Here are a few speed paints!

These are some I did today and yesterday!

First term comes to an end...

That's it now until after Christmas. Then it is off to Turkey for me and four others.

But it wont all be sun, sea and booze, oh no!

We will have to go picture crazy. I may even go as far as to take a video of some of the streets to get a full 3d view of the buildings.

Work has been fun this year with us starting by searching for textures rather than filtering them off the net. A bit annoying but in fact a reason for spontaneous rides to odd places.

I think the hardest project for me was the H Van as I almost lost the plot getting the mesh right. But I'm surprisingly happy with the final outcome.

So without further ado, here are some final renders;

Have a great Christmas everyone and a Happy New Year!

Till Next Time Cya!

You can can with a H Van!

Yes i have been building the H Van. As have most people as it was the only vehicle most people could find. Turns out that it is quite collectible and alot of people are having them restored to there former glory.

It is a very awkward shape to model correctly but I think I'm almost happy with mine.
As a vehicle though, it actually grows on you. It reminds me of a tank, with how bulky it's shape is.

I should have the interior finished soon and then I can get the thing unwrapped and textured post haste.

Feel free to not tell me what you think on this van as I will ignore them anyway. Because I dont want to model it any more than I have too. Understand?

Till Next Time Cya!

Little Big Planet

WOW.......

This game is amazing and rather addictive.

OK very addictive and i don't think its going to be easy, but i will do work and not get distracted..............

..........
............ well maybe a little go wont hurt :P

Yes you can build stick pull faces. You even drive a car. Where does the fun stop. Seriously.
I'm not the only obsessed one either. I get sad faces coming to my door asking if they can play and even adopted a room full while I was attempting to ignore them and continue modeling. With the odd urge, to have a go at trying to fling my Sackboy about giant spinning disks. Which aloud me to get it out of my system.

Me and Joel have both had a go at the customisation. Trying to build some sort of level. But it is both time consuming and more effort than either of us had anticipated.
Maybe over Christmas I will have a few really good levels to try out upon my return.
Along with 2 more controllers hopefully as Caz will have her PS3. WoopWoop!

Till Next Time Cya!

GranTurismo 5 Prologue

I really enjoy these games and could not wait for them to release the full game and in my haste bought the Prologue on EBay.

I'm still happy with my decision and when the work gets handed in I will be sure to unleash myself upon it.
But I could not help but have a little look see first. Only an hour. Honest.

There are not very many tracks to play and to my surprise, no licences. Which was a blessing in my book. The flaw came though, in that you had to complete all challenges in the low class races before continuing to a higher difficulty. Which left you some what bored and feeling rather linear.

But as I found, if you now your cars and buy them with some thought and consideration. You can fly through the races with some ease. Occasionally there is the odd race where you feel it was some what unnecessary, such as overtake 15 cars in 1 lap.

It's bits like that in games that just drive you mad. Get it!

Sorry that was really bad. I apologise.

Not sure if I was entirely satisfied by the game though, but it is great to see the cars and tracks in there full PS3 glory.

A very good looking game indeed. And so it should be, it's taking them long enough to bring out the full game.
I also like the start page shown here. It shows your car in fully rendered 3D environments, all still modeled to a high quality. Slowly spinning around the vehicle. I just love cars.

Which is probably why I have started typing quicker, as Top Gear has started and I don't want to miss another Clarkson extrabaganza.

So Till Next Time Cya!

Alternate Reality

Let me take you back to yesterday. A day where all was normal, Kitchen was in a mess, Tom downloading lots of stuff at no MB a second and Joel was making tea and as usual Max 2009 was being a pain in the arse.

Ben decided that life was getting a bit samey and wished that something would happen that was "out of the ordinary".

Where do I start..... It is like being in an alternate reality.

No Food.

Kitchen is CLEaN!...

The fence has fallen down.

Something has collapsed across the road.

A crazy woman that was patronisingly happy came to the door.

No More TEA!!!!!

And for me personally, Blogger has loaded every time today and not just every now and again.

Maybe this is how the world ends.

In one giant crash of reality....

Or..... maybe the pressure of all the weirdness will make everyone's heads blow up.....

No?...... Me neither.

Maybe I'm already insane.........Till Next Time Cya!

Going Slightly Mad!

I think that there must be some sort of bigger power because there is no way that this much shit can happen to one person without something doing it to you. I feel like the fly that's had its wings pulled off by an adolescent child.

I think that me and a few other people will have to go and break some legs. Mainly the programmer's of Max (Cax) 2009, as they just messed it up.


I feel like I'm going on and on about this but every time I write a blog about how dumb they are and crap the programme is. I find that there is yet another stupid ass problem that almost tips me over the edge of a nervous breakdown.

As I was saying in my last blog that I had nearly finished my model of the Slaney pilot. And that there was only the hands to do.

Well call me particular, but I thought I would spend some time on them and get some nice high poly hands.

But...... Max had other plans for my hands. I had a few extra touches to do and 2 more fingers, when I needed to do a weld. But accidentally selected a few extra other unwanted poly's. Not to bad really because all you need to do is backup. First of all as you remember me saying the backup can just stop functioning at any given point.

This time however it decided to work but in some Cax 2009 fashion forgot where everything went before it was welded and proceeded to completely balls up my high poly hand into a nice sort of ball shape.

So then I thought no matter, there is always the autoback. All 3 of the autoback's came up with an error message closing the file instantly.

Now not all is lost because I had a save of it. Where in I had only to make the fingers and the thumb, but the point is that it was the fact that I had to do it again after already perfecting it before. It was like Max(Cax) had just decided to put me back about 5 stages in my development.

I'm going to think on the bright side though. I have to look at the bright side :))))

It is good practice......... (insane laugh as the white van pulls up to take me away) about time!


Oh yes work of course, I almost forgot. Here is what my character looks like now;

As you can see not entirely finished but not far.

Till Next Time Cya!

Im still here....JUST!

I think that for now, I'm happy with this.
I think that I will go with Kitto's idea of a cool sky to go with my environment. The sky in this picture was quickly done in Photoshop but hopefully it will be a cool sky dome when I get round to it.

For the moment though I want to get my other 2 projects to a similar level as this, then I can do the finishing touches to them all.

With all the problems I have been having with max (CAX) 2009. I have had slow progress with my character, the Slaney pilot.
I have almost finished the model of my pilot and just need to make the hands.

But since I have been connecting the head and making the neck, max has magically flipped all the polygons and changed all my X-Forms. And! Even created an invisible object.

I know you probably don't believe me and I wouldn't have either if it had not happened to me. But a more common and more believable problem does happen. The undo (ctrl + Z) stops working randomly, until you turn off max and reload.
Why?
Who knows!
Who cares!
But it just should not do that!!!!!!

Anyway I solved all of these problems and did the odd bit of merging the files until I was happy.
Now I believe I can continue without taring my hair out at any given moment.
WARNING!
Please do not use Max when near or around sharp objects or with any long piece of cord or string.

oh max!

The all mighty Max 2009, or should it be called Cax 2009. I’m starting to agree with Joel and think that they have made a huge mistake with the programming this time around.

I mean it is as if they said that starting again would be a good idea and they all agreed, but didn’t take notes on where the important stuff should go.

Maybe it sounded a little bit like this.

BOB: Oi Dave where do you think this goes mate.

DAVE: Don’t know mate. Just shove it next to the unwrap.

BOB: Right O!

(No offense to any Dave’s or Bob’s)

If you want to read what Joel wrote on the subject CLICk the link; http://legendfactory.blogspot.com/2008/11/cax-2009.html

COOLPIX!

Coolpix cameras do what they say on the advert. Now thats a first.

I will tell you what, I think this has to be an award winning photo. I was busy taking pictures of my garden and the area over the fence. When I noticed this seagul flying round over head.

So I just thought I would try to get a picture of it to go in the sky over my work as an Alpha. But never did I expect to get one as good as this and especially not on first try.


Also I have chosen a corner of my garden that has sculptures I on my foundation. Like this one.

I think it funny that I should be resculpting it again digitally this time.

It might not look much but it did start out life as a breeze block.

Now it is much more interesting than if it had been used to build a boring house.




I think that I shall try and incorporate something into the background of my environment but im finding it hard to think of something to put there as in reality, their is nothing there but cows in fields.

The church in this picture is not to bad as a backdrop I guess.

Or in the distance you can sea the Wind Turbines out at see poking over the trees.

Any suggestions on possible background stuff would be really helpful.

Till Next Time Cya!

StarWars: The Force Unleashed

As most people know I have a PS3 (60GB).

Since bringing it to Uni I have been constantly downloading different Demo's and watching trailers.

But a game in particular took my fancy. The new star wars game.

Slaney has this game for the PS2 and it is fantastic to watch, but I wanted to have a go and test it against the PS3 version.

First thing I did was play the PS2 version. But to my suprise, playing it on the PS3 is impossible as the game re-orders itself from back to front.

Let me explain; When you play you have a health and energy bar at the top left hand of the screen. But the health and energy are not displayed in the bars at all. Or so I thought.

It turned out that when I looked up at the sky, I could see my health and energy fine.

Well not to worry if thats the only problem, I thought, but here is the funniest part.

I reached the first boss. The health bar of the boss is at the bottom of the screen. Making it completely impossible to read even if you look up.

Still I thought, so what if I cant see the boss's health, completely denying the obvious truth.

To kill the boss you have to do a button combination in time with what it asks you. Of course, you guessed it. YOU CANT SEE THE BUTTONS!

I ask myself why they even bothered making the PS3 back compatable sometimes.

Apart from that,the demo of the PS3 version is superb and graphicly, really pleasing to play. I think that I will have to use my PS2 if I want to play the other version properly next time.

Till Next Time Cya!

Welcome

Hi, Welcome.

This is the new blog and I feel I will be posting more reguarly here.

As a start I will post some images of work that I have been doing.

Some of you will probably of already seen some of these images on the last blog but I thought it nice just to refresh them here as well.

If you did not already know, I have chosen to do the WWI character project and im recreating Joel Slaney as a WWI Pilot.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

Here is my second project, the garden.

After my incident with my internal hardrive, I unfortunately lost all of my images for this. But never fear, I will be returning home to take them all again on tuesday.

If the weather permits me that is!

Also I have been researching Architecture in Turkey, for preperation of Team CatBarrel's project.

Feel free to add our team blog to your Follow Other Blogs on Dashboard : http://catbarrel.blogspot.com/

Till Next Time Cya!