Unity and The Butterfly Effect

Happy almost Thanksgiving everyone!

The clips I have this week are made from a program called Unity which I may or may not have talked about before. It is a game development program which is free to use and offers a pretty professional interface for beginners like me to get their feet wet in developing 3D games. With the release of Unity 4 a lot of new features have been added, so the developers teamed with Passion Pictures and Nvidia to create an animated short showing off the goods. Passion Pictures is primarily an animation studio, unfamiliar with working with game development software. The team at Unity knew this and wanted to see how their technology could be pushed in the hands of an animation studio outside of gaming and, well, the results are nothing short of fantastic! I was particularly intrigued by the highly detailed facial animations, created entirely by the free technology which exists with Unity. There's a lot of technical talk that I can't even begin to understand in the Making Of video... however next semester I'm enrolled in Game Dev and Technologies which plans to work with Unity in creating games so hopefully I'll begin to understand some of it. I'm extremely excited to begin learning this incredibly powerful tool for the industry I plan to work in.

And if you really enjoyed the video, I suggest watching this Making Of trailer, which shows the challenges and triumphs of each scene:

Lap Slap App

Tomorrow I'm excited to be a part of the Park School's "Pitch It!" idea pitch session. Cody and I will be presenting a game that we developed last year that is in its prototype stages. I don't want to talk too much about it (we don't have our idea protected yet) but it is a 2D game developed in Unity, a 3D engine. I am extremely proud of the work we have put into it and truly believe that the game will be a success if it can make it to the android and mobile markets. Working on this game was my first real foray into the world of animation and motion graphics. One of the members and I worked on getting hands to animate. We began by looking for models of hands, or the assets of such, to work with and manipulate in Unity. What we found nearly blew our minds...getting hands to animate in 3D space was much more difficult than we anticipated. I'd never heard of rigging before this point and even now it sounds like an incredibly daunting task (but I really hope to get into that sort of thing). So we switched over to 2D animation, which I was just beginning to learn (and still am). My fellow art designer and I used Photoshop to construct the sprite sheets which were then loaded into the game and animated through code. It was fun and in the end I am proud of the prototype we built for the game. We hope to develop it further over the course of the year, if, i mean WHEN we are chosen by the panel of Park alumni. Here is a sneak peek screenshot of the up and coming big hit to the mobile markets: The Lap Slap App

New Challenges

I'm running into some exciting and daunting new challenges in life. The other night after class I had a discussion with Professor Sinclair on what it takes to be a part of the games industry, to help refocus myself and my goals. I expected his answer, but I have yet to get a grip on my reaction. In other words, I am both excited and intimidated and once again do not know which career path within the industry to pursue.

One area we specifically talked about that got me really excited was in 3D modelling, using a program called Maya. I have had some trouble downloading the program, but once I do I plan to really play around with it and see what it can do. I started looking up videos of what people have done with such a program and I was blown away... here is one example I found on youtube:

Yah... nuts. So it looks like this is a combination of several programs; Photoshop, 3Ds Max (similar in power to Maya), Mudbox (?), Brazil (for rendering I believe) and After Effects. These are the programs that I am just starting to scratch the surface of... I have a long way to go before I can pull something off like what this guy has done. My goals for this summer are to find an internship when I go to LA, (I'm looking at both Blizzard and Doublefine!) and I believe knowledge of this program will greatly help my chances. Hopefully by the end of this semester I will be able to post something that has some kind of 3D modelling in it, but nothing close to what this guy has done! If you are somewhere out there, Nareg Kalenderian...TEACH ME YOUR WAYS

First Impressions

Wanna know something funny? The first day I walked into class, I had no idea what After Effects even was. I'm so clueless sometimes it's a bit ridiculous. In any event, now that I know what it is, I'm extremely excited to be part of the class and learn the program. After playing around with it for just the first few days I've been trying to think about the possibilities of the program and what it could mean for my future in game design. I've worked a little with Photoshop and Illustrator, and I'm taking a class this semester that works with Flash. By the end of my time here at IC I would love to be proficient in each program to be able to adapt my drawings and sketches into polished concept art and animations.

The short time I've spent with After Effects has opened my mind up to even more than that. I'm still not decided on exactly what I want to do... I seem to have run the gambit of game design and don't know exactly where my niche is. Art, writing, and production seem to be where I find myself always returning to. But talking about all these intros to movies has made me think critically about them, and the possibility of doing something with movies or television is always in the back of my mind. One of my favorite movies of all time is 300, so when we talked about it and I began to realize that we were working with the very same program that made the special effects possible, I got very excited. I'm a pretty good artist and I really want to use my drawing skills with the After Effects program to create some cool animations like the ones in the credit scene, and I've told some friends that maybe someday I'll be able to create some cool intros for their film projects.

One of the coolest things I've seen done with the After Effects program is people on YouTube making live action, or real-life videos of games, or spoofs on them. Specifically for the game, Skyrim. This is one such video that if I could, I would love to make:

By the end of this class, I hope to have my own Skyrim Badass video on youtube. Cody, I know you're out there, lets do it.