Character Design

Here is one of my character I've drawn out in Photoshop.

It was one of the beginning point towards this design.

Airbrushing painting

If you seen the preview then you seen this drawing below:

This is the photoshop painting I've quickly speed painted. It was fun to draw

To make the image looks 8 bit pixel, I just used mosaic filter to add the effects and it works.

DVD casing

I finally finish my short film, yah. Though it lacks sound for now, I'm going to add them later.

Anyway here is the DVD case along with my DVDs. I really like it as it looks really old school video game cover.

Based on my promotional poster post:

http://retro-8bit.blogspot.com/2009/05/promotional-poster.html

http://retro-8bit.blogspot.com/2009/04/game-covers.html

Now I'm making the special features for my DVD.

I feel as though I really pushed myself towards to the standard of a professional level and I'm really pleased with myself with that. However I wish I could of been more careful with the narration.

1 day countdown - rendering some good sh*t

I'm feeling tired after working these last couple of days but it's going to pay off once I finish the film, yeah. Right now I'm rendering and I'm fixing up some of my work at the time being. So expect the film to be finish quite soon today. The rendering is a b*tch and it's taking me forever so I have to reduce the action/animation abit.

At the mean time I can work on my RVJ.

CGI craze

With my final scene in 3d, all I can say is that I'm almost there

Ok I barely fixed my character rig, I'm working on the blend shape of my character facial such as eyes and mouth. They're not going to be complex expression. The paint cluster is done and now I'm doing abit of facial animation:

I think I can finish my film tommorow though I'm not really happy with it at the moment but I think I can touch it up after uni finishes.

3Ding some stuff

Ok rigging it wasn't much of a difficult job but the paint weight cluster can be annoyance, shown below:

The head and neck movement is ok but it's the lower body, I'm concerning about at the moment.

So the 3d scene shouldn't involve with too much movement because my model has flaws with it at the moment until I fix it.

2 Days Left!!!

I've finally finish the 2d scenes, all is left is the transition to 3d scene and this is going to be fun.

I've shown some people about my film, they said that they can see alot of effort in making the film however there rooms for improvement:

1. The text sequence needs abit slower.


2. The deja vu scene - might need to show the repetitive of the game play scene.


3. Sound is needed.

Other than that things are looking positive for now, now I need to end the conclusion of my film and it's finish. Hopefully I get it done by tonight.

Expect G.U.4 finish by tommorow.

A little preview

I've uploaded abit of my film onto vimeo, feel free to check it out:

3 Days Countdown!!

Here is an update of my short film, I fixed the problem with my computer crashing while using the Digieffects plugin for After effects. Basically I had to render the glitch scenes in jpeg sequence and re-import them in my composition. It's a hassle but I've got it done.

Check out the screen shot below:

Scenes that I need to do:

1. Paranoid Scene
2. Running away from screen
3. The button scene
4. The 3d transition

The 2d scenes are almost finish, the other scenes aren't that difficult to animate comapred to the gameplay scene. The thing with 8-bit, because of the limitation of the technology they're had to make everything in it's simplistic form including animation, music and visual. With animation, the limitation of 8-bit only allowed most game in the early generation 3 frames to move.

Funny thing is that I had self doubt about me finishing the whole film but now that I've done most scenes, I feel rather confident in finishing everything.

Damn you AE plugin

The worst thing there can be is that when rendering files, the program crashed!!!

I spent an hour figuring out whats going wrong and I've found out it's the DE Plugin Skew behind it all. So I had to render it in low quality which comes in to my advantage because it's distorted the footage and it's blurry.

4 DAYS LEFT!!!

Well my aim to finish everything by tommorow seems very unlikely with the progression I've made, however I think my film has many unnecessary part and this would effect my whole narration. So I'm going to keep it short and simple for now.

So I'm getting rid of the running away from the screen bit besides from the controller port 1 scene.

The action sequence is finally done!!! I'm not going to touch it because it was a headache.

Anyway the walk cycle is done but looks rather funny when setting in 24fps so I had to change to 30fps. Now I'm working on the beginning glitch, I don't think it's going to be difficult but rather time consuming.

New colour scheme

Here is what my character going to be, with the new colour scheme it's looking much better and more eye catching.

Vector render:

Render in mental ray:

Here in Flash, I'm tracing over the top of the place holder. It's so time cinsuming but it will worth it in the end.

3D stuff

Here is the new update of the hero character:

More render testing the lighting/shadow along with vector render:

Sidescroller camera with mental ray and Vector render: Now I need to rig it and the skin cluster paint is going to be quite time consuming, but now I'm happy with the 3d stuff for now. Well things are looking quite positive for now and I'm hoping I can make it by Tuesday...

Not much update

The first scene where there is crazy actions is done, all that needs to be done is replacing my character. But it looks really convincing as a game.

What can I say, the gameplay sequence is the most time consuming

Here is the corrupted /glitch scene:

I'm making the character in 3d first so I have the right adjustments when transitioning between the 2d and 3d sequence. I'm going to use blend shape to animate the eyes and mouth for the facial bits.

Animating in progress

With a week left, my aim is to get my animation done by Tuesday so I have to get this done as soon as possible and also meaning I won't be getting any much sleep.

The game play intro scene is probably the most tedious and has to be tweeked alot. But I actually enjoyed making it. I had to use alot motion tweening, motion guide, movie clips etc.

As you can see I'm using existing game character for now as I can easily trace on top of it.

Here is the scene where the hero goes off screen away from the viewers:

The thing I'm annoyed with After Effects is that with swf files, after effects can't read the movie clips so I have to export it as quicktime and this means that it reduces the quality but luckually my old tv vfx covers it up.

The text narration scene in the beginning is completed and I had to set the timing alot so that people can read it. But I couldn't found the sfx for the dotting sound when text is playing out.

Here is the sound I'm looking for when text is rolled out:

I've found this application that produces 8-bit video game sfx:

What if Street Fighter II was released in 1982?

I've just checked out this clip and what if Street Fighter was released for the atari and here is the results:

Anyway this just proves that people back in the days has to use imagination to think whats happening.

Arm Rig test

I wasn't sure whether a square object in maya can be animated probably.

But after looking at people's work such as mcbess and cgi lego animation, it became more clear about how it works.

So I've done a quick rig test on the arm to see how the bending went and it went pretty well. I've added the IK handle to the bones.

As you can see below, the arms is has low polygon count and the bending works fairly well.

Here is a rig plan I've drawn out for the polygon and bone structure:

Character Design

My art direction is early 8 bit pixel grpahics so the graphics should be somewhere between the Artai and the NES. Colour Scheme should be like White, red and Blue (like sonic, Mario, Dig Dug and Bomber Man).

Here are some of the character sketches I've done:

I've approach to character design in a different way and I've played with lego:

The character I've created in Flash below looks like Earthbound/pokemon/ Link character:

Here are some websites I've checked out for character design research:
Computer Arts - 20 character design tips
Digital Arts - Games Character
Digital Arts - How to create commercial characters

Short animated test

Here is a short test I've done, one of my concern is that I think the character is took small so I'll have to rescale it. But in a way it kind of explains that my character in the story is small and vulnerable.

I've used this character to do this short test. Anyway it turned out pretty sweet because the animation walk cycle isn't that difficult based on the file I've got.

What I liked about 8 bit is the style of cycling pattern/texture and this becomes rather repitive and easier for me to make.

Check out the low quality:


I've rendered a new clip with the old tv look and it looks really nice.

Some design stuff

Here are some of the design of the background such as the clouds, sky, trees etc which will be linked to the game level.

One of the aim in design that it has to be simple and blocky so that I can easily reproduce them in 3d.

Here is a place holder to see how the camera: Anyway this is a preview on making the level.

3D preparation

I have only 2 weeks to finish everything, argh (Panic level raising)!! But I reckon I can complete everthing by then.

Anyway I've been preparing the 3d stuff, for example colours which will be important when changing from 2d to 3d because it would be obvious and I want it to be a seemingless transition.

Sorting out the colour by changing the RGB.

The sky and ground:

Lastly a quick render and yes this is actually 3d:

It would lead to Tibori reto style scene.

Vector and Mental Ray blend test

A while ago, I had people commenting which render is better with the vector or the mental ray.
I found a solution, I'm going to use both, here is a short test I've done to blend the two render together:

This will be used in the scene where the character goes 3d.
I think it goes really well for this particular scene because the whole imagery goes quite darker because of the lighting setting I've made.

Look at the pretty clouds

One of the new scenes I've added is the panning down shot from the space to the sky. I've decided to add this mainly because I want the film to be more outside the small video game world rather than restricting it.

Here is a preview of the shot:

This scene is a combination of Flash and Photoshop. The gradient was done in Photoshop and mosaic to create the stripe toning effect. The other rest are done in Flash.

Corrupted Data

If you remember some time ago, I've researched on glitch/corrupted games.

So I tried to find a way to recreate this certain look and check out below:

After this scene, it leads to the red screen of death.

I'm happy with the blocks of corrupted data but I couldn't found the size to change them but at least I've made it look like corrupted.

Here are two video clips I've looked at, in attempt to recreate a freeze/glitch moment:

The background scenery progress

Based on my previous post on the design of the level. I've used Flash to make the background because flash is vector and when you size them, it's still keeps its smoothness:

I've tried importing the swf file to After Effects whether it works. But as you can see below, when I resize the image it becomes blurry so I guess I have to animate the background in Flash:

I've been looking at existing old games to see how to make more old school 8-bit and below are two NES games, someone manage to create a wide image of the games level:
Noah's ark:
Milon's Secret Castle: