Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Shift in focus.

     So, with the lack of interest in a platform game... I'm going to re-devote myself to learning all things game design with a focus on modeling and animation in Blender for the time being. That is where I have to most fun. I think that, maybe, I jumped ahead of myself. I got myself all worked up and excited to start on a game and then was let down by the underwhelming response. Though, looking back, I shouldn't care what happened as it was a project for me (and if it got good reviews, well that is great too). However, it kind of stopped being fun for a bit.
     Now taking a month break and realizing that there is still tons of stuff that I can learn and work on, it gives me new motivation to continue with this blog and with my dream. This blog is still devoted to learning game design, as is my YouTube channel. However, you might see some fun projects sprinkled throughout. Now, with that being said...

         ONWARD!

-Eric

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

More than a walk...

     First of all, I know it is a day late, Happy New Year! Now that the social niceties are out of the way... back to Blender! For the first time in my Blender exploration and execution, I go beyond the normal "walk cycle test". Why, because it is boring. I wanted to see how I dealt with the real world problems, like front flips. Using my Minecraft character from the previous blog post, I created a small little scene for him to play in. Using a basic plane and then subdividing it out about 5 times to create the base for the scene is the path I choose. From there you can pick random faces to extrude for hills and trees. Keep in mind this is just a very basic attempt at Minecraft animation and I hope to make a better one later on. Mostly because the small scene I created doesn't really leave much room for camera work or character movement. I made the scene in a bit of a hurry, sorry, I was excited to get into the animation portion. I promise the next scene will be much better, also, I'll fix the textures there too!


     This was a lot of fun to make and I cannot wait to start working on the next scene. Animation is part of game design, a part which I am truly excited to work on some more. Any thoughts or ideas are always appreciated! Sorry for the short post, but, I'm going back to work with Blender some more! The next post will have some screen shots of the creation process.

EDIT: Just figured out how to fix the shadows not appearing, special thanks to tacodrake95 from the /r/blender community! Sadly, I had already rendered this trial video. The next one will have shadows!
     -Eric