Just did this to relax after playing a horse simulator game.

posting some art

Redoing the sculpture project, I was unsatisfied with the minimal effort I put into it so I'm challenging myself now. Flesh, hair and fabric, eep. Any crit would be much appreciated. I could work on this forever and never be able to capture the subtleties in this painting. The pose in my version is off, gonna rectify that...
Also finished the character I'm working on.
1024 flat diffuse. Working on a stylised child character atm, I need more variation in my characters.

I'm going to try pick this article apart because I think its silly.

So, its been a while since I've gotten angry on my blog about something on the internet.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10883404

This article bugged me in several ways. First off, you expect to be taken seriously using the phrase 'girl gamer'...?

'When you think about women in video games, you would be forgiven for imagining the helpless girly-girl persona of Mario's beloved Princess Peach, or for getting distracted by the improbably-chested, often-running Lara Croft.'

Has this woman even touched a video game beyond Farmville and Bejewelled in the last 10 years?

Why all the hate for Lara? After all these years she's still my secret idol - intelligent, witty, athletic and totally out for herself, not to mention looking fabulous while doing so. The Crystal Dynamics games really developed her personality and gave her character flaws such as her slightly obsessive and psychotic nature that reveals itself from time to time.



This scene never fails to make me smile. Look at what a badass she is. [also, she's pretty modest compared to Amanda!]

'"Sometimes women don't get the option of being male or female," Ngan Nguyen, editor of Women in Games Jobs, told BBC World Service's Colin Grant.

"You have to play with whatever character you're given. Some of the games I've played, like God of War, you are given just male characters."

HAHA OH WOW, does this really need a comment? Oh shit, Kratos is a man, how has this got anything to do with the topic? Some games actually have character-driven stories other than you just being a faceless avatar. This is one of the most stupid comments I've ever read.

In regards to revealing your gender over chat in MMOs, if the people you're playing with aren't immature asshats, why would they care if you're a woman or not? I knew someone in my first year who was the only girl in a group of about 20 guys and had a blast, no one treated her any differently.

"Parents aren't going to encourage their girls to play, they're not going to be as keen to buy them their first DS or buy them a console in the way you see families and mums buying lots of that stuff for boys at a very young age."

This is pure opinion over fact. As a child, all my female friends got bought their first gameboy and copy of Pokemon red/blue because our parents were intelligent enough not to buy us anything with an 18-rated sticker on it. My group of friends and loads of other girls I knew at the time owned consoles so they could play cute colourful platformers.

"I don't think we just want games where you dress up Barbies. I think [my daughter would] love to go around picking up gems, cutting the heads off donkeys or whatever it is that the game involves."

Cutting heads off...What? Since when are games either about barbies or super violence? As a child I never played games about either of those things, I just wanted games about animals jumping over things and collecting gems. Why is this article so obsessed with black and whites.
I think this is a very poorly-researched, unbalanced and petty article which I don't particularly want to be associated with as someone trying to get into the industry. :(

chara

3k tris. Flat diffuse ftw.
Any crits at this stage would be much loved.

The main problem with my characters, aside from aesthetic things, is the fact that they usually cannot deform properly or work in engine, two things we decided to include in the goal of this project.

Needed to brush up on my modelling skills, so I made a generic looking dude concentrating on proper edge flow and basic blocking out of anatomy, with no zbrush.

Here's some progress.
After getting a load of crits [thank you Del!] I focused on correcting things like uneven polygon distribution and the smooth flow of verts, as well as the overall posture.
Here's the result I've got so far.
Clocks in at 5296 tris including the head. Neither the proportions or topology are totally correct, but next is a rigging test to see how it holds up with deformations.

"-Is it essential to be able to rig characters, or just understand enough about how animation works to build the mesh correctly?
Placing bones and skin weighting I think is pretty essential as it’s the only way you can pose your characters to show them off and the only way you can really judge if your mesh is any good once it becomes an animated character. This is not the same as being a rigging expert though. To test elbow deformation all you need are the major bones and the skin weights, this a character artist should be able to do. To rig an elbow properly you might need to set up FK and IK and pole vectors and a UI. This wouldn’t be part of a usual character artist’s job scope."

^ Jolyon Webb in response to my incessant questions [thanks!]. A little clearer on what I have to do now. Will post the results of how I get on.

some cool animations i found while browsing.

funny Russian cartoon from the 80s.


I don't know why I like this...It's really simple and sweet.


This is really good, though I hate it when cute things turn sad at the end ;_;


More awesome 3d animation.

Also...I can't wait for this!!! 5 years in production, Madhouse are going to inject pure adrenaline into my eyeballs and its going to be amazing style over substance.

artsss

Heh, thought I should update my blog with some recent art. This guy is around 9k tris. God, the lighting is so terrible, not sure how to get it to look decent, makes the skin look like plastic. Looks better with a viewport shader.
The most successful thing about this was the hair alphas, after the clusterfuck that was the hair on my last model. It works better if they're made in chunks, and thin strands are overlayed over thick pieces. Looking at the hair on the FFXIII Lightning model was super useful.
Ah, I wish my laptop was powerful enough to run Marmoset...Does anyone else have it installed?