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.