Germania update

Ive basically completed the 3 main buildings of my level now so ive just got to do more work on the surrounding walls of the level. The two images here are of the existing reichstag building that is already been built but that the city of germania would have been built around. The other building would have been the quarters of hitler or known as the fuhrer's palace.

Germania main statue

This piece of work is going to be in my main plaza area. I made a few design changes to the orginal blueprints i was working from so decided to place a giant bronze statue of an ss officer on horse back. Also i wanted to ad a link to the programme that i think reminded me and also inspired me to do this project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQLQsk06OYI&feature=related

upcoming project

History is a subject which fascinates me quite abit and always gets me thinking especially when thinking of subjects like war and conflicts. I was always annoyed at school when the history that was taught were of such boring subjects. like for instance i always remember being taught on the indians of america and i don't really remember anything that really fascinated me about it, as it wasthe boring parts that teachers focused on. Like i would have much liked to learn about battles between cowboys and indians, over things like how indians drove buffalo over cliffs. My point here is that if schools had taught more interesting subjects like on the great british empire or on either WWI or WWII then i would have been drawn to this subject but unfortunately it was never a subject i chose for my GCSEs.

So as history is a subject i never truely studied, i found myself getting interested in certian parts like i mentioned earlier partically towards subjects of war. It was during the summer period that i started go watch more of tv channels that i wouldn't usually watch like the history channel. I discovered a programme based on WWII that gave a basic run down of the timeline of events during the war.

This is when i started to notice that even my work was starting to be influenced by what i was watching as one project i did during the holidays was the hells angel project and decided to create a nazi biker. this was just a project i wanted to do as i wanted to test out displacement maps using zbrush, but this is where i learned the mistake that i couldn't have triangles on my model to make the displacement map in zbrush :(.

then with the upcoming release of inglorious bastards i found that i was getting more inspiration from the nazi regime and things like how they used propaganda amongst other things. thats when i recalled watching a programme years ago about how nazis would construct a new city if the war was won by germany and that city would be germania. This is what my upcoming project will be based on. in it i will try to show how if the city would have been built how it would be used to show nazi supermacy and dominace.

the importance of playing with your work

Usually when im doing a 3d project on max i find my self doing the work and adding the maps that i want the piece to have and then if im satisfied i would usually leave it, though if i do notice problems i will try to resolve them to finish the piece off.

However recently i have been purchasing different books which shows me some of the great 3d artists out there at the moment. Like one book i have called digital art masters covers a wide range of digital artist, so isnt necessarily just confined to game art. but even so when looking at some of the work produced it just inspires you in your own work. i would start looking at a certain artist in this book and they would then give a brief description of how the produced a piece of their work.

in the case of pieces of work that is produced in max the artist may inform you on some of the effects they have used that you wouldn't necessarily have thought of, so then this leads you to start playing around with your own work even if its just testing things to see if it would work. tats what ive started to notice more about how ive been approaching my work. i know that I should never be satisfied with my work and that its best to always think of ways to imporove the piece.

i have found this attitude to be really helpful though as even with tampering with things that your testing, you can find things by accident. Like for instance i finished producing a treasure chest and even though i had added all the maps that i wanted and i was quite satisfied i still proceeded to test different effects on it and it was through this method that i discover how to create an ambient map over a bump map. It wasn't like i found some tutorial on the internet or some thing that i read about in a book, but was something i learnt simply from playing with the piece of work to see what worked. It just goes to show how even when yout think you have a piece of work that is finished, that you can improve on it if you have the tiime to play with it.

film and games

I know i haven't really been blogging that much recently, but i would like to think that the start of a new term will mean that i can get back on track with this blogging business, at least for the next few days anyway as i have had topics which i wanted to blog about, but just didnt due to me tinkering with pieces of work im unsatisfied with and me not being much of a writer.

Anyway i wanted to start writing about some thoughts that have been recently goin through my mind that i wanted to share with you all. Some of the major influences when producing ideas or designs for me have been through films, i get to see alot of films free anyway which is a big bonus when working in a cinema. But its always good to see that games can also influence films as i noticed in a film i watched a few weeks ago. The film that i'm writing about here is district 9, now this film i believe was always going to be closely influenced by games as the director was originally suppose to start work on the halo movie before distrubution rights made the entire project collapse and the director then moved on to make this movie.

When district 9 starts it all seems like a film and a quite different one at that as i found the racist remarks against the aliens referring to them as 'prawns' was an interesting touch along with the general behaviour towards the alien inhabitants. Then halfway through the film the main protagonist manages to accidently aquire an alien arm. Now to me this is something ive never seen in a film unless you want to include the original fly film, but in that case the character was left with the disadvantage of having their new body part. in District 9 however the character with the alien arm had the advantage of using alien technology and to become an almost unstoppable force in the film. This is where i think designers had the most amount of fun designing the weapons. It was at this point that i started to realise that most of the weapons were as though they had been taken straight from games. For instance there was a mech suit that had a gravity gun, that would fling pigs with powerful force at enemys that seem to have been taken from half life and tesla guns like in wolfenstein, though the gun in the film didnt just shock but would result in the victims guts exploding across the walls!

When i had finished watching it was then that i realised that this film easily could have been a game instead of a movie and now since this thought passed through my mind ive been making these comparisons with other films. like a few days ago i watched irobot, then whilst watching it i remembered how Will Smith actually has a bionic arm. this then immediately started me thinking about games like bionic commando or prototype. Even thinkin off the top of my head i know there are scenes in G.I. Joe where characters get to wear suits that make you run as fast as a car and let u jump over a train, which sounds more like a game scenario to me.

I guess my point to all this is that the line between games and film are thinner than i once thought. i knew that games and film were becoming more alike, we all know that some games have started to use actors as characters in game. but i just didn't realise how much similar they are these days. This then gets me started thinking about how nothing really seems that original anymore. it just seems to me that things are just taken from other peoples ideas and they are changed a little bit then they claim that the idea is original. Like i can understand where people like Peter Jackson are coming from who say that films like district 9 are original, but at the same time i dont agree with this statement as like i mentioned this film has taken ideas from games like half life and claim that its an original piece of work.

Assistance of concept artists

When i started on the concept of this piece, i started without using any form of reference material which was probably not the best of ideas. However i pushed on with this concept which was the idea of having this mini hideout amidst the mountains in an alien environment.

When looking at this piece of work i could see that there were problems but sometimes it is quite hard in determining exactly what the problem in the image is. I then found this problem to be even more harder as i hadn't actually used any reference.

At this stage i was really struggling to complete the image, so i therefore started looking at other artists to see how i could improve my work. An artists that is really influencing me at the moment is Gary Tonge who can create some fantastic landscape pieces of work. I quickly realised by looking at his work that my own was missing alot of shadow. I therefore incorporated the shadows into my work and actually started adding more details to areas like the sky which i felt was a little bland before.

I feel like the resulting piece of work is a vast improvement in comparison to my earlier image, which is all thanks from the aid of the masters in the industry!

Trouble with perspective? use max!

I just thought i would post this message out there for reference for the other game artists that are out there, that might be struggling with perspective, especially when it comes to more complex structures.

When i was producing designs for the land, sea and air yacht project, i managed to produce a side image that i really liked, however i found that i was struggling with the perspective on the design and when putting pencil to paper i found that i wasn't progressing any further in getting the design into perspective. i therefore decided that i should create a model of my design to achieve the correct perspective.

However i felt that actually trying to create something out of clay or paper would be to much time consuming, that when i remembered reading about the concept artist Gary Tonge and how he would use software like 3dmax to create complex designs which he found hard to put into perspective. i therefore went through this process and found that it really help me to finalise my design. It just goes to show that from time to time we all can struggle with perspective even the professional, but its good to know that 3d max can be not just for game production but can assist in visual design as well