Raptorous.net

That's right! For art! Yup, so I got off my lazy butt and started to do some artwork. It's been a good summer and a few months since I've touched my RaptorBlood model, but I finally found the DVD that had all my work on it. I was able to get my ppt where i had a bunch of renders I did for my presentation at the ETC. I've posted all of them in my personal artwork page

I'm thinking of continuing my work on this model, and posting the results up on the blog. I'll post up the ways that I did things, so people can try them out or tell me that I'm doing things completely backwards!! Maybe if I'm ambitious, I can do a quick ~30 sec animation with RB with an environment...

Anyway, I bought this book, which I hear is totally awesome for creating facial rigs and controls. I'm thinking of applying some facial animations to my RB model, probably not too many. I don't even think I'll have enough to make him speak... The book says you need 40 blendshapes to truly get full range of motion, but I don't think I'll be needing that many, and it's a little different when your character has a non-flat face. (ie: has a muzzle)

I'm pretty excited, and I hope I get time to work on this side project of mine. It's going to be both artistically and technically challenging, which is what I love to tackle most, so it should be a worthwhile effort!

It's been two weeks since I've been to Tokyo, and my mind is still whirling (so is my wallet). A bunch of CMU ETC people went to go to the huge game conference known as TGS. It's basically a game show where Japan's biggest game companies come out and show off their latest and greatest games that's about to come out. You can watch trailers, or even play some of their games.

So, what were my favorites? I think that they were in no particular order:

• Metal Gear Solid 4
  
• Final Fantasy XIII
  
• Little Big Planet
  
• Devil May Cry 4
  

Metal Gear Solid 4: The first MGS was great. The second was a disappointment. And the third was just an awesome thrill ride of a game. So, I'm not quite sure what to expect from this installment of Snake's adventure. He's old, so I'm not sure if that's going to be some major hazard in the game. (I don't know if we're going to have to be taking pills and drugs to help with his old age, hopefully not 0_o;;) Still, the game looks gorgeous, and the production level is top notch. I didn't get to play this game at the show (2 hour + lines, ugh!) but I'm sure that there's plenty of new wacky controls to learn and gadgets to figure out.

FFXIII: I didn't even get to see the trailer at the show, which kind of bums me out :( But there were "advance tickets" you had to get in order to get into the screening room. How crazy. I've seen some of the trailers online, so it's okay, but I'm still really excited about this game. Storyline's really important to me, and the FF series definately goes all out when it comes to story telling. FFX was a personal favorite of mine because the story was awesome, the voice acting (in japanese plz!) was just fantastic, and the game was just a lot of fun to play. FFXII was sort of a different game compared to FFX because of the setting of the game, and it was fun, but still kind of less exciting. I guess the battle system was a little strange (too MMO-esque, and automatic) and the story involved too much politics (ick! politics in games! I get enough of that watching The Real World.

Little Big Planet: There's been a lot of great cooperative games coming out for the Wii, which was a real reason to consider getting it (besides the price tag), but this game was one of the most fun coop games I've ever played. The art in this game was just phenomenal (and HD!) and the gameplay was just too much fun. It's a 2D/3D game where you and your buddies go along solving puzzles together. There's usually something you have to do together, in order to successfully complete the puzzle. The game was just too cute.

DMC4: I've always been a fan of the series, and I'm excited to see this game continue. Sure, in this installment, it's probably just a faster, prettier, and gorier version of the game, but as long as Dante's not an idiot (like he was in DMC3, that young fool) I think this game could be fun to play.