Wildsided

I finished the Gwen and Tech parts for the intro today, First up is Gwen's Christmas Angel There's now some back ground, and more of a scenario. Simulated snow (that changes orientation as the camera changes position), A simulated Depth of Field effect (I.E I made it using a blur filter rather than it specifically being a D.O.F filter). Gwen is no longer just there, she appears through a gathering of mist. gwen_complete.mov it's a fairly big file but I tested it and it took about 20 seconds to stream which isn't bad I don't think. This is a combo of A:M and After Effects. Which is probs how most of the show will be made from now on. I'm totally psyched about animating sequences in A:M and then adding effects in AE. Then there's Tech's Gift chase. Tech is now in the studio and the floor is visible for what might be the first time. The Christmas Tree is a photo of a tree with decorations made using an After effects plugin called "Alpha Plugins Ornament". The lights however were made in A:M by making separate models for each light type and adjusting the transparency and glow amount of each model to make them fade by color. The lights animation was then imported into A:E and overlaid on the tree. Tech, Sonic and Mario also have shadows now to help make them appear more physically in the environment and not just overlaid on a static background. shadows_test.mov

Very strangely my little blue box rating thing has dropped from I think it was 8 boxes down to 3. Must have upset someone....

Yay for Thomas the tank engine characters! I loved these when I little. Mum used to bring me home from nursery school (Kindergarten for American readers) and I would have scrambled egg on toast and watch my Thomas video all afternoon.

The Alice in Wonderland idea draws a lot of parallels to the American Mcgee games series 'Alice', in these games Alice has been institutionalized after her parents die in a fire and she goes a bit....well okay a lot mad. to cope with her psychosis her mind takes her back to Wonderland and we are introduced to a twisted version of Wonderland based on Alice's broken psyche. We reviewed Alice in Epic Gamin' episode 5 http://blip.tv/EpicGamin/american-mcgee-s-...isode-5-5079424 and the sequel Alice Madness Returns in Episode 10 http://blip.tv/EpicGamin/alice-madness-ret...sode-10-5303542 There's also a horror comic book series by Zenescope Entertainment in its Grimm Fairy tales series that follows a similar concept. This one features Alice grown up and insane and her daughter Callie being pulled into the twisted Wonderland. Not accusing Ilidrake of anything, just pointing out that the idea has mostly already been done. That said a lot of things have been 'done before' and still get re-done.

Here's how I do it. 1) Take 2 copies of an eye, name one left and one right. 2) Give each of them a bone with a pivot in the center of the 'ball' so they move properly. 3) Make 2 percentage pose sliders one for eyes left and right and one for eyes up and down. 4) At 100% eyes are extreme right or extreme up (Depending on which slider you're doing) and at 0% the eyes are extreme left or extreme down. That makes the eyes be central at 50%/50% and I can move them around to where they need to be with tweaks of the sliders. If for some reason I need to just move 1 eye then I just grab the bone and move it around on its own. There's another way by making a null and constraining the bones of each eye to it. I think it's aim at and orient like constraints. Then you just move the null around to position the eyes.

Hey guys, just wanted to show you all Tech and Gwen's Christmas intro animations. There's no audio or backgrounds, gonna work on that today, I know roughly how each should look thanks to the storyboard in my head and it cuts render times if I make different parts of the clips separately and then composite it all together afterward. untitled.mov techchristmas.mov

Sounds like a loada balls Thankyou, thankyou, I'll be here all week. Remember to tip your waitress

Thanks for the combo assist guys. downloaded the latest driver for my video card but that didn't fix things. But the normal's were indeed all over the place. clicked refind normal's and most of the faces re-appeared. So nice one David. But I also got a bunch of new options on the video card thanks to the updated drivers. So props to John as well. Not a complete fix but thanks to Robert I know it's a common problem so not gonna stress over it. Thanks again lads

Does anyone know what might cause a bunch of random 4 point patches to suddenly not be filled in? i've made a simple gift wrapped box but all of a sudden 3 of the sides and parts of the ribbon have become unfilled. In shaded wireframe mode the lines are all there and the points that would normally constitute a standard closed 4 point patch are all connected (I've checked). But the patch isn't filling in. It was working fine until today. I've tried resetting the PC, restarting the software nothing seems to make a diference. This same thing happened on my mario model yesterday but on a much smaller scale. I noticed a hole in his hand while I was animating and thought it was a 5 pointer that hadn't closed. It turned out it was 2, 4 point patches side by side that had become unfilled. I deleted the line where they joined and re-drew it and that fixed that issue. But even doing that won't work on the gift box. i've checked to see if the tranparency had been turned on but no. There's nothing I can see that would be causing them to do this Help would be appreciated guys, but if it's just something totally random it won't be a lot of work to remake the gift model. When I render the model all the sides re-appear and when I rotate object whatever sides are facing the camera go transparent. It's like I've clicked some kind of "Always be always be able to see through object" setting without knowing it.

Animation and games are 2 very competitive areas. But there aren't too many animated shows about videogames. The only one that comes to mind is Rooster Teeth's Red vs Blue. The amount of competition drops again when you factor in 3D animation. But i'd like to apologize to you and Rodney. This is after all my problem and I should be dealing with it. I'm the only one who can make these decisions and if I f**k it up then it's my fault. It's my fault my life is the way it is .It's my own fault that I got fired and am on crazy pills to stop me from going off the deep end again so no one will hire me (can't blame em like who wants to hire a potentially ticking time bomb). I shouldn't be bothering people with my problems. Sorry everyone.

I want to make the show a financial success, not for the bragging rights but for purely practical reasons (and my own self efficacy). When all is said and done this is supposed to be my job. I refuse to say work because I love doing it and supposedly when you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. As far as money is concerned, the change couldn't possibly make me any less money than it is now. since April I have made a staggering $4.00 in advertising revenue from the show and while I'm not 100% sure, I attribute this to "Another guy making another video game review show" syndrome. I thought we had a fairly unique angle on the premise, but how unique can you be in a potentially over saturated market. Statistically our viewing figures show that between 55 - 95% of our total viewers watch up to 25% of each episode. While only 25 - 30% watch all the way to the end. There are 2 explanations for this as far as I can see. 1) Viewers watch the show because they like the pre-review stuff but aren't really bothered about the reviews. So they watch the bit they like and then stop watching. Or 2) Viewers start off watching the show expecting the review to start right away and when after a couple of minutes the review hasn't started they lose interest and switch off. Quite frustratingly these 2 explanations point to either dropping the pre-review stuff or dropping the reviews What do I want to do? Basically whatever works and will enable me to increase the viewer base and enable me to make enough money to support myself and the show. Sadly without much in the way of viewer feedback (I ask for it pretty much every episode but don't get a whole lot) I have no way of knowing what the viewers want.

Thanks Rodney! I hand on heart greatly appreciate that you (or any member of the community) take the time to comment on my stuff. I know it's not up to the standard of some of the hard hitters around here but it'll get better the more I do it. Which rather neatly segues into the next topic I'm throwing open to discussion. Don't get me wrong I love video games. Whenever I have some spare time I'll sit down and play through some classics or try out the hot new thing (E.G has been a great excuse to do that). However my real passion has always been with story telling and animation. I'm sure the following story will be a familiar to a lot of the A:M'ers. When I was a kid and even more so now I'm older. I used to watch Saturday morning cartoons and be pulled into these other worlds and imagined adventuring alongside my heroes. But unlike a lot of people I would also watch these characters brought to life and wonder, "How do they do that?", "how could I recreate that effect", "That's a really good choice of camera angle" and so on. As I've worked more and more with A:M the point has really been driven home. I get much more excitement and pleasure knowing that people will be seeing Gwen, Tech or the logos etc and not so much from the reviews themselves. So starting with the Christmas episode (which will most likely be entirely skit based) I've been thinking about shifting the focus of E.G away from the skit - intro - review - outro. Format I've been using and instead making the show be more animation and story-centric. Either by making the story a separate entity to the reviews or dropping reviews entirely. E.G would still be about Videogames characters and culture. Just with original stories and my own characters. My reasoning is that there are a crap load of videogames review shows online and having 3d characters, puppets and (at least in my view) a well put together show, doesn't seem to be helping to raise E.G above the white noise. There are very few videogames related animation series though. (Not counting all the flash and sprite based stuff that newgrounds users make. But a lot of that is unnecessarily violent, full of crude humor or meant to be a one off). So after that long explanation my question is do you all think this is a good idea? Am I missing something? I respect your opinions so feel free to fire off some thoughts and opinions. Oh and while I'm here, here's a low res render of part of the Christmas intro. No sound effects or BG Music. gwe_angel_test.mov

Just posted a quick video to the Epic Gamin' Chanel. It'll be more interesting to you guys than your average gamer though. The vid has the animated debut of Tech 2.0 as well as 3d rotates of my Mario, Sonic, Shadow, Truck and Christmas Gwen models. Hope you like it and it gives you a little more of an idea of what to expect from the show in the coming months. http://blip.tv/EpicGamin/quick-message-from-the-team-5796616

that my friend is a work of art

love it dude. just need to track down that shooom shooom shooom sound effect for when it's strobing.

Well I know i'm liking it so far. Once all the panels are done and you smooth em out it's gonna look sweeeeeet. What are you thinking for the red lights at the front? Animated Decal or a bunch of lights turning on and off in sequence maybe.

The 6 million dollar puppet.... It was cold out and raining heavily when the officer came into the gamin' lounge at E.G Studio's. His heavy raincoat was soaked through and his expression was no warmer than the temperature outside. "Mr Skelton?" He asked enquiringly. I confirmed my identity with a quick nod of my head and he continued. "Mr Skelton I'm afraid there's been an accident tonight involving one Mr Tech Nology. We got your address from the business card in his wallet." "Is...is he hurt?" Gwen the newest member of our team asked. She was tall with redish brown hair, deep blue eyes and legs that...sorry I'm getting off topic. "I'm afraid so miss, we're trying to contact next of kin do you happen to have a contact number?" The officer asked, taking out a small black notebook and pencil. "I'm all he's got...." I said guiltily, it was my fault Tech was here in the first place and worse it had my idea for him to go pick up a pizza for the three of us to eat while we pulled an all nighter working on the Christmas special. Thanks to me he was injured, maybe even dying by the sounds of it. "In that case i suggest you get to St. Andrews as soon as you can. I was there when they cut him out of the car and I didn't fancy his chances, I'm truly sorry to have to tell you sir," the officer said before excusing himself and heading for the exit. 10 minutes later Gwen and I screeched into the hospital parking lot and soon after a friendly young lady at the front desk had pointed us toward the Emergency ward. We were greeted by a stern looking doctor, his face was weathered like an ancient oak tree and his wrinkles clashed glaringly with his immaculately pressed white coat. "Are you family?" He asked. "As close as. He lives with me, doesn't have anyone else." I said in rapid fire succession. Why are hospital staff always so reluctant to give information to anyone who isn't family? It's not like I was going to call and inform the local press that my best friend was fighting for his life. "How is he." I asked, bracing myself for the worst. "Not good...In fact he's barely alive," I heard a choked sob escape Gwen from somewhere behind me and I won't lie I felt my tear ducts kicking in as well. "Is there anything you can do or should we say our goodbyes?" I asked in a small voice I barely recognized as my own. "Well there is one thing, but it's risky." The doctor replied. "You see we could rebuild him, we have the technology. We have the capability to make him better than he was before. Stronger, faster, we could even.....Give him legs!" Alright that's quite enough of that. Just wanted to stop in and let you all know Tech 2.0 is completed and tomorrow I plan to put him through his paces. Here's a pic.

Looks like K.I.T.T to me.

yup it was, the quote is from the beginning of City Slickers 2 though

Quick update on the progress of Tech 2.0. He's not finished yet, needs his hair spikes and beard and general tidying up, but he's coming along.

awesome Nancy I love the movement of lotharios' chest and mane.

"The cow's name is Norman, you're pulling on his dick." 17 year old movie reference FTW

Glad to help

Have you set an alpha channel in your image software? dunno about gimp but that's what I do in photoshop. Then save it as a .png or .tga and when you bring it into A:M it should see the alpha channel and not show the white area.

In other news I just finished Gwen's Christmas outfit. Whadda you reckon, festive enough?