Space Temple #25

Space Temple has finally been accepted to a film festival. It failed to get into most of the festivals I entered it to. Of the thirteen I entered, there are three left which I've yet to hear from. I did get a few mails saying they liked my film and thought it looked professional but it didn't fit there program. SO I've been pretty down recently.

I found out yesterday that Space Temple has been accepted to the Euroshorts film festival in Poland.

The festival will have 4 screenings in Warsaw on November 22nd, 26th, 28th and 29th, then it will go on tour to 15 other cities of Poland.

In Warsaw the screenings will be held in Luna Film Theatre, National Film Museum Screening Room and Powiększenie Club.

The Schedule of events will be available at www.euroshorts.pl soon.

Here is a link to the catalogue I'm about three quaters down in the animation section (Kosmiczna świątynia umysłu Waywarda), reż. Ezra Allen Wooooo Hooooo!

It' funny to see the synopsis in Polish:
Kapitan Oren Metz odbiera sygnał alarmowy z niezbadanej
dotąd części Kosmosu. Odkrywa tam tajemniczą Kosmiczną
Świątynię, w której czekają na niego mroczne niespodzianki.
W filmie wykorzystano muzykę Modesta Mussorgskiego, Richarda
Wagnera, Igor Strawińskiego.

I am so relieved that it got into a festival. I thought that I would have to make do with just putting it on the internet. I'm so glad that it will make it to a cinema screen.

I expected Space Temple would have no problem getting into festivals and was actually worried about how much I would have to pay converting enough copies over to digi-beta for the screening (£25-30 a pop) but as time wore on and the rejections and silences rolled in (not all the festivals respond it just comes to the day of rekoning and you dont get the magic email). It's dawned on me that film festivals are a tougher nut to crack than I had first thought.

Ninja Post #5

My ninja is ready for animation. It was more tricky than i expected, I had quite a lot of trouble setting it up so that the ninja can take out his sword and have both arms follow the sword and then put it back in the scabbard and have it attach to that, and function as normal.

It involved a technique called space switching or dynamic parenting which was horribly technical and after quite a lot of time spent I came to the conclusion I could'nt get it to work with out using scripts. I need to avoid scripts so I ended up cheating. Now the ninja has two swords one in the scabbard and one in his hand and I just swap between them. I did a quick test but it's too ugly to put up here. Once I've spent the time to make a nice animation of it I'll post it up. In the meantime here's a clip showing the model skinned and rigged doing an idle animation.


Also I've been doing some research looking at somersaults, backflips and martial arts. I put in "ninja moves" as a U-Tube search and found this top clip.

Ninja Post #4

Have done a few tweaks got rid of the holes and added the sword. I will be working on skinning and rigging next to see if I need to alter my mesh. Skinning is the process of adding a skeleton to the model and attaching the mesh so it moves correctly with the skeleton. This can lead to problems meaning the wire frame model needs to be altered so that it works better with the skeleton. Rigging is the process of making the skeleton easy to interface for an animator, so that he can work comfortably with the model. So lots of technical messing about on it's way for me. Sometimes it makes me want to throw the computer out the window, but if I do a good job of it, it will make animating the model much easier.


My ninja is currently around the 3100 polys mark (tris).

Ninja Post #3

Ninja production is progressing. Sword still to come and some other details to go in like his belt.

 

Still lots of tweaking to do. There are some holes in the mesh and I will need to go through the whole skinning process before I start with textures. No point UV mapping and then finding the mesh needs changing.

Ninja Post #2

I've been working on my Ninja model, and I've started with the head and hands as this is usualy the most work. I'm aiming for no more than 4000 polygons hopefully I can get it lower. At the moment the hands are quite high which I might have to change.

I'm quite happy with the way the hands are looking, games characters often have pretty awful boxy looking mittens so it would be nice if I can avoid chopping too many polys out.

Tomorrow I will probably start with the feet and then hopefully get the rest at least started. I will probably leave the sword till last as it should be easy but also satisfying.

Ninja post #1

 I've decided to start work on a new character and decided to go for the old tried and tested Ninja. A stock badguy for many arcade and console games over the years. I've started by doing some research and doing some drawing to get an idea of what I'm aiming for.

The plan is to get a rigged and textured version together, and then do an in game set for my showreel. I think these two are about the best of the sketches so I will be working towards a Ninja that looks like this. I will post up my progress here so you can see how I get along.