Category Archives: Ideas and Ramblings

Relics

My friend, Kristin, tonight was asking about the projects that I have worked on, and I stumbled upon my old production blog.  We had to keep blogs for some of our classes in college so we could easily communicate with our mentors and view our progress.  This was mine:

http://jgrossmann.blogspot.com/

Brought back a lot of memories and shows how far I have come.  This of course led to me going through my friend’s sites as well and seeing how far they have come.  Good times!

Creative Outlook

We have all, at one time or another, been faced with a complete lack of motivation.  I am not talking about just not wanting to do your work.  Here is a scenario:

You sit down at your computer to do freelance work or just a project of your own and you feel like this is the day.  You are going to rule the world and it is going to be awesome and then we others realize how awesome your work is they will revel in your awesomeness.  This project is just going to put you back on track.  You are going to learn new things.  You are going to have to learn to light…and….render properly…..hmmm….that model is really complicated.  HEY!  If those other awesome people online can do it I can do it!  ….HOW THE HELL DID THEY DO THAT!?  You begin fiddling online looking up helpful useful inspirational stuff and a friend IMs you or you IM them and eventually…. you dwindle ….and then it is evening.  You have spent most of your day on Twitter or Facebook and IM and now it is the time of day you shouldn’t be working because you have to “clear your head” before you go to bed so you can get a good night sleep and do it again tomorrow……

/cough

Something is missing.  I was busy all day right?  In a sense.

I am really bad about productive procrastination.  I rather organize files on my computer or clean out my email then find out I have wasted my day, instead of being productive on something that needs to be done.  This is what has happened to my portfolio amongst other things.  I will say though that I also work a full-time job and often forget that it counts as being productive and why I tend to be tired.  I may be a possible work-a-holic, but I digress and think that would be another topic.

What this comes down to is coming up with ways to really motivate myself on a professional and creative level.  For some, a quick jog around the park can do that but what motivates me is being surrounded by those that LOVE what they do.  They exhibit passion that you don’t find everyday and they do what they do because they LOVE it.  Pretty simple…unless you aren’t in a very creative environment, but that is what the internet is for…right?

I am hoping to start postings that are inspirational or doodles or quick sculpts I have done about 5 times a week.  In order for this to work I have to be non-bias on what I submit and completely take in my shortcomings and learn from them.  This can even include if I just decided to learn something new and then blogging about it.

This is a major push on my part and hopefully the motivation can be passed forward.

Here is a prime example of inspiration and a good chunk of the reason I am taking more action.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012259/Train_(or_How_I_Dumped_Electricity_and_Learned_to_Love_Design)

Just watching this has renewed my sense of excitement for all that stuff I learned in college and have been fighting for time to do again.  I think it is time, and do enjoy the lecture.  It is highly informative and fascinating even if you are not a game designer.  It is game design to a whole new level.

Wine Guru

Sometimes you just need a change of pace, so that is what I am doing.  This way I have two projects I can work on simultainiously.  Instead of just stopping when I am stuck, I can continue on but in a different route.  Below is the concept image of the next model I will be working on, which I am going to be calling the “Wine Guru” for now.

I have to thank Chris Sasaki for the concept:

http://sakiteriyaki.blogspot.com/

It truly is generous of you to allow me to model this AWESOME concept.  I just hope I can do it justice.  🙂

wine_blogsasaki

Project 1 – Hyper-realistic Male Celebrity

The way I am working right now is to give myself multiple projects from the get go.  All of these projects will be portfolio worthy and things my portfolio is lacking.  The categories up top also reflect the order of which projects will follow, so if someone ever wants to check out my final work posts they are readily available by clicking “End.”

The first project on my list was to create a hyper-realistic person of some sort.  I didn’t start out with anything in mind but have since gravitated towards hyper-realistic male celebrity, because I like to make my life a living hell.  A few things had to fall into requirement on this one.

  • I wanted a more sculpted build that could fit the basic hero type character.  I am the only person I know that does not have a space marine type character.
  • Lots of reference images.  I found just because you are a celebrity doesn’t mean you have good reference footage available.
  • Subtle features.  Again with makes my life harder.
  • For some reason I wanted someone who had been converted to CG beforehand.  The thought here was to be able to compare at the end.  /cough
  • And finally, someone that most people could recognize in some shape or form.

These were all things my reel lacks in some way.  

What I came up with was using Chris Evans, star in the Fantastic Four movies.  I was actually surprised in the amount of reference images I could find of him on the web so quickly.  In fact, Google thought I was a virus with how fast I was pulling images from the web and told me I was not allowed to continue for a set amount of time.

Currently, I am working with my base mesh and proportions/topology and will be following that up with some base uvs that will be more easily tweaked after I finish up in Zbrush.  Note: I have been trained in Zbrush 2 and have dabbled in Zbrush 3.  All in all I am rusty in both.  😀  This project should help rectify this problem.

The last detail to figure out is the final dress and pose of my figure at the end.  Any recommendations?

WE EXIST! No really we do….

Its been way too long since I posted, but this is a momentous occasion. Meteor Games released their first press release! BTW, I work there. Here are some articles popping up on the net.

http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/06/neopets-creator.html

http://www.sunherald.com/prnewswire/story/658672.html

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19236

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080701/latu042.html?.v=101

I will try to keep this updated throughout the day!

The Horror of Walking…

I was faced with this question tonight as I played Fatal Frame with a friend. Does the horror genre have any games that have fantastic controls? I am not a pro with the genre, but of all the games I have played it is incredibly complicated to move the character in their environment, efficiently. This could very well be caused by the cinematic camera angles used to add suspense. But in the end, it is just added frustration to the player when their character gets caught on an invisible barrier. Fatal Frame is plagued by this. Many a times, I have been walking down a narrow corridor with full visibility, and my character got stuck on the wall.

This is definitely something I want to look into more. I have copies of Silent Hill and Resident Evil, which I remember both being easier to control than the original Fatal Frame but are still a bit clunky.

Controls aside, I still really enjoy the game.