Arcade Machines are basic low detailed games that take a small amount of money to play the specified game that is shown on the wooden box that surrounds the computer to attract people and show you what the game is. Arcade games are usually found in cinemas, fairs, some shopping centers, bowling alleys and the obvious Arcades, they can be found in busy places where people are most likely to be waiting for a long period of time or just passing by.
A Arcade game can be different as some will have buttons others will have more things such as buttons and a joy stick or even a outer shell of a bike for motorbike racing games and for car racing arcade games it will be a bucket seat with steering wheel, gear stick, break and accelerator pedals.
Arcade machines will always be one of my favorite types of game experiences, there is no need to explain why, they are just the best.
In 3D max what I'm doing is making a building using a plane and adding a picture onto the plane with the blue prints on which I went over making the walls out of thin Cubes which turned out like this, all I'm doing is tracing over the basic blueprints and adding some of my own ideas inside the building, but the exterior will be as close to the real thing as possible.
For some people it will be complicated but that's only if you want it to be, the best way is to make it really simple not using many polys and getting it to sort of look like it bare in mind when you texture it the outcome will be completely different as it will look a lot more realistic.
Today I was learning how to use equipment for recording sounds on different layers what I mainly did was some random sounds and beat box which told me one thing, I have a bit to go with my beat boxing skills, but what wee did was created a recording on one of the layers then recorded some sounds on the second layer and play them together. At first it was quite difficult to grasp all the different controls but I'm sure with a bit of practice with it I'm sure I will be OK.
What I learned was the high sensitive mic is plugged in with a XLR Cable that plugs into the mixer below.
Little picture of me messing about with the system.
What I have done today is created a 3D environment on 3DS Max which was something new to me as I have only done models in the past. I started off in Photoshop creating a new picture, 512 pixels by 512 pixels with a resolution of 72 which is for viewing purposes, the next thing I did was select black and white as the standard colours to have the positive and negative effect in Max. The next part was selecting Filter, Render and clouds/Different clouds, the reason for the black and white is because in max when you apply this to a plane the white parts will highlight it to rise up and the black will make it go down, think of it as a negative and positive. what you can do is mess around with the colours and patterns to what you want then save it as a JPEG, the next step would be to open 3D Studio Max and create a plane any size, dosn't matter about the size, its how you use it, so after creating the plane remember to change the plane segments to the same as the pixel in Photoshop which was 512.
After doing so go to the Modifier, or the metallic rainbow is what I call it as it is easy to remember, to modify it click on the list and select Displace and the right side bar will change and will say bitmap and a box under saying none, click on it and add your saved JPEG to it and put the strength up to 50 as it will show the effects of it, from there you can make it higher or lower and blur it to make it smoother.
If you are wanting it to have a texture then go back to Photoshop and make a new picture using what colour you want and save it, venture back into 3D Max and press M on your keyboard as it is a shortcut to bring up the Materials options, from there you can add your texture onto the environment (remember to click the rubix cube icon to view texture in perspective view) and from there you can experiment doing different environments.
this is one of my final renders that overall looks pretty good for a starting point.
At the moment we are having a team meeting about what we are doing in our project such as what points of interest were doing and who is doing what buildings, at the moment we are planning what everyone in the team is doing and what software we are using. All of us will be using 3DS Max to do our assigned target, My assigned target is Salts Mill, the main priorities of Salts Mill that I will focus on first are:
1) The Main Entrance/Interior and Exterior
2) The Tower
3) The Chimney
At the Moment we are designing a logo for our team and have each done some ideas which we will put together and choose the best idea.
Here is my concept art for the team logo that took me a while to think of thinking about colour, shape, size and font.
Seen as though we are doing the red route I though for some of them ill make them red. What I was trying to do was create a logo which would be quite pixelated to have a resemblance to the name that's why they are all boxed off
Today we had our first team meeting as we are split up into groups, one for each route we were given the pleasure of having the task to do the blue route, in my group I am accompanied by Tom Pearson, Shawwal Afzal, Micheal Henderson, and Inwrek Jones, the team leader has been chosen and Micheal will take that roll as well as Inwrek helping him being Deputy leader.
The next thing to do was to create the team name, after a while of thinking and debating we came out with Pixelarity, there were other options such as Alpaca Forge, Dodgi Vyper and Pixel Forge.
At the moment I'am working on a logo for the team as each member has to come up with one design each, what i am after is a simple design with picture and words meaning the name as well.
What I have been doing is learning about Wavelengths, Frequency, Decibels and Amplitude, we have also been discussing what music makes us feel like, for example Bob Marley music makes me feel happy, relaxed and cheerful.
What we did today was listen to six pieces of music and wrote what it made us feel and imagine for example for a song called Bratock swing which reminded me of a fight to the death scene in a Colosseum with them circling each other.
Here are three songs and say what they make me think of.
I do not own any of these and only are using them for examples for my work.
First
White Lies - Death
This song is brilliant and is one of my favorite White Lies song which for me brings back good memories when I saw them live, twas a really good day. so for me it makes me happy and would be a really good song to listen to in a car if travelling somewhere.
Second
Nero - Doomsday
This song created by Nero is a good example of what different types of sound makes us feel, this song would be perfectly used in a film where there is mass destruction occurring around the main characters who are trying to avoid everything blowing up in a Jeep moving at high speed. So this is a good song to get hyped up on.
Third
Wiley | Can You Hear Me (Ayayaya) ft Skepta, JME & Ms D (Official Video)
This song makes me think of a big beach party and boat parties going on in Spain with the sun shining down, it is a brilliant song, there is one with just Wiley but for me its better with Skepta and JME as they make it feel different and make me think of clubs here in the UK.
what I have done is created a concept of what will appear when you click on one of my symbols on the map, the layout will not be exactly like this but this is the idea I have come up with.
What I did was I used pictures off Google to create what I would like, in the TV will be a video of the place where the symbol was on the map with a play and pause button, below will be some extra text featured in the book this will be information that hasn't been mentioned but if all the necessary information has been told then the book won't be be there only the TV will be bigger and also the picture, in the frame will be a picture of the place where the video is taken.
Based on the project Multi-Story Waters I have done a not very detailed map of the area where it will take place which I drew and went over it in Photoshop which only took half hour to make.
What I'am going to do next is add some symbols, that when scrolled over a picture of the place will appear from the symbol, also the symbols will be in the colour based on the routes that I mentioned in my last post, and these are the symbols I have drawn and finished off on Photoshop, some of them could probably do with some improvements.
This one is my favorite and will be the main symbol for the blue route.
This is the main pointer for the green route, its not my favorite and not the best one I have done but nobody perfect,
This is the symbol that represents the attractions on the red route, this was one of my basic ideas but didn't know what colour to do it.
there are some more symbols but only for different places that don't follow the routes.
The animation changed quite a lot to what we planned, it started off with us wanting to do the main character falling off his bike then having to face off with a horde of Zombies but when I was put in charge of finding the correct models I couldn't find a bike and a action figure that would look like a normal guy, what I was able to find was a Power Ranger but the bike that came with it couldn't be found so we had to make some changes to the stop motion, the next problem was I could't find any Zombie models so I created a Zombie by using some modeling Plasticine which looked like this
The problem was we couldn't get it to stand up or walk so we changed the plan, yet again to make it a crawler Zombie, Tom had an idea of doing a spoof of the game Left 4 Dead when a big Zombie enters the arena it starts flashing red and a big zombie turns up but instead we used a model troll that lands on the crawler and twists his head.
The easiest part of creating the stop motion was making the Zombie crawler and creating the backgrounds, the hardest part of the animation was spacing out what needed to be done in the nine hours we got to complete it and also creating the edit because when I used Windows Movie Maker it didn't let me put in a song without making it longer so when I put in a black screen at the end to extend the length i put the song in and as soon as i deleted it all the sounds got mixed up and it took me a good two hours to perfect it.
If I was to change anything in this animation it would be to follow the plan more and make a longer animation, overall I think our team did a brilliant job and we had fun making it.
This is the planning I drew before I started Making my flash animations the reason for only just uploading it is because I didn't scan it in and I was too occupied with other work this is both my first animated comic and for my second one.
I kept as close as I could to the planning and to be honest I did a good job because sometimes I plan out things then I make little changes to make it better, sometimes I create better things from the top off my head and sometime it works out better, I plan to keep me on the track but sometimes I might drift towards the dirt track. Coming up with the story lines for both animations was easy because all I did was create some character make them fight then the bad guy gets killed, in the second one this story line was easier because I wanted to do a funnier animation then the genie idea came to me, so I thought instead of having a genie in a lamp ill have it in a lambrinie bottle hence the title the lamgenie.
What I have been doing is working on another flash animation with a bit more animation I titled it the Lamgenie and is about the character in the last one and he finds a bottle of Lambrini while tidying the castle attic so when he opens it a Gene pops out to grant him three wishes what he wastes well not entirely.
I will upload my planning after I scan it in.
The only bit I struggled at is getting the speech and animation to go at a steady pace so that it is easy to understand and for the viewer to acknowledged what is going on in the animation, getting the genies face the perfect size when it zooms in was a fairly tricky part but the easiest thing to do was the mouth and facial expressions of the genie all I did was I change a small oval making different shapes which gave the effect of him speaking another part I thought was easy was the multicolored bit when he make a wish come true. My favorite part is the whole animation because its a simple story to follow and when the main character uses one wish in something good and wastes the rest all on one thing.
If I was to do this again the only thing I would change is the length of the animation making it longer and using more animation in by probably make him wish for a back flipping dog instead of wishing for the "Trippe Scene" but it needed to be finished ASAP so more time to perfect it would make it it and probably use recordings instead of comic style.
The reason for this animation was because my last one didn't get results as expected so I thought I would do another one making it more entertaining and a bit more animation instead of just pictures.
This is a card I created for the show reel which I used my honey badger to represent me, to be honest I can sort of see the resemblance, on it it shows my name, my course, date of birth, and a description about me and a picture of my best work or work I want to show, took me a hour to do all together and did the background by getting a picture off Google of some old paper and added everything else on.
This is My blogger picture that I made on Photoshop by getting a picture of a honey Badger and adding a few accessories I was aiming for a random mental lethal animorph sort of thing just for a bit of fun.
This is my sketch for my Horror game icon which is not a pool of blood or a zombie the reason I did this for my Horror Icon is because the face is evil looking and can represent many different types of horror such as a Zombie apocalypse or a demented scientist from a film such as The Human Centipede (all you need to see is the trailer no more) or a vampire or werewolf etc.
What I found easy doing this icon was going over the drawing and making the hair which I am quite proud of I did the hair by filling in with a light-ish brown and drawing gray lines down in the direction of where the hair would go then I used the smudge tool to blend it in., the reason for the red background is because it represents blood which is as we all know is red if yours isn't then there is something wrong.
What I did for this icon was I drew a skull and a revolver pistol and the intended idea was to have the skull in the middle and have the revolver underneath crossing over another one just like the checkered flags in my racing icon and having a yellow background because it stands for alertness and awareness.
having the guns cross over was quite difficult because at one point the guns didn't look right so i had to get the colours right and make it look more realistic than a rubbish gun.
I know its not easily visible but it was OK on Photoshop.
On both of these I went over them in Photoshop adding different colours and making them look better.
This is two of my concept drawings for my icons these two are racing and fantasy, the sword, shield and staff are the fantasy icon which was intended to have a purple background to symbolize magic with the shield made of wood with metal trimming.
The staff was designed to be made out of wood and the sword to have a gold handle, all to be the typical shield swords and staffs.
For the racing Icon I did a checkered flag and copied it and flipped it so that it crossed over with the other flag and then I went over the drawing and adding a blue background that represents racing because this colour blue represents respect.
it was fairly easy to make only a few problems when drawing the flag, only because it wasn't how I imagined it.
This is the drawing I did for my Sci-fi Icon which was a snake because that is what the logo would be for the space troopers featured in the game, I made it green to symbolize the typical green martians or just the typical alien.
This is my finished icon for this genre.
this is the background that I have used in our Stop Motion animation which was simply done by getting a picture off Google of a normal street and adding some zombies in the distance and adding the crawler zombie, the smoke and fires were added is well by using layers and tweaking it to look more realistic, the Pikachu is just random and the billboard is just better than is offering double glazing at a time like this, the only bit I don't like about it is the Zombies in the background because a search engine blocker called JANET wouldn't let me get a picture of a group of Zombies because of the word Zombie (acceptable in Primary School) so I wasn't able to get proper zombies with leg so there is some drunken people at a rave floating through the ground which is close enough.
This is my presentation document I made after we took a trip the the Media Museum in Bradford was a nice day went to a curry house called the kashmere.
This is the document with my stop motion planning on
On Friday what we did towards our stop motion was finished the actual animation and started working on the titles and credits, and named our team "The Tyrants" and each person in our group needs to come up with their own version of the animation and a group finished one.
We have started the production of the stop motion animation but we have encountered a few problems such as we didn't have a lot of the resources such as a model motor bike and model zombies or a ordinary action figure so what we do have is some clay and a few power ranger models and a batman model.
What we did for the zombie was made a crawler out of clay and made a bigger one out of clay which we have named a tank which was used in Left for Dead and so far we have only done about half of the animation in three hours that we had on Friday. Next Friday we will continue with the animation and try to complete it so that the Friday after we can focus on the voices and sounds.
Stop Motion is a animation created by taking pictures and putting them all together to create a video, most stop motion is done with clay and objects that don't move on their own for example the childrens sketch morph is a clay made person who can change into a ball to move and also dissapear into the floor.
Wallace and Gromit is a stop motion animation created by Nick Park featuring a man called Wallace and his pet dog called Gromit Wallace is a inventor who loves Wensleydale cheese and has released many films with and without Wallace & Gromit and has dedicated a lot of time to make these stop motion animations.
what I did was I commented on all of the show reel videos and rated them, my favorite video was the one with the teleports and a spaceship under the college.
These Aren't Mine.
My second favorite one was the Red Hawk video that I liked because of the lighting and the not so deadly roof trap and the glowing rocks.
This one is tied with second so there isn't a least favorite, some brilliant work done in these videos for second year college students.
This is a space ship I created in 3D Studio Max a while ago but never put on my blog it was one of the first models I made by joining two cylinders together and doing a bit of extra jigger y poker y and I have ended up with this.
What could make it better is texturing it with a futuristic look, a cockpit with a animation of it in action I could also add more detail such as bits of engines sticking out, better wings with maybe a animation of it flying around shooting other spaceships, or simply a spaceship race.
We are in a group of four to create a stop motion animation using any idea we want and in my group star me Lawrence and our team leader Tony and what our animation will be about is a guy riding a bike and falling off and ending up fighting Zombies and finished with him getting eaten by a Zombie.
What we need to make this happen:
When you see a object and it moves you will see it as a movement and you will see the object for 0.4 seconds after it moves this is called the Persistence Of Vision and this method is used to make the bird in the cage drawing.
This is an example of what I am on about.
Another Persistence of vision is a flip book this is a really good professional example of a flip book i found on YouTube.
For the title of my Flash, Game and comic that includes the characters below it is not the planet name or anything like that it is called The Symbol because I created two symbols a symbol of evil and a symbol of purity. I created Both symbols on Photoshop by collecting pictures of symbols, changing the colour then adding them together to get one symbol, I have a idea for three stories based on this that the symbols of the symbol of evil come true in time and that the symbol is a prophesy of Dark times, starting with death then leading to worse such as a Zombie Apocalypse then the Devils and Demons rising from the afterlife to destroy living beings in the war between good and evil.
This is the symbol of Purity
For people to worship to for forgiveness or to purify the soul ,contact the peaceful Gods.
This is the Symbol of Evil
used for people in my world to worship demons and devils, basically all evil obviously.
I made up some characters for a fantasy game and used them in a comic strip that I had to make then did it with some animation on flash, these are three of the characters that I designed.
This is the Main Characters friend.
This is my main character.
This is the bad guy.
I drew the original characters and then went over them in Photoshop to make them look more realistic than a flat coloured look. it was fairly easy to draw and I'm not exactly the best drawer as you can see but the hardest bit was probably drawing the dreadlocks on the top guy but the effort was worth it.
