Here is a video I made of Aion: The Tower of Eternity. For those that don’t know it is a Korean MMO that will be released to the NA/EU market this year. The video is a visual glance of the first several level as an Elyos Mage on the Korean game client. Be sure to check it out in high quiality.
~gp
I’ve spent the last several weeks playing with 3D and here is one of the results. I get so absorbed in 3D that I don’t realize the time passing. I suppose that’s a good thing.
This is an image of a Blood Elf character I play in WoW. It was just for fun. I think it’s pretty decent, but the hair is a little, meh. Hair is really hard to do in 3D. I tried several ideas, but this was the easiest to deal with. Texturing hair it is a whole battle in itself.
This was modeled in Lightwave and textured/rendered in Softimage XSI. I really love the Mental Ray renderer, especially with SSS.
I added this image to the gallery page.
I have also been working on the character I posted last year. She has clothes now! ;P
~gp~
Well I had my amazing Mac Pro for a year now and it seemed it was time to go back to the PC world. Okay, well there were several reasons for this. I didn’t just wake up and decide to blow tons of money on a new machine. That said, though, I wanted to build a great gaming computer and still be able to do all the graphic work that I do.
For the geeks out there this is what my new machine contains (pictures below).
- 3.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
- 2 Gigs DDR3 1333 MHz Corsair Ram
- XFX 790i Ultra Nvidia Motherboard
- 2x XFX 8800 GTS Alpha Dog Edition XXX (G92) w/ 512 MB DDR3 Ram (SLI)
- Samsung 24 inch Widescreen (16:10) LCD (1920×1200)
- Windows Vista Ultimate (32-Bit)
- 750Watt PC Power & Cooling PSU
- Zalman 9500 CPU Cooler
- Microsoft Wireless (Bluetooth) Entertainment Desktop 7000 Keyboard / Mouse
This should keep me going for a while.
2007 is over already? Where was I? Talk about going by fast. I feel like I haven’t accomplished anything. I’ve mostly jumped around from project idea to project idea, 3d program to 3d program, MMO to MMO and quietly managed WirePop. I haven’t really done anything new.
I think I’m in a creative slump and don’t even know it yet. It used to be that I had ideas for stories and projects that I couldn’t wait to get out there. Now every idea I come up with feels like it’s been done before. I go from one day thinking of something cute and fun to the next day thinking about something dark and gritty. I have a folder on my computer full of random story ideas and yet none seem to really do it for me.
Right now I’m still on my 3d animation kick, but the truth is all I’ve done so far is jump around playing with many 3d apps trying to pick one I like to move forward with. I think the fact is that I’ve falling so out of the loop that even Lightwave, my old go-to 3d app, feels foreign to me. I’m almost starting from scratch. On top of that when I was at the top of my 3d game I was mostly good at modeling. I have little experience in the actual animation department.
Not to long ago I bought a digital training kit on character animation in Softimage. I think I should start the year by sitting down and actually going through the lessons.
As for a story… I don’t know when that will come to me.
I’d like to actually get somewhere this year. Especially somewhere towards 3d animation. When January 09 hits I hope to look back at this and not wonder where the year went again.
~gp~
So I’m still toying with the idea of getting back into 3D animation. While going through my old files and moving them to the new hard drive I found some really old 3D work of mine from back in 1998. Wow, was is horrible. I wonder if I kept at it instead of stopping to pursue my web career where would I be now?
Right now I’m trying to figure out what exactly I want to do. Just stating that I want to do character animation is not enough. I’m still not even sure what 3D program I want to use. Chances are, right now, that it will be Lightwave. Mostly because I know how to model in it fairly well. They also just recently released the Universal Binary version. So that should run nice on my Intel Mac. Of course I need $400 to get the upgrade, but that’s better then $1000s for, say, Maya. 
I’ve been looking around the net for some inspiration. Something that I like and I feel that I could potentially actually do. So far all I found was this animation. It was done in Japan on Animation Master. I’m not sure how I feel about the cel-shaded look. But it does lend itself to the style. The point, though, is that the animation isn’t really hard. No running, jumping or battle scenes. Just a lot of talking. That begs the question, though, what kind of story could you do like that? Would anyone really care to watch it?
Of course beyond that there is also the whole thing of music, sound effects and voice overs. It’s a lot of work and I sometimes wonder “do I really want to do this?”. Thing is, I can’t stop thinking about it. So I guess I’ll just see where it goes.