Valentine’s Day

This being Valentine’s Day, I thought that I would share the way that I proposed to my wife.

Her favorite game series is Mario Brothers.  I spent months working in secret to create an actual, playable Mario scene with title screens, enemies, breakable blocks, climbable vines, Moving clouds that can be ridden, even music and sound effects.  I altered Princess Peach's look to make it look more like her, and made her dress red (her favorite color).

Once a block is broken, it left a letter behind.  The letters spelled my message once all blocks were broken.

Lucky for me, she said yes!

Rigid Body Dynamics Test

I have been super busy on a project at work, but I’ve found a little time to keep moving forward on my Megaman project.  This is a test for the “death” shots of the enemies. I used Rigid Body Dynamics in Maya.

I hadn’t played with the dynamics in Maya for the last couple of releases.  It's a lot easier than I remember it being.  It’s a little buggy, but you can get some pretty cool simulations out of it.

Arcade Control Panel Restoration

I did a write-up on how I restored the control panel on my Konami Windy arcade cabinet.  It is only one small part of a major project, restoring a classic Japanese arcade machine to it's original condition and state.

READ MORE ABOUT IT HERE

Pop-up Book Animation

This is my favorite portion of a video that I created for a program to promote literacy.  It recently premiered on the largest video screen in the world.  I am in the process of repurposing it for several other major NFL and NHL stadiums.

3D Sprite Animation Progress

I’ve finally gotten around to blocking out some animation in my Megaman project-


Rough Blocking from Joshua Miller on Vimeo.

This is only the rough blocking. I’m trying to get the animation to feel accurate to the game from the side view because that is the original view (of the game). Then I will go in and find more interesting camera angles/moves and play with the timing.

I’ve been having some trouble with the background. Each “pixel” cube in my scene is only 6 polygons, but when there are billions in the scene Maya freaks out. It got to the point where it would take about 20 minutes for the project to open. Maya can do amazing things, but it’s also frustratingly buggy, especially the Mac version.

Anyway, I’m probably going to have to rebuild the background, which isn’t the end of the world. Every time I have to rebuild a part of a project it always goes twice as fast, and I have a lot of ideas on how to make it much more efficient.

So I decided to just deal with that later, after I figure out my camera angles and shot list and move on to animation. That way I can deal with the background on a shot-by-shot basis, and not have to bog down my scene files with information that might not be on screen.

Using the Tools at My Disposal

Over the long weekend, I started my first painting on canvas in about 5 years.  I had forgotten how great it is to feel the bristles of your brush on the canvas.  While you can usually achieve almost the same image with software, there is a level of tactile feeling that is lost using a Wacom tablet.

On the other hand, there are advantages to digital media.  The one that I appreciate most is ease of editing.  There is no undo key in real life.

That brings me to the point of this post.  I tried a different approach to this painting.  Almost every drawing or painting I do, I try to find some sort of visual reference of the subject matter.  I don’t try to copy the image, but usually I can get more information about shapes, textures, etc. that might not be immediately accessible in my head.

For this piece in particular, I know there would be a lot of geometric objects, seen through a very wide angle lens.  While there are ways to figure out the fish-eye effect with traditional drawn perspective, I thought that it would be just as easy to build the primitive scene in Maya, and be able to experiment with different camera angles and focal lengths until I found the right one for the piece.

So I created my own visual reference image in Maya.  It took around 2-3 hours, about the same amount of time that it would take to measure everything out in perspective. 

However, there was a huge advantage to using Maya for the reference once everything was built.  I was able to easily move things around in frame to get the composition that I wanted.  I experimented with different focal lengths and camera heights.  Seeing the scene from a different angle would only take a matter of minutes, rather than having to completely redraw a sketch.

After rendering a contour pass for a perspective reference, it was quick and easy to drop some lights in and render a rough value reference as well.

Painting Progress

I've been making the time to paint.  Reverse Glass Painting is much more difficult than I thought it would be.

You have to think of everything backwards, because you look at the finished piece through the other side of the glass than you paint on.  This means that if you paint one stroke over top of the other, it will be behind your first stroke.  (If painting on canvas, it would be in front.)

The Background is finished, and the gold leaf has been applied.  The whitish areas (hair and drapery) are still masked off.  The skin area has had one translucent layer of dark blue applied (you are seeing through the glass to the cardboard in the brown areas of skin).  

I fear that I may have gone too dark right away in the skin tones, but I have already scraped off and reworked the background, and feel as though I need to keep moving forward.  This is my first time trying this technique, and it's not going to be perfect.  I have to try out as many things as possible and let myself make mistakes in order to learn the intricacies of the style.