Visualisation Project Complete!

Here's how my visualisation project turned out.

Music: Get Your Guns by Nine Black Alps


Visualisation Board Game Project from Jay Jackson-Hicks on Vimeo.

Overall I'm happy of the out come. I'd of prefered to have a few more fast cuts and diffrent camera angles. But my editing/filming skills kind of drew a blank. I'm not going to post the video of my Animation project because I'm not very proud of it. I should have organised myself better so I could of spent more time on that part of the project. This is something I'm going to try harder on next term.

Attention as A Commodity?

After watching a lecture from Matt Harding ("that guy who dances in those places in front of those things") he mentioned Attention as an important commodity. What with so many distractions now (TV shows, DVDs, Computer Games and the Internet), getting peoples attention can be a hard thing.

Viral Marketing is when an experience grabs a persons attention and makes them want to share that experience with others. After having success on the internet as "that guy who dances in those places in front of those things" he was approched by Stride Gum company to make another video. This second video he made was paid for by Stride so not only did Matt get paid for his video, he also got free global travel. This was a great way for him to sell the attention he was genrorating.

Now if only I could think of a way to get free global travel for doing something stupid!

Where the Hell is Matt?

Matt used to work 9-5 in an office in Los Angeles as a games developer. He's worked on games such as Destroy all Humans for a company called Pandemic Studios. He is most famous for dancing like an idiot around the world.



I'd heard of this video before but haven't seen it till now. The thing I find funny is it was both his love of traveling and terrible talent at dancing that made him famous. I myself have a burning passion to travel. I've been all many countries and 4 continents and consider myself a more seasoned traveler than most. I also love to dance (some say terribly) stupidly. But what I think is crazy is that his job was a games developer, which is what I aspire to be.

Fueled by stories of my dad and a college lecture I've always seen my first priority to travel the world and I love to discover and learn new cultures.

More interesting stuff can be found here. If you found this video funny or inspiring I suggest you find his 3 part YouTube lecture which is also on his blog.

Rendering Accicent

Does this happen to anyone else? You make the finishing touches to your render setup and forget to make sure you have the correct veiw frame selected? I just waseted almost 3 hours rendering the wrong veiwpoint so i had a 16second long video of my top veiw doing nothing :p

I wish I saved and uploaded that video now but I overwrited the name to redo the intended shot.

The Internet is for useless crap

I thought I'd seen alot of dumb pointless stuff on the internet, then I found this when researching 3D practitioners in Cornwall.

Visual Board Game VII

First clip rendered. At the moment it's taking ~45miniutes to render 4 seconds. I'm going to have to set alarms for myself so I can wake up and start the next render after one finishes.

Here's how it looks so far:

Visual Board Game Sweep1 from Jay Jackson-Hicks on Vimeo.

Visual Board Gamer MKVI

Well I managed to sort out my textures and it's all coming together quite well. Here is a picture of it so far, I'm working on the Video now. HD Bitmap versions coming soon!

Visual Board Game MKV

I think I've got everything set for this now. All that's left is lighting and some texturing. That being said i'm having a really tough time with texturing. I'm not sure what's happening but when I try to add a map to the material editor the square veiwer just covers up completly with a grey background like in my picture.



I'm not sure how to fix this and it's getting annoying.

I've also decided that my environment shapes were too close to the board and it looked crowed when I added more. So I've spaced it out.



When I sort out the lighting and textures you'll see almost all the blocks with a glairing whiteness and hopefully some bloom effect. I want to put in quite harsh lighting.

Visual Board Game MKIV

An overveiw of the board so far:


It's still missing something and it feels like there are too many blank spaces. I'm going to have to rack my brain for new pieces to fill the environment.

3D Visual Board Game MKIII

I've been working on some more background pieces for my Visual Board Game. I thought I'd make a rib cage looking piece.

First of all I made a flat square In the top view. I choose to make it a box and not a planar because I wanted some height to the base. Then i extrude the pillars and with edge select lengthened one side to make a slope.

I had to then move some vertex's up so the arching part wouldn't be as thick:


After this I simply selected the now smaller polygons, extruded them and then raised them to make it diagonal:

3D Animated Board Game

I've jotted down quite a few ideas for my Animated Board Game. I don't want to give much away just incase I can't figure out how to animate it or someone ninja's my ideas.

Using the Helix spline I made 3 parallel Helix shapes. The outer 2 were lofted with a circle to make the visible track. The centre one was then joint via Animation Path Constraints with a sphere. This centre track was then raised vertically to give the illusion of the ball sitting on the visible tracks.

Helix Track Ball Test from Jay Jackson-Hicks on Vimeo.

Rendered at 24FPS and 100 frames long with high quaility mental ray and codec it took ~8miniutes to complete. I'm quite sure that wasn't as fast as my computer could do it as iTunes was running fine as it was going. When I move on to bigger stuff i'm going to allow rendering 100% CPU power.

I’m aware that this video is really short and the ball moves incredibly fast, but I’m planning to have a very fast paced animation.

3D Visual Board Game MK II

I've completed the actual board area and now I'm working on the environment. At the moment I still have the standard black background which is going to be replaced later on with a light blue or green.



The floating shapes in the background are not part of the board. They're there to bring more depth and enthesize the disjointed nature of the area even though it's made of such primary shapes.

3D Visual Board Game

After watching a trailer for new downloadable content (DLC) for one of my favorite games I decided on the style of which I was going to set my Visual Board Game to look like.


The game is called Mirror's Edge



I've always been a fan of that style and found it most intresting in Russian war propaganda posters:



I'm going to create a game board which has very bold flat colours and shapes but still has enough individual style to make it original and fresh. This is what I have so far to give you an idea.

Term One - Board Games Overview

This term I've been set the task of making 3 different types of board game. One in real life with functioning rules, and two in 3D which can be as abstract and physics defying as I want. The two in 3D will be assessed individually on aesthetics and animation.

Work is coming along quite well on all of these projects, I just hope I don't get too wrapped up in them that I forget to do my SPP essays. Or atleast clean my kitchen.

Super Mega Lack Of Posts

I'm really disapointed in myself for the lack of post's I've done so far this year. Well all that's about to change. I've recently signed up to Vimeo which is a video hosting website much like youtube apart from you can host much high quality videos.

I've been playing around in 3D Studio Max for a while and I'll be posting some high quality videos as soon as I finish rendering them.

So stay tuned for some good stuffs.

Buisness and the Death of Networking?

The essential point of networking is human contact; business has killed networking by making it something for the career orientated.

To answer this question one must first determine the specific meaning of networking. From what I’ve compiled, a network is a supportive system for connection between interrelated individuals or groups. The purpose of a network is for mutual benefaction by providing support or assistance between the individuals or groups.

Business can be said to have killed networking in its truest form by having career orientated individuals and groups using networks for selfish reasons. By only harvesting and taking resources from a network you’re not mutually participating this therefore kills its true definition.

Flash Completed Where's The Marching Band?

My identities flash animation is now complete and I'm over joyed. Now all I have to do is pull off some work from my blog and write it up into an essay and it's sorted. Looks like I'm going to make it down to Cornwall for Flora Day after all.

"PC Load Letter? WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN?!"

I decided that the most reilvant tutorials for flash are probably on the VLP. Although trying to access them is proving annoying.

http://img391.imageshack.us/my.php?image=vlpgaygs4.jpg

I don't have a clue what "Your account is on hold" means but I know it's pushing me one step closer to killing someone.

If Flash Were A Person, I'd Kick Him In The Nuts

So because I'm leaving to go home on Wednesday morning I have to have my Identities project finished by Tuesday afternoon. I have completed all the 3D work needed and written the blurb for each of my 5 objects inside the box. I have even imported all the frames into flash.

This leaves me with only having to write the essay, and figure out how the hell to use flash. I've been going over some tutorials but the only ones I can find and either simple things like how to make a box move across the screen and save it. Or how to do rediculously hard animations which aren't important to my project.

I'm going to keep trying to find relivant tutorials and I'll go to the surgery tomorrow afternoon. But the way things look now I'm not hopefull that my trip home will happen.

Major Set Back

As I was rendering one of the last of my objects for my identities work my computer overheated and turned its self off. When I restarted my computer and tried to load the file which all my work is contained in I got an error message saying that 3D Studio Max could not load that file. After a few restarts the file still won't open. This leads me to believe that the work is lost.

Although this is a major set back for my work I still have all my UVW maps, some print screens of my work and a few videos that I managed to render before I lost it all.

I was planning on getting into the flash process today and having the project completed for Monday. But this looks like it won't happen.

If I don't get this work completed by Tuesday then it looks like I'm going to have to cancel my trip home which I've been looking forward to for months now.

Identities Project 2

I just thought I'd post my progress on my work. I'm keeping with my original idea of an ammo crate, but I decided to make my own crate in 3D instead of frapsing a crate from in game because then i can show the crate opening with my objects inside.

Here are a few of my objects that will be in my box:

Boarding pass



Guitar Hero Guitar



Films



When you click on one of the objects inside the ammo crate it will load a description of why it is in there and how it relates to my identity. Also it will load a video clip of the 3d object slowly spinning around. This video will loop so that it looks as if the object is just continually spinning.

Video clips here:

Boarding Pass
Guitar Hero

Jessica Rabit IRL WOOT!

Like many other people, my frist true love was Jessica Rabit.



How it's done: http://youtube.com/watch?v=r940y3N1Yns

I was just browsing through the many pages of the internet when i stumbled across a picture of Jessica Rabit "untooned". I later found a blog called pixeloo which has some really cool photoshop work on it. I've seen other photoshop "speed painting" before, but I really liked how pixeloo uses images from existing photos and picks them apart and morphs them into the desired shapes.

Wall-E A Pixar Feature Film

In the future mankind will have left Earth for greener pastures. Leaving behind one robot to clean up after them. Jonny 5... I mean Wall-E is that robot.



After 700 years of solitude Wall-E he develops a personality and finds the world around him fascinating. Then one day a spaceship lands and changes Wall-Es life forever.

He falls in love with Eve, A more high-tech robot from a diffrent planet. Eve strangely resembles a Sentry Gun from Portal... but has the ablity to fly.





Wall-E then follows Eve back to her home and discovers many facinating things on his adventure.

Although very little has been released about Wall-E the films hype seems to be mounting even though the film is 3 months away from it's world release. Because Wall-E and the other main characters, Eve and M-O, are robots they don't talk. Which means the story is driven along by the characters movements, which are very slapstick.

The first released footage of Wall-E was done during the Super Bowls' half-time commercial advertisments inwhich Woody and Buzz Lightyear, from Toy Story, talk about him as they themselfs are sat watching the Super Bowl. Advertising since then has grown slowly as the release of the film gets closer with life size cardboard cut-outs of Wall-E popping up over Cinemas worldwide.

I'm really looking forward to this film as it looks like pixar are tring new 3D developements out such as smoke and dust clouds. Also it reminds me of a more upbeat version of A short film my brother made called Sad Robot.

Wall-E IMDB

YouTube Videos:
Wall-E Super Bowl
Wall-E Teaser
Wall-E Trailer

Box Idea

It's just occurred to me that I haven't posted anything on my box on my blog. Well at last the long wait is over.




The idea is when it loads you click the screen to start a small movie clip. This clip will be of you walking up to the ammo crate and opening it. Once it is open there will be five objects inside that I think relate to me and my identity.

Once you click on one of the objects two black boxes will drop down, one with a description of the object and the other of the object.

Finally Got Around To It

This is the 3D model I made for my Identities project.

It's been along time...

I just started to check out my blog and other MM students blogs again and i'm disapointed with myself with my lack of postings recently.

I had a great easter break, even though I was working for most of the time, and now i'm ready to really crack down and get on with my work. From talking to Will and checking his blog I can really see how far along he's come with his 3D work and I aim to follow in his footsteps and improve my 3D skills dramically aswell by using online tutorials.

A massive blow has happend to my machinima project (see here and here) when I found out that my halls have blocked mosting gaming ports. This means I can't develop the characters I want to star in my machinima, search for suitable locations to shoot and most importantly with not being able to log into a game when making machinima, I can't film any of it. So for now it looks like this project is going to be held back untill the summer holidays or even untill next term. I'm going to use this time to develop the script, make story boards and do research into my favorite machinimas. Such as how they record the voice actors and foly sounds.

Up Here for Thinking, Down There For Dancing

Today I was supposed to have my presentation to display the work that I have done over the last term. I knew I had it on Tuesday but I wasn't sure of the time so at 9am I went down to Waverly to check. I found my name and it was under Thursday, being very tired at the time I thought that I was given the wrong day and I had longer to prepare my work. If I looked closer I would have seen that the page where I saw my name said "Review Week - Thursday April 8th".

I wasn't untill I got a text from my friend Will that I tripple checked and found out my mistake. Hopefully I can reschedule my presentation for sometime this term. It's just annoying that I made such a stupid mistake, espically after the presentation I was supposed to give for my first terms work.

Untill I have my review here is something to keep you entertained:

Avatar Almost Done

Well it's closeing down on the last few days of term and I need to have my avatar completed and in an enviroment. I also need to have a 30 second clip of my avatar from diffrent angles.

All I have left to do is give him hands, map skins and produce a rough enviroment for it to exist in. I think that I might include all the other 3d work i've done in this enviroment too, but only have the focus on my final avatar.

Here's the (almost) finished avatar:




On final thought I've decided that these are the main influences behind this avatar:

I Love The Bevel Tool

I've been doing some more work on my Avatar.




As you can see I created a body for my avatar, and I changed the head. I thought that the Predator like dreadlocks at the back looked a little ghey so they're now gone. Also after watching one of my favorite films, Return of the Jedi, I decided to take the helmet in a new direction.



I'm planning to group the shoulders and torso into one shape but leave the head with a simple link, like I had with my walker, so that I can animate with it.

My Avatar Progress

Last tuesday my super buddy Will gave me a tutorial of how to make a Master Cheif helmet in 3DS Max. I was pretty happy with this as I was worried that my 3DS Max skills wern't as developed as they should be.




(The brown helmet is mine and the green on is Wills.)

I've been thinking about my avatar over the last few weeks and what he should look like:




After some thinking I decied to incorperate the helmet I made into my avatar. Obviously I wanted to change it from the helmet Will helped me made because he spent so long working on it I didn't want to just rip him off and take credit.
Avatar so far:



As you can see it's really only the jaw that i copied from the original, and I plan to do some more work on that to make it more original.

If You Love Music...

http://musicthatmakesyoufeel.blogspot.com/

That's all i'm going to say. You can thank me later.

This Is What I'm All About

Frequently I'm asked "Jay why is the internet so great" or "Why should I keep on living?" I simply reply to them with a link to this video



It gets less blury further in so keep with it.

I'm Sorry, Don't You Know Who I am?

I was giving some thought to the avatar that I am going to create for myself. While doing this I thought about the avatar I have already created for myself on online. Possibly my biggest hobby is computer gaming, and if asked to pigeon-hole myself I would consider myself a Gamer.

For the last 3 or 4 years I’ve been calling myself/avatar Radical Ewok. I’ve play numerous online games such as Counter Strike:(1.6/Condition Zero/ Source), Day of Defeat:(1.6/Source), Command and Conquer:(Tiberium Sun/ Tiuerium Wars), Battlefield: 2142, Team Fortress 2, Quake 3&4, Guitar Hero 3 and World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft was defiantly the game where I felt the strongest sense of community. With thousands of people playing on each server it's hard to stick out of the crowd, although if you socialize enough on both the game and the forums then people will recognise and remember you. I once stopped playing WoW for around 4 months, then within a week of playing it again I’d had people approach me and tell me they remember me from a guild I was in with them from over a year ago.

What I look like online:

World of Warcraft is really the only game I’ve played where appearance is customizable.

The Century of Self

We were told to watch a documentry called The Century of Self and write an analysis of it. I was quite sad to see that the video was an hour long. Not because I have little patience, but because streaming videos with my student accomadation internet connection takes forever. I tried to load the 6 parts of the video during the daytime. This took almost 3 hours to do and only the first 2 of 6 parts loaded properly. As a result i've had to wait untill internet activity is at a minimum so that the videos will stream and play instantly.

Sadly due to the typical night life of a student it would be i'd be awake untill at least 3am before enough people went to sleep and stopped refreshing there facebook homepage.

From what I picked up The Centry of Self is about how propaganda/public relations was and still is used to controll the masses and there violent basic instincts.

I need sleep, this will be continued tomorow between my first lecture and tutorial.

Idea for 3D Tracking Sensors

Deborah showed us a video in one of her lectures about tracking sensors.
We were asked as a task to think of new ways that this technology could be used. The video reminded me of a scene from a TV show called Firefly. In one of the episodes the doctor character uses a tool which displays a human brain as a 3D interactive holographic image.

In the video Jonny Lee uses an LCD screen to display a more detailed map ontop of a large projection of a basic map. I think if you combined this with 3D holographic x-ray it could help train surgens with complex operations. It could also be used to simulate risky operations that are about to be undertaken so the surgen can play though the senarios that may happen during the precigiour and practise and problems that might occure.

Modernism Vs. Post-Modernism

Last week we had a lecture with Simon and he explained to us Modernism and Post-Modernism. Before the 18th century most things happened and existed for the glorification of religion this changed during the age of the renaissance, when people started to celebrate science instead of religion. This sudden change known as the “enlightenment” was the beginning of modernism.

Modernism is about logic, order, simplicity and the celebration of “the machine”.

It was the thought that great ideas come from individuals, or “the author” whereas post-modernism celebrates the death of the author and believes that all ideas come from creative communities and have no clear beginning, like a rhizome it has no beginning and no end.

MURMORPERGUR Seal Online

I thought i'd post some pictures and talk about my progress even more in Seal Online.



There isn't alot of customization that you can do to your chacter, beyond hair and gender, but that doesn't really bother me. I was kind of bothered that which ever gender you pick and customize you still kind of look like a girl in game, that coupled with not being able to jump in the game gave me this awful flashback to a Guild Wars free trial weekend I once took. If it wasn't for SealO's music, which reminded me of the many wonderful sleepless nights I had playing Monkey Ball, I probably would have done the same to SealO as I did to Guild Wars and uninstalled it before you could say uncle buck.

So off I went into the world of Seal to vanquish my cuddely foes with my UBER X-TREME GREEN HAIRED... himaphrodite warrior. There are many skills that you can learn like fishing and sleeping. Fishing allows you to catch fish which you can eat to regenerate your health and sleeping regenerates your health also much much more slowly.



I found myself not really using the sleep skill much as almost ever creature drops an item called newbie eggs which also regenerate your health.

After leveling up abit I found that I had enough money to buy the first newbie teir for the warrior.


At first I thought i'd been conned, it looks like i've just finised a shift in an ice cream truck. Supprisingly enough though it's completly overpowered. Rabits that used to hit me for around 30-40 damage now hit me for 1 or not at all. Considering that I have just over 1000 health thats quite alot of rabits i can kill before i'm dangerously low on health.

MMO Adventure Take:2

After recieving no help at all from blizzard support I decided to stop wasting time trying to fix Worlf of Warcraft (WoW) and to turn to another online game. I had already tried Secondlife and I found it painfully boring, buggy and pointless.

It turns out that quite a few people in my tutorial group and some more people in my seminar group started playing a game called Seal Online.



This is an MMORPG (you may find me calling these "Muh-Mor-Per-Gur's"), like WoW, apart from it is much more basic. Although the gameplay is much more simplifed (as i write this my character is fishing with out any input needed by me), the interaction seems to be a little higher.

In WoW you will rairly find people in the starting areas, and if you do they tend not to be very chatty or want to group with you. This is probably due to the fact that the early levels are boring and the fastest way to level past them and into more intresting areas is to do solo quests as fast as you can. I'd be intrested to see how interaction develops in SealO as you level up.

"Se"XBOX - My Thoughts on Fox News Journalism

After watching this segment from Fox News, about a new computer game called Mass Effect, I felt I had to respond to how poorly the news is delivered to the public. First of all the person on the against side has no background experience in the effects that computer games or any other media types have on people. The soul reason for her being there is to plug her new book.

Secondly the supposidly neutral journalist sides on the against team almost instantly. During the intro of the segment she talks about the game "In some parts of the game it features full digital nudity" which is not the case at all as there are no graphical scenes in the game.

Cooper Lawrence, who has also not played the game, starts her argument saying that this game has damaging effects on the development of adolecent males because it protrays women as objects and because you're in controll of the character it means that they feel they would be in controll over women in real life. Geoff Keighley rebuttles by stating you can play either a male or female character in the game. Also he goes on to say that the featured "sex" scene in the game lasts for two miniutes, where as the whole game lasts somewhere around thirty hours long, meaning that that one scene is very insignificant. This doesn't stop the missinformed ignorant journalist and aparent pshycological specialist from talking about the game as if it is based on that miniture part of it.
Cooper brings up some research from a university in the United States and quotes them saying "boy that play video games can not tell the diffrence between what they're seeing in the real world and a video game if they don't have the real experience". Unless that came from the University of "I'm going to talk shit and pretend it's fact" (from which Cooper probably graduated with a first) I'd have to say that she was lying or was just terribly missinformed. There is no proof at all that shows a violent video game caused someone who played it to do something violent in real life.

Even if there was a case where one unstable person choose to do something violent due to playing a violent video game then that would be one case out of the hundreds of millions of people that have played a violent game.

At the end of the segment they go to a panel of 4 people each has no experience in the effects of video games on people, let alone experience of games at all. The journalist keeps repeating that it's games like Mass Effect that make parenting even harder than it already is. This in my opinion has no relivence as the game has been cencored "M" for maturity which means no one under the age of fifteen is legally allowed to buy or play that game.

I'd rather let my hypothetical children play a violent game with partial nudity than let them watch Fox News.

By the way this isn't just a one off from the fox news team:

Spring Break Serial Killer - A segment on a serial killer at large in Florida. The picture in picture frame are clips of people on spring break which is pretty much just people drinking alchohol and women in bikinis. It has nothing to do with the story at all.


9/11 Tribute Show: Lube Wresteling - This segment is from Fox News' Bill O'Reilly's 9/11th Tribute show. Almost half of this segment has lube wresteling full screen, not really in keeping with a tribute to thousands of people who died in that tragidy.


If you want more extreme right wing, stupidity journalism I recommend you check out this extreme left wing fanatic's youtube page http://youtube.com/user/jsjkim

LOOK OUT! COLOUR AND LIGHT!

We were asked in tutorial to post a picture that we've taken ourselfs and which screams colour and light. I decided to use a picture that i'd already taken. This is a picture of one of the times I went fishing at home in Cornwall. I was concerned at first about using this picture because the only rich vibrent colour in it is blue. But I think it still works well considering that our task was "Colour and Light" and not Colours and light.

INSPRA-FUXING-RATION!

I thought it would be a good idea to post some videos on my blog that have inspired me to make a machinema.

The Grind - Halloween Special


Illegal Danish - Super Snacks


Jimmy: The World of Warcraft Story

A Screeching Hault

As part of the Identities modual we were asked to join an online community which had it's own virtual world. My first thought was to make a machinema film about online communites using the game World of Warcraft.

Things were going well when I managed to knock out around two pages of dialog. Things came to a sudden hault last wednesday though. Blizzard, the companie behind World of Warcraft (WoW), released a patch for the game. Something in that patch must have corrupted some files somewhere because now I can no longer log into my account and play the game.

I left multiple posts on the Tech Support Forum they have set up but nothing has worked so far. I feel I might have to abandon using WoW for my machinema and try something else.

Interactive Narative The Flash Process

I'd never used any version of Flash before so I didn't expected the process of making my interactive narrative to be an easy task. I started quite well finding placing my frames in the template provided with out any major kind of problem.

I was not able to complete my project though as I had quite a lot of trouble with organising the buttons for how to start the game and proceed though it. I'm sure I'm just facing small obstacles that can be sorted out easily during a surgery session. So I aim to have it finished and online quite soon.

Here's a few snippets from what I got so far:

The First Frame


The Second Frame


Game Lost Frame

Interactive Narative

My idea for an interactive narrative is a type of play along music game in which the player needs to pick the correct segment of music that needs to go next. I decided to use the song The Devil Went Down To Georgia as a music video by Primus inspired me.



I thought the song was very catchy and would appeal to a wide audience therefore more people would want to play my game. Also the song has a clear narrative throughout.

You play the role of Johnny, who is a young fiddle player who accepts a challenge set by the devil. If the devil wins then he gets your soul and you have to reset the game. But if you win then you win a fiddle made of gold.

I decided to call my game "Let's Go To Hell" because it I think that name makes it funnier than something like "You're Going To Hell" which sounds more like a statement, whereas my version makes it sound like going to hell is a good idea sort of like "Let's Go Get Ice Cream" or "Let's Go To Disney Land". In truth I stol.... borrowed this idea from a film I like called Let's Go To Prison