciated enough. Maybe all those "I'm so ugly"-status updates on facebook and "Look at this shitty art I made"-posts on every site ever aren't just for attention-whoring. There are people who sometimes legitimately want others to tear their work down and deny all the skill and talent they have.
Of course, the problem is with the commenting itself. Once you have to ask certain kind of feedback, indirectly or not, it has already lost it's meaning. And of course sometimes negative feedback is not what you want.
It's difficult, having emotions.

I wonder how many of you there are, out there. In a year this blog has been visited over 3000 times. probably over 500 are me popping in, checking those other blogs on the left. I guess my familymembers visit on weekly basis. I have 3 to 5 friends who, I strongly assume, are stalking this blog. Maybe one or two of you Orivesi-students even look up to my work. Nah, I wonder, you guys are better than me already.
Thinking that there are people who not only know this blog exists, but even check it out once or twice every week, hoping to see something new... It's a... nice thought.

I'm worried about my best friend. She's been fighting for too long already, and she doesn't deserve everything she's going through. She deserves more than to be alone on christmas.
I'm definitely going to pay her a visit when I get a chance on holidays.

I'm just writing down my thoughts here. Still, I'm grateful you're interested. Thank you.