Deranged Scratchings

Seriously? #3 – Is Your System Sliding? (Trailer 2)

2026-04-13T11:44:00.000-07:00

So… things are getting a bit stranger.

This is another trailer for Seriously? #3, this time focusing on DivaTron doing what she does best — performing, posing, and possibly taking over.

There’s less story here and more attitude. It’s very much leaning into the music video side of things, which has been a lot of fun to play with while I’m finishing the film.

DivaTron is one of those characters that kind of designs herself as you go. Started as a simple idea, but the more I animated her the more she turned into this full-on diva presence — very controlled, very confident, and slightly… off.

“I’ll make it right for you.”

Still working through the final shots for Seriously? #3, but I’ve been cutting these trailers together alongside production. It’s been a good way to test different tones and see what stands out.

For anyone who saw the last trailer — this is a different angle on the same film. More performance, less setup.

If you missed the previous trailer, you can check it out here:

And if you’ve no idea what Seriously? is, you can watch the original short here:

👉 Seriously? #1

More soon.

Be seeing you. Seriously.

Seriously? #2 – Sci-Fi Comedy Short Film | Alien Mayhem, Robot Guards & Slapstick Chaos

2026-03-30T11:37:00.000-07:00

Seriously? #2 is here!

Back on the giant alien spaceship, things have escalated.

What started as an awkward romantic misunderstanding has now become a full-blown security incident involving two robot guards, one dangerously persistent admirer, and an alien who really just wants to be left alone.

There is love in the air again…

…which is unfortunate, because there is also a lot of alien goo.

For this second short, I wanted to push things further. The first film was very simple and quick, but this time I introduced more characters, more moving parts, and a bit of full-on slapstick action.

The biggest addition was the two guards:

Big Bong – experienced, unflappable, not paid enough for this.
Rinky Dink – not experienced, very flappable, definitely shouldn’t be holding a weapon.

They guard a very important door.

What’s behind the door?

Well… Stinky Von Tentacles, still recovering from the events of the first film and understandably not keen on any repeat performances.

Enter Pootle Mc Derp

Pootle returns, and he has learned absolutely nothing.

This time he arrives bearing gifts:

A large potted plant
An enormous heart-shaped box of chocolates

Which, in his mind, should smooth everything over.

It does not.

Building the action

Unlike the first short, this one needed proper choreography.

There’s a sequence where:

Pootle flips and bounces his way past the guards
Rinky Dink tries (and fails) to stop him
Big Bong attempts to maintain some level of professionalism

This was all animated very deliberately to feel fast, chaotic, and slightly out of control.

Rinky Dink in particular was a lot of fun to animate. He’s essentially a walking mistake.

The problem with adding more

More characters = more complexity.

Suddenly you’re dealing with:

Timing between multiple characters
Clear staging so the action reads
Making sure the joke actually lands

And most importantly:

Making sure the ending is worth it

The ending…

Without spoiling too much (although you probably know what’s coming if you’ve seen the first one),

Let’s just say:

Things escalate
Physics becomes a factor
And Stinky’s day gets significantly worse

Again.

Visual style

I kept the same sci-fi setting:

Large metallic environments
Big doors, heavy machinery
That slightly ominous “something’s not right” atmosphere

But contrasted it with very silly, exaggerated character animation.

That contrast is really what makes it work.

I also made a lot of trailers for this where I experimented with some different directions, my first real try at the youtube shorts format.

Final thoughts

Seriously? #2 is bigger, louder, and messier than the first.

It’s still short, still ridiculous, and still built around one very simple idea:

Some people just don’t take the hint.

Just when things couldn’t possibly get any worse…

They do.

Seriously? #3 is coming.

You haven't watched Seriously? #1 you can catch it here.

If you enjoy it, please share it around — it really helps.

Be seeing you! Seriously!

Time lapse drawing Toxic Zombie

2025-03-23T09:50:00.000-07:00

Here is a time lapse of me drawing on my new tablet. I did it on the train. It's not very edited so there are some gaps. I'm not used to editing these weird tablet resolutions and all my kit is set up for standard TV and film resolution. Well it's 720 by 1200 so I would probably be fine if it was the other way round. I tried using the editor in youtube studio but it is pretty awful.

It's the first time for a long time I put some effort into 2d and recorded the results. I do occasionally work on paper with my daughter when she is drawing. I have never done a time lapse like this before I know a lot of drawing apps have it built in but it's my first time trying it. Interesting to see it. I usually work very roughly and I don't mid a sketchy rough finish. I think it gives more character plus overly finishing a drawing or painting kills the dynamism I've always thought. Digital art is different to traditional art as you can go in and edit as many times as you want where as with traditional paper and art materials there comes a point where you destroy the paper if you over work too much.

I usually use on old Wacom where I draw on the tablet and see what I'm doing on the screen. This is because when I shifted over to tablet the cost of a set up where you are drawing on a screen was extremely high. I was working in games at the time and even the concept artist who was doing nothing but drawing was working on a standard pen tablet. Grunt artists like me used to hand paint our textures, back then a Wacom was standard issue. There was always a bit of a faff with pens going missing.

I don't often get it out and my Wacom is very old and it broke! The pen kind of sprang apart and springs and pieces went everywhere. At first I couldn't put it back together and I started looking at alternatives and that's what led me to looking at a new tablet. I have since fixed my Wacom pen it seems a little unhappy and does not fully fit back together as it used to but still works.

I still splashed out on a new tablet which is very portable and like a doodle pad. I used to draw all the time as a kid when I was bored. In the back of lessons on the cover of my exercise books or in the back pages. I've worked with other animators who have apple tablets that they doodle on. I hate apple so I got an Android one. It feels odd to have a pen back in the way of what I'm drawing I'm so used to the line magically appearing while I scratch away on my Wacom.

The Bumpy Ride of Goosebumps Horrorland: Behind the Cutscenes

2025-01-01T08:17:00.000-08:00

Working on Goosebumps Horrorland was a wild ride, full of challenges, lessons, and memories I still think about today. It was also the project where I did the most cutscene work in my games career. Initially, I was hired as a model maker and environment artist, a shift from my previous roles, where I was typically brought on as an animator. For context, I was a generalist in earlier jobs and had experience across all areas of game art—animation, modeling, texturing, and more. However, animation was always my main ticket in.

At the time, I had decided to pivot from animation to focus on environments, props, and texturing. I wanted to explore other facets of game development, especially as motion capture seemed to be taking over much of animation. That said, the opportunity to dive back into narrative animation through the cutscenes for Horrorland was too good to pass up, even if it came with plenty of hurdles.

Above is the first cut scene I did on the project. I got the most notes on this one and I was very worried as I really struggled to get up to 8 seconds a day which was my initial goal, but I knew I needed to increase it to deliver on time. It took ages to approve and I think I was still doing notes on this up till the end. The publishers used to give a lot of notes when we had close ups on the characters faces. We didn't have many controls to work with and it was difficult to make them stay appealing and expressive.

The Cutscenes That Keep Getting Views

The cutscenes I worked on for Goosebumps Horrorland have become the most-viewed content on my YouTube channel. Many of these videos have over 100,000 views, and they’ve been the source of fan mail. While it’s gratifying to know people enjoy them, it’s a little surreal. These cutscenes were created under immense pressure, with tight deadlines and resource constraints. As much as I wish they showcased my best work, they represent a time when I had to balance speed with quality—a constant tug-of-war.

I often get questions like:

"Why is the render so low quality?"
"Why does the sound seem unfinished?"

The answer lies in the tools and processes of the time. These videos are playblasts—viewport renders from 3D Studio Max. They capture what I saw while animating: low graphical settings, no lighting, no textures, and no anti-aliasing. The low settings were essential for smooth playback in the software. These playblasts were quick and functional, designed to get publisher approval before integrating the animation into the game engine.

The sound is unfinished the final version in the game was likely tweaked at a later date so if there is music it may not be final.

From Props to Cutscenes

Initially, I worked on environments and props for the game. There was another animator handling the cutscenes, but the tight schedule made it clear he needed help. After some back-and-forth, I was brought on to assist. Before long, I found myself taking the lead when the original cutscene animator left the project.

The work was daunting, especially given the process: storyboards, animatics, animation, and multiple approval stages. Each cutscene had about a week’s turnaround, with some days lost waiting for feedback. Despite the challenges, I enjoyed the chance to focus on hand-keyed animation for narrative scenes, even if it came at the cost of long hours and stress.

The Freelancer Fiasco

One particularly frustrating chapter of the project was the freelancer we hired to help. He chose to work on the final cutscene—the most important and action-heavy sequence of the game. Unfortunately, his skills didn’t match the task. His work was so poor that I had to redo about 70% of it. By that point, I was running on fumes, but I managed to salvage what I could.

This final cutscene is a sticking point for me. I often get comments on YouTube asking why I haven’t posted it. The truth is, it’s a strange mix of my fixes and his original work, and I’m not comfortable showcasing it. It’s frustrating because I know how much better it could have been if I’d had the chance to start fresh.

The GG transformation was something that got done at the 11 hour. The initial plan was to show GG's shadow changing in to her monster form but there was some technical problems. I wanted to get the cut scene done and approved and so pushed for this texture swap with the wings appearing. I think the other model is actually behind GG and either has transparent textures or is scaled, can't remember how I did it in the end but this is the vid I showed to the team to get approval for the idea.

This is from the final cut scene I think I did this bit from scratch as our freelancer didn't manage to finish before it got passed to me. These 3 vids show the way I used to work from a very rough stage below.

The below clip shows the animation about half way through

The last clip shows animation as it was used in the cut scene (I think unless I got asked to alter it). All of this work is long before I started working in TV and is from 2008. I get a lot of comments on the half way done animation and the first rough animation telling me they suck. Well it all sucks but thankfully I can animate better now! Although most TV jobs also have a lower seconds per day out put then this did and with doing the sound editing storyboards and camera direction it was pretty crazy. Also the last time I worked in the main stream games industry.

A Baptism of Fire

Looking back, Goosebumps Horrorland was a trial by fire. The tight deadlines pushed me to animate up to 20 seconds a day while juggling sound editing, storyboarding, and camera direction. It was exhausting, but it taught me resilience and how to prioritize under pressure.

A strong memory on this project was that the games testing was done in studio behind me. So all day everyday I used to hear "Yo Yo Yo it's bumper carnage" along with all the lines from the cut scenes like "Double Wow!"

While the cutscenes may not be my proudest technical work, they hold a unique place in my career. They’re the only project that’s brought me fan mail and consistent YouTube views—even after all these years. For a game released in 2008, that’s something.

If anything, this project reminds me how far I’ve come as an artist and animator. It may not have been perfect, but it was a stepping stone that helped shape my journey.

How to Animate a Female Walk Cycle: A Step-by-Step Guide

2024-12-10T08:12:00.000-08:00

Welcome to this tutorial on creating a female walk cycle in Maya! In this post, I’ll walk you through the process of building a smooth, natural-looking walk cycle, starting from scratch. Whether you’re a beginner or just brushing up on animation principles, this guide will cover the essentials of hand-keyed animation—the same techniques used in games, TV, and film.

If you prefer to see the process in action, check out my video tutorial [embedded above].

Step 1: Start with the Key Poses

The foundation of any walk cycle lies in the key poses. For a standard cycle, we focus on four main poses:

Passing Pose: One leg passes the other while the weight shifts.
Stride (or Contact) Pose: The legs are at their furthest apart, marking the extremes of the stride.

These poses are then mirrored for the opposite side, creating a symmetrical cycle. In the video, I show how to use the passing pose as the loop frame. This ensures your animation can repeat seamlessly.

Step 2: Blocking the Animation

At this stage, I work in stepped mode—a setting that eliminates interpolation between poses. This approach keeps the animation "snappy" and focused, allowing me to adjust the main poses without distraction from computer-generated in-betweens.

Once the key poses are in place, I mirror them manually. Some rigs have a "mirror pose" feature, but for this project, I handled it by hand. It’s worth noting that many free rigs available online include mirroring tools to save time.

Step 3: Refining the Motion

With the main poses set, it’s time to add tween frames, which double the number of key poses and smooth out the motion. This involves:

Using the graph editor to tweak translation and rotation curves.
Ensuring legs and feet land correctly, with natural arcs as they lift and plant.
Adjusting the hips for a fluid, balanced sway that complements a female walk.

For characters with exaggerated features (like larger hips), you can accentuate the sway for added personality.

Step 4: Adding Details

Once the foundation is strong, I layer in the smaller, more dynamic elements:

Arms and Hands: I used IK (inverse kinematics) for this rig, but FK (forward kinematics) is often simpler for walk cycles.
Hair and Accessories: Elements like hair bounce or accessories add realism and flair. For this walk, I manually animated these details for full control.
Character-Specific Motion: For instance, this character has secondary motion in the chest area, which I animated by hand instead of using physics simulations.

Step 5: The Final Polish

The last stage involves fine-tuning and ensuring the animation loops perfectly. For this, I used a translating floor
plane to double-check foot placement and reduce any "sliding" issues. Small tweaks in the graph editor ensure that the movement feels fluid and polished.

Tips and Tricks for Animating Walk Cycles

Keep It Simple at First: Focus on the main poses and smooth motion before diving into secondary details.
Use References: Study real-life footage or reference videos to capture realistic motion.
Experiment with Tools: While Maya is my tool of choice, the principles apply across software like Blender, Max, or even traditional 2D animation.

Watch the Tutorial

Ready to see the entire process? Watch the embedded video below to follow along in real-time. This animation took several hours to complete, but in the video, I’ve condensed the steps into a 15-minute walkthrough.

Conclusion

Creating a walk cycle is one of the most fundamental skills for animators, and mastering it can open doors to all kinds of projects. I hope this guide (and the accompanying video) gives you the confidence to create your own. If you have any questions or want to share your work, drop a comment below—I’d love to see what you come up with!

How a UFO Animation Took Flight… Out of Pure Creative Chaos

2024-10-31T09:00:00.000-07:00

After working on a children’s TV show in Ireland, I felt the itch to create something completely for myself. I wanted a project that wasn’t bound by deadlines, client feedback, or the need to be practical—just something where I could dive into my imagination and make something fun, nostalgic, and a little out there.

And that’s how this UFO animation came to be.

A Love Letter to 50s Sci-Fi and a Little Cartoon Absurdity

For some reason, I always find myself drawn back to the charm of 1950s sci-fi. There’s something about the bright colors, campy plots, and those flying saucers that’s both retro and timeless. Maybe it’s the idea that anything—anything—is possible out there in space. And when I had an Alien model sitting in Blender, rigged up but unused, I knew it was time to give this little guy a life of his own.

Originally, I built this alien model for a different project in Blender. This children’s show marked my first time diving into Blender, and I went a little ambitious on character creation. I learned pretty quickly that a simpler robot design would work best for learning the ropes. So, this little green fellow was left in my files, fully modeled but without a purpose. Until now.

The Result? An Absurd Animation Just for the Fun of It

So I decided to turn this model into a quirky short animation sequence. Think of it as a mini homage to Marvin the Martian and all those flying saucers that had us glued to the screen as kids. It’s ridiculous, nostalgic, and completely handcrafted—polygons and all—over a lot of late nights and probably more coffee than was advisable.

This clip is 100% my own creation, and there’s no other agenda here than to share a laugh (or maybe a groan) over a hovering UFO that’s suspiciously cartoonish. If you’re into quirky animation, sci-fi throwbacks, or just need a quick escape from the daily grind, I think you’ll get a kick out of this one.

[Click here to watch it on YouTube!] 🛸 👽

Why I Made This—and Why I Hope You’ll Watch

This is just the start of what I hope will be a collection of personal animation projects, each with its own dash of weirdness. If people seem to enjoy it, who knows? I might expand this into more stories, or bring in new characters from this universe I’m dreaming up.

So take a look, share a laugh, and let me know if this clip made you feel a bit like a kid again—or at least had you questioning if maybe, just maybe, the UFOs we saw on Saturday morning cartoons could be real.

Watch the video below, and let’s chat in the comments. Are you more of a UFO believer or a skeptic?

🚀👾 P.S. Don’t forget to hit “like” and subscribe on YouTube if you enjoyed it—it really helps indie animators like me keep these projects going!

Seriously?

2017-07-11T05:26:00.001-07:00

Seriously? is my new short animation. Working in my favorite theme sci-fi it's set on a giant alien spaceship and shows the interaction of two of the inhabitants. There is love in the air....and on the floor and in your face. I asked my daughter for an idea for a short, she gave me nothing for hours saying she was thinking and then came up with a two sentence idea and Seriously? was the result.

My first job was to build a new character, My little green man #1. I wanted to do something cartoony and cute with appeal and simplicity. It took me a couple of tries as my first version was ugly, I like to sculpt my characters with lots of detail but it turned out that less was more. Simple rounded shapes made the character look cuter.

Surface of the model laid out for painting

Maya base model to Zbrush to texture test

Serious pose done in Maya rendered with 3Delight

My next job was to create an animatic. An animatic is a very rough version of the film where you can see the intended actions and camera shots but animation is very basic, just enough to show what happens.

So once you have your animatic it's basically a case of refining until you have your final animation version. You can see that while I was animating I had a placeholder background. I put the final version of the background in after the animation was done. Next I will show you an early version of the animation.

In that version you can see the animation is quite rough, some of the last shots look very different in the final version. There is no sound, the sound was worked on by my good friend Rafa Tomás Velázquez who was my house mate in Dublin. He is a talented guy and you can see more of his work over at Farmode .

Once I had finished the animation the last step was rendering I used 3Delight for the final render but I also tried Mental Ray and Renderman.

Renderman as used by Pixar........not really working for me :(

Mental Ray looked very nice but .....wasn't free :(

3Delight saves the day

Rendering was a headache, I set up all my lights with and did all my tests with 3Delight, it kept crashing on me but I thought it should be all right when I rendered a full sequence a batch render........it wasn't. This lead me to try the other two, Mental Ray is what I have most experience with but at first it wasn't running. After poking around on the internet I found a solution and got it working and it looked great...........but I didn't realize you had to pay if you want it to batch render. You can render stills but to render a sequence you have to buy it.

Renderman to the rescue! Pixar use it it must be amazing!...........WADDAYA MEAN IT TAKES 10 MINUTES TO RENDER A FRAME!!! Erm....yeah so seems my laptop is not Pixar ready, I could only get very ugly results with my background in Renderman. Back to the drawing board. Luckily in picking through my scene so many times to set it up for the different rendering programs I discovered my camera was corrupt. This was what was causing 3Delight to crash and after that everything went smoothly.

It would be great if people could share this post and the film, I would love Seriously? to get a big audience.

Be seeing you!

Shotgun 3d model

2015-11-27T08:56:00.000-08:00

Here is my new Pump Action Shotgun model available from Turbosquid now. You can get it for Maya, Max, in fbx, or obj format. It's a polygonal model coming in at faces 7519 verts 7485 for the shotgun with three cartridge models included. If you go over to turbosquid you can see a little animation of the shotgun pump action firing and ejecting shells.

I'm going to talk here a little about how I built the model and converting it from Maya to Max.

Maya Low poly shotgun

I started out with a low poly base mesh which I built in Maya I then UV mapped the low poly model. I decided to have a look around to see if I could find a better UV mapping solution for this model. I normally make organic models and have been using Zbrushes UV master but it's no good for mechanical stuff like the shotgun. I ended up using Roadkill, it's a good program for low polygon. I also tried Maya's unfold but found it to be so loaded with bugs that it was unworkable.

Shotgun in Roadkill for UV mapping

Once this was done I exported the model as an obj and brought it into Zbrush for detailing. I separated the model into a number of subtools so that I could get a higher level of detail into the model.

Base model in Zbrush

Below are my high poly Zbrush sculpts with a shiny material on them so they look pretty. I found it quite hard to sculpt a mechanical object like this, but the idea was to push myself specifically into a hard surface object and I learnt a lot from it.

The next step for me was to get normal maps from the high poly sculpt onto a lower poly version of the shotgun. For this step I used xNormal which I have been using for a while and for me it seems the most reliable tool for this. As I had a number of subtools and because some areas of the shotgun overlap I used my subtools to normal map the shotgun in sections that fit into one texture page when assembled (if you look at the Roadkill screen shot you can see my texture page). Overlapping objects in normal mapping will cause errors if not dealt with separately.

This is where things went wrong..................

I had some ugly texture stretching going on which you can see above. The strange saw tooth effect showing on the piece above is pixelation on a normal map. What I did to fix this was re-map the shotgun at a higher poly division and also I altered my UV islands. I also rebuilt the barrel and used edge creasing in Zbrush to keep my edges sharp. The rifle butt needed re sculpting as I didn't have enough geometry in my low poly to make my original version work. All useful things to learn, edge creasing in Zbrush is an easy way to keep your crisp edges. For mechanical objects it's better to be generous with your low poly when it comes to curved areas like the rifle barrel. I discovered that Roadkill does not cope with higher poly models and ended up mapping the shotgun in sections, it wasn't too bad, I used the subtool division from Zbrush.

Next step texturng. Above is an early base colour version. You can see the barrel has changed from the Zbrush version. Below is the altered mapping from the higher poly division shotgun.

One more thing I wanted to share, as it drove me up the wall. This is the first model that I have converted to Max. It's pretty simple for a model like this which is just geometry with some separate parts. I exported the model as an obj. I learnt that to keep my pivot points accurate I needed to export all elements from the origin. I learnt how to rebuild my materials in Max, all pretty straight forward........until normal map seams!

The horror!

I'm going to run through what happened and how I solved it starting with setting up the normal map slot in the material. The first step is to go to the maps section of the material. Set the bump map amount to 100, default is 30. Next click the map button marked none, select "Normal Bump" from the Material/Map Browser. Now select the normal texture node.

Select the Normal slot marked none and pick bitmap from the Material/Map Browser. Lastly and here is the fix. Once you have navigated to your normal map texture file go to the gamma option, select override and set it to 1 as shown in the image below. The problem is due to Max's default gamma option being set to 2 which gives you your seams.

I had to do lots of googeling to get to the bottom of that one, so I hope this will help others with there normal map woes. Typical Max that the default value doesn't work.

Fixed!

I could also tell you a thing or three about shotgun calibre, imperial to metric but I think it might be too exciting for you (sarcasm).

My Illustrated Children's Book about Autism 'Why does Sammy do that?'

2014-12-18T04:03:00.001-08:00

Cover illustration

This is my first self published illustrated children's book. It explains the problems a child with autism can face. My partner Melanie Janz wrote it and I have been working on the illustrations. The story is about our son Sammy to help his class mates and other children better understand autism and Sammy's behaviour. The book is called 'Why Does Sammy Do That?'.

A couple of pages from the interior dealing with proprioception: the perception of movement and spatial orientation

Sammy was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) when he was four years old. ASD made sense of much of why Sammy was different from other children, and in some ways it was a relief. Once we had been given some insight into why Sammy behaved the way he did, we found ourselves explaining what autism was to others. We did find that it was difficult to explain to other children of Sammy's age (also older and younger), but that they were often the most direct about asking "Why does Sammy do that?".

Melanie had the idea for a story, which would simply explain some of Sammy's behaviour to his class mates, particularly issues with sensory perception. She came up with it, while she was stuck in bad traffic. Her plan was to put it together with photos and print a couple of copies for Sammy's school and maybe our daughter Becky's pre-school. I suggested I could illustrate it and was also thinking about self publishing. I have published my cg models through online shops before so I thought a book would be more straight forward. Illustrating a children's book is something I've daydreamed about for years. I did a style test, a simple illustration of Sammy looking lost, and Mel was keen for me to do the project.

Style test for Why Does Sammy Do That?

We were influenced by Ellen Notbohm's book Ten Things Every Child With Autism Wishes You Knew which we both found very useful and inspiring. I started working on the book in mid July, and we published it on the 12 of December 2014. The illustrations were finished by the end of October. November was taken up with bug fixing, proofing and tidying up loose ends. My father proof read the book for us with his years of experience marking students working as an English teacher.

It has been a very different project to what I'm used to. It's very close to my heart and was extremely hard to work on at times. With many illustrations of my son and some of my daughter it was personal. The book often deals with scenes I find very difficult and upsetting. It's hard for me to see people judge Sammy without understanding him, but at the same time understandable. If I didn't know Sammy, as an outsider I might see Sammy the same way.

For the illustration I worked in Photoshop. I worked up the lines quite roughly and tightened them over time. The color is quite simply blocked in with a shadow and highlights pass. The color is layered under the line work similar to cell paint in traditional animation. You can see in the style test that I was thinking of a more loose finish, but when it came to the book I tightened it up. The format for the book is 8.5"x 8.5" at 300 DPI I created the originals at 10x10 and shrank them down for the final version. I had a palette layer that I passed from file to file to keep my colors consistent.

Work in progress on one of the illustrations for Why Does Sammy Do That?

We used Createspace for this project. It was relatively straight forward to work with, there was a hiccup with the resolution being too low. I unfortunately didn't spot the problem until we had a printed proof. This went round in circles for a bit until I asked on the site forum and was told by other users to re- upload the file, which magically solved the problem. I used photoshop and uploaded the final print files in PDF format. I would probably use createspace again, but it seems if you get stuck, the forums where you can talk to the other users are the best way to go.

The pictures in the book are mostly children we know. The most obvious is our son Sammy, but my daughter Becky also pops up in a number of the illustrations as do our neighbors, a cousin, various children from Sammy's school and our cat Ember.

Becky & cousin, interior illustration

We have had wonderful feedback about this book from friends and family, the other parents from Sammy's school and also the teachers and support workers who work with Sammy.

"I love this book. A perfect book to explain autism to children. It made me cry."

"This is a must-have for anyone who wants to help their children understand the world and mind of an autistic child. Beautifully written and illustrated, and very moving."

It's now available on Amazon in the UK Why Does Sammy Do That?

Also in the US Why Does Sammy Do That?

Please can you share plus and like to help us increase the awareness of autism!

Thanks to everyone who has supported us with this project!

Z-Brush Horned Green Dragon

2014-06-18T06:51:00.001-07:00

Screen grab of Zbrush sculpt with polypaint.

I've been thinking about making a dragon model for a very long time and actually started doing something about it. I decided to just open up Zbrush and go at it. I think sketching in 3d is sometimes easier than on paper. You need to put more effort in to get a decent looking 3d model. However a drawing can give the illusion of a nice form with out true substance. You find the flaws of the drawing only when you try to build it.

Inspiration For The Dragon's Head

I've painted dragons here before and read up on descriptions of what dragons look like. They are described as having elements of the horse, camel and dog. A very broad mix to play with and part of why I enjoy making fantasy creatures so much. I have some pictures that live in my head when I think of dragons, I can remember seeing Smaug by Greg and Tim Hildebrandt on the cover of the Hobbit when I was probably 8 or so. Strange to see two brothers credited for the same picture, I had no idea it was by two artists. That picture echoes round the web as well as the inside of my head so I expect many of you will recognize it.

Another big influence for me was lead figures for fantasy games like Dungeons & Dragons. I actually went looking for some of the miniatures I used to have and found The Great Fire Dragon, there's clearly an influence there. I couldn't find the artists name but it's fair to say that the artists who made those figures had a big influence on me and I learned a good deal of what I know about painting from painting miniatures. More recently I saw the cover art of John Jude Palencar for the novel Eragon and that stuck too.

Making The Dragon's Head

I screen grabbed the dragons head at intervals as I was working so you can see how the dragon developed. The dragon started as a poly sphere and I remeshed round about every time I did a screen grab. Remeshing prevents the polygons from being overstretched when you are putting detail into an area which lacks the required number of polygons.

This model was intended to develop ideas and have fun. I would normally build a base mesh in Maya with a low polycount with the intention of having a fully poseable skinned model. I may still do this but I enjoyed just focusing on sculpting for a change. Low poly modeling is a very different process and not as good for developing ideas. Zbrush has a much more organic feel which very much suits pulling around fantasy creatures.

I start with basic shapes which I pull around using the move tool.

Once I had the head shape looking the way I wanted I put the details in.

Scales are quite easy and fun to do using Zbrush.

If you have a nice form to start with the scales almost draw themselves.

That was where I stopped on the sculpt.

Early polypaint, I experimented with some materials too.

Almost there, this is an outliner material that helped the texturing.

Painting The Dragon's Head

I painted the model using polypaint in Zbrush. It's probably the first time I've used it so much and it worked out quite well. Because I painted directly onto the model in the same way I sculpt, it's much easier than painting an unfolded map in photoshop. I did use photoshop to tweak a little but for the most part it's polypaint. The best part is not having to guess how it's going to look. When you're painting the flat map what you're looking at is a peculiar pancake version of your dragon that looks like it has been skinned ready for stuffing. This is not a rendered model, all the images are just screen grabs so this model could look even nicer with the right lighting.

If I develop this model further (which depends on how much attention it gets) I think I would start thinking about more of a crest of horns and a larger mouth with more prominent teeth. I would also texture the eyes as they are currently just placeholder spheres with a material applied.

If you would like me to develop the dragon further please like, +1 and/or share this post and I will get the message. Thanks to all the plussers on my last post I very much appreciate active readers, this blog welcomes and needs your support.

Animated audition a short slap stick test

2014-05-23T06:47:00.001-07:00

Here is an audition I did for a job at the start of the year. The mail came out of the blue on the 3rd of January "We would like you to complete the audition ASAP". I was given a version of the model to work on by the company but the rigg didn't work and the mesh had errors and too much subdivision to skin easily so I had to rebuild and re-rigged it. It was a bit of a mad rush to get it done in time but good practice. I always liked cartoons like Road Runner and the Pink Panther so it was fun to do something slap stick. One of the best things about it was I showed it to my kids and they loved it. I really enjoyed doing the animation and hope you enjoy watching it , I haven't done something like this for a while so it made a nice change.

It's a little bit like the style I used to work in when I worked for Kuju on the Eye Toy games, I have an urge to try doing some more work like this as it came very easy to me. The swords and sorcery stuff I'm working on at the moment is a bit of a battle at times. The funny green thing I animated for the audition was much easier to set up and build than the characters I've been making recently. With a bit of Z-brush fiddling it could look really cool I think.

The clip above was a style test I did for Kuju.

Flame Troll #3 Flame Spear

2014-03-17T02:44:00.000-07:00

Here comes the Flame Troll with his Flame Spear! The animated gif was grabbed from the Maya file using Fcheck with the high quality render on the viewing panel. High quality render is in terms of real time render.....so not really high quality just a quick grab. I thought seeing as in my previous Flame Troll entries I mentioned how I had him walking around, I should provide evidence of this. The reason why I didn't put him up before, I suppose some of you might be able to guess; the rigg is my standard rigg which I use for most of my models and most of my models are sci-fi orientated so the troll was walking around with the same giant laser gun most of my characters come equipped with.

The Flame Spear is a pretty simple model, I enjoyed making it and it made a nice change from having to worry about skinning and all the hassle I had with making the functioning plate armor for the troll. I was really happy with the way the design turned out and having to work through all the surfacing on the armor suit and the designs of the seals and sigils on the armor definitely helped me with the spear.

I loved sculpting the details in Z-Brush, the flowing fret work I did in the centre of the spear was done with masks and using the symmetry feature where work on the left half is repeated on the right. Very quick to do so I think I did a few versions but very fun, the kind of thing where it's so easy you feel like you're cheating.

After having an easy time of it with the sculpting I hit a brick wall with the normal mapping and couldn't understand why. I was getting very strange warping on the blade edges of the spear which made no sense to me as the high poly sculpt and low poly base were extremely similar. I turned to the internet and searched for the solution but it seemed an uncommon problem. I found many tutorials on how to make edged fantasy weapons, none of which had the same problems I was having. I finally found something about triangulation needing to be the same in Xnormal as in the source program (maya), my low poly model was mostly quads so I triangulated it and that solved the problem. It never occurred to me that Xnormal would divide quads differently.

I've used a little bit of self illumination, (or incandescence as it is in Maya) on the spear jewel. It's a separate map like the colour map but it holds only the colour that should glow, in this case a subtle rosy red on the jewel itself and also on the metal around the stone. It gives the impression that the luster from the stone is reflecting in the metal.

Below is the colour map and normal map. The incandescence map is not much to look at being mostly black. I put the normal map in as I talk so much about them but I guess if your not used to 3d you would not have seen one before. The normal map works with the three colour channels red, blue and green. Each colour behaves as a projected light hitting the detail of the surface of the model from a different direction. This information then gives the impression of surface detail when rendered in a 3d program. It's similar to the old grey scale bump maps I used to use except that they are just dealing with height, black being in white being out to give the impression of bumps hence bump map.

Below is the Z-Brush sculpt of the spear, there was some fret work on the base of the spear that was so fine it was really not worth the bother, as to see it requires getting so close to the model that the low poly nature of the base model ruins the effect. One day I will learn not to go over board with details....maybe.

To finish a couple of renders of the full model, I will be returning with more of the Flame Troll as I have built an environment for this character too, an archetypal dungeon/ castle cell with flaming torches, sturdy hewn stone walls and studded wooden doors. I am intending to animate some new work for my showreel with this set up as in my recent audition work I am often asked to animate scenes which I don't currently have on my reel. I think there are way too many walk cycles in my reel and it needs some Flame Troll to liven things up.

Flame Troll #2 Armor texture and surface sculpt

2014-03-12T03:03:00.000-07:00

Proto Troll needs texture love

Back to the Flame Troll and this is where I left it last time; an early base mesh for a full plate armored suit. Some skin tests done to check the mesh, I got the troll walking around, textures are placeholder tests and no real UV mapping done at this stage. The Troll is fully articulated without too much fancy rigging.

My next step was the UV map, for this I use a mix of Maya and Z-Brush UV Master. I sort out my UV islands in Maya first then I go into Z-Brush and Use the UV Master plugin for a straightforward flatten but keeping my UV islands, I generally end up re-positioning the layout of the UVs in Maya at the end to tidy up. A bizarre mechanical job but it has to be done. Below you can see the entire armor suit except for the shoulder, elbow and knee pads which I put on a separate texture page. I always snap shot my UVs before I go into texturing so I have an overlay which shows me where and what I'm painting. Sensible layout of the UVs also helps with this so for example at the top of the page in the middle are all the Troll's fingers. It makes it easier to paint if elements of the model are where you expect them to be, otherwise you have to cross reference with Maya to track down what you want to paint. Although there is generally an unavoidable period where you need to familiarise yourself with your new UV map.

Once the UVs were out the way I took the model into Z-Brush and started sculpting. I quickly discovered that I could not get the level of detail I wanted with out hitting the poly limit for my machine so I had to divide the model up into several sections. In this way I could go to the maximum poly limit on each separate piece and so have an overall poly limit that was much higher. The body had 6 separate sections in the end which were: arms, chest plate, gauntlets, legs and additional armor plates.

Below you can see work in progress normal maps on the model. What I usually do is set up with Xnormal so I can drop my normal maps onto the model as I am adjusting my sculpt in Z-Brush so the screen grabs below are from Maya. It means swapping around between software which is a drag. When I first started using normal maps I would do all my sculpting, finish it and then generate my normal maps and drop them into Maya. This means less messing about but can lead to unforeseen errors which you can catch if you check your work as you're creating it. I find it less of a headache to keep an eye on any developing problems as I'm working rather than get all the way through the sculpt and then have a nasty surprise.

The mat version above is an earlier version than the shiny silver version below. If you look closely you can see there are lots of blank areas on the armor in the pictures above and below which I filled in later, like the phoenix that I sculpted into the centre of the breast plate. These pictures show the model with just a base one tone colour applied to it. All the rivets and gubbins are coming from the normal map.

Below you can see the separate sections sculpted in Z-Brush. I really liked the Phoenix design I came up with for this characters breast plate, I decided that I wanted the Troll to have a magic flaming spear and that he needed an emblem of fire to go on his armor. I doodled out a phoenix holding the rune for fire on a scrap of paper and then transferred it to the armor using Z-Brush (by eye). You can find all sorts of runes and ancient symbols by checking the internet and it can be lots of fun researching this kind of thing. Or you can just use your imagination.

Once my sculpt was done it was time to move on to the texture painting. Below you can see the model before I started really going into the painting so you're just seeing the detail of the sculpt transferred onto the model through a normal map. The result is a very beaten up surface that seems peculiarly clean and plastic, time to get painting!

Back view ready for painting


I set a simple pose for rendering so I can check my work as I paint

Here are some details from the texture sheet, these are the hand painted flat images that I mapped to the model to complete it. You can see the Phoenix breast plate and one of the shoulder plates, these flat images work in combination with the surface sculpt to give the impression that dirt has caught in the recesses and that the corners and raised areas have been scratched and battered. I use an ambient occlusion map as a starting point to paint from. It often helps the model to paint in details that are not in the sculpt so you should not stick too rigidly to the ambient occlusion, (within reason of course).

Again as I'm painting I am constantly checking the results in Maya and running off the odd render.

So there you have it one flame Troll in a suit of long serving battle worn armor, complete with sigils and magic seals.

We are not done yet though as next will come the spear.

Alien Invader How to strip the rigg

2014-02-19T12:45:00.000-08:00

I've been asked how to strip the rigg from the Alien Invader model and thought I might as well share it here.
If you need to strip the rigg from the Alien Invader model in order to create a fresh rigg or assign motion capture to the model using something like motion builder, here is how you do it. If you have the Cyber Punk, Cyborg or Space Soldier you can use the same process, the only difference will be the node prefix. For the Cyber punk the prefix will be CyberPunk, for Cyborg the prefix is Cyborg and for the Space Soldier the prefix is SpaceTrooper. You can find these and many other of my character models here for download on Turbosquid.

A character for animation has three components:

mesh
skeleton
controllers

In order to create a new rigg or new set of controllers you need to strip out the old controllers including IK, control handles and constraints leaving you with just the skeleton and mesh(s). This model also has duplicate skeletons for the arms which are part of the IK/FK switching set up which makes them controls. They are also removed in the steps below.

Step one separate mesh and skeleton from controllers.

Go to frame zero (this is the bind pose). Open the hypergraph find and select node AlienJntAss middle mouse and hold, drag out to the side release. Find and select node AlienMesh middle mouse and hold, drag out to the side release. Find and select node AlienLP33LaserRifle middle mouse and hold, drag out to the side release.

When you middle mouse drag out a node like this in the hypergraph what you're actually doing is pulling the node and it's children out of the hierarchy and creating a new hierarchy tree. Pulling out the wrong node can really mess up a character model.

Step two delete controllers

Select nodes under node AlienLP33LaserRifle delete. Select node AlienMaster, delete. Find and select node AlienBrainConrtol, delete. Find and select node AlienJntBrain, set rotate Z to Zero.

Step three delete animation

Stripping the rig breaks the animation. You need to remove the broken animation to have a clean model for re rigging. Select every node in the skeleton make sure you have every node. A quick way to do this is to marquee select the skeleton hierarchy in the hypergraph (make sure all joint nodes are visible in the hypergraph before doing this). Now open the graph editor zoom out and make sure all keys are visible select all keys from frame 6 onwards, delete.

Step four optional clean up

You have now stripped the controllers. There are some handles which are left over, if you want to remove these too the cross handles are a display option. Select the node with a cross handle, open the attribute editor, in the display options set display handle to off. For the remaining nurbs handles in the hypergraph right click in empty space >option>display>shape nodes. You will now see that the joints have the nurbs handles assigned to them as shape nodes, you can delete them. They have generic names like CTRL_circle6Shape or curveShape3. An animator would not normally have access to these shape nodes which is why they are not labeled.

Hide the shape nodes through the display options once you have finished editing. You do not want the shape nodes visible for normal use of the hypergraph as it doubles the number of visible nodes.

Note the skeleton joints are named so you should get an idea of what the joint does straight away. You are left with just the character mesh, rifle and skeleton. The model is now ready for a new rigg.

For rigging tips and best practice I recommend Jason Schleifer. I will be back with more from the Flame Troll shortly.

Flame Troll #1 Head and body test

2014-02-07T11:24:00.000-08:00

Happy new year to my readers. I have been working on this troll model for some time now but I haven't got round to updating the old web log about it. You may have noticed that I added it to my blog as an animated button over in the right margin. Here is a bit about how I built his head and some of the journey of building his body.

I started the troll thinking I would use it as a sprite. It was intended as just a head that floated around biting things. My first step was to build a low poly base mesh that I would use for Z-Brush sculpting and to create morph targets/ blend shapes for a character capable of facial animation.

At some point I ended up thinking maybe this would make a cool full character model and built a body for the character. I was planning on a fairly conventional troll other than being a cyclops, big, brutish with a loin cloth or troll pants to keep him from being too scary.

However feature creep started and I began messing about with some heavy duty bracers. Sculpting Armor and metal surfaces is something that I have not managed to get working to my satisfaction with Z-Brush so I started fiddling with it. I built a few bracers and played with sculpting the surfaces in Z-Brush, I got some results that I was pleased with and so........I decided to scrap the whole body and try making an entire suit of armor for the troll. You may remember I had plans for an armored orc a while back, I only built the leather armored version and I always wanted to return to it. Ok I'm getting a little ahead of myself as the first thing I worked up was the head.

I took the head into Z-Brush and sculpted it to a high level of detail. I then exported a lower poly version out to Maya as an obj file Which I used for texturing normal mapping and for the morph targets/ blend shapes. Above you can see the wire frame and a render from that model with the details exported to a normal map. Below are the different versions of the head which are used to create the different expressions for the model. I sculpted them in Z-Brush which worked pretty well. In the past I would have done them in Maya on the low poly base mesh shown higher up the page.

Below you can see how combinations of these basic blends can be used to put expression onto the character. The left image is the base pose. The open jaw is using a jaw bone and skinning as are the ears. The teeth, tongue and eye are separate models that I actually ended up creating the normals for separately. I've had lots of stuff going on in between working on this model and it seems there have been more than the usual number of hiccups with creating him. There have been multiple interviews and auditions cropping up so I've had to drop work on the troll many times.

Below is the Z-brush model of the head, you can see the eye and tongue masked out there as well. The red brown colour is the default Z-Brush material. I export the head only from this file for normal map generation using X-normal. If you try to do it all together as one model any intersection with the model will cause an ugly mess. with this model there is intersection with the eye ball and where the gums go into the head. I've put more detail than I usually do into this troll so you can see there is some fine detail on the skin, it is barely noticeable on the Maya version but you can tell if it's turned off. One of those details that is barely noticeable but somehow gives the character a little more life. My plan with this model was to push myself. I always seem to hold back on the polygons and that has happened with this model too. The reason being well.... basically I need a new computer, when I'm animating I like to have a good frame rate so I can see what I'm doing, for a good frame rate I need a relatively low poly model or of course.... a shiny new machine.

And then it all went a little bit armored. This is an early base mesh for a full plate armored suit. I did some skin tests and got the troll walking around, the textures are placeholder tests there was no UV mapping done at this stage, I just wanted to see if I could get him fully articulated without too much fancy rigging fuss and I will tell you more about that in my next post.

Spooks For Haloween

2013-10-31T07:38:00.000-07:00

It's Halloween so lets have some ghouls and ghosties! Always a favorite subject for me and some of these character illustrations are actually very old. I've been meaning to put them online where people can see them for some time. You of course have to have pumpkins for Halloween but also skeletons so why not put the two together? Add a dash of pirate and that's about as good a mix of ingredients as I can think of.

Here is a creepy demon gargoyle affair with glowing red eyes for good measure. I have recently been doing lots of sprite renders for a game I'm working on. This means I basically set off batches of character renders and then wait to set the next lot off, rinse and repeat. It's not the most exciting job so to keep my brain busy I decided to work on some characters for a Halloween blog post and that's why this beaky fellow came into being.

The ghost pirates come from the pre-production of an Eyetoy game I worked on. It eventually became Astro Zoo so no ghosts no pirates and definitely no ghost pirates. There were squirrels in space suits but at that stage of production I was back to building and animating not painting. I did really like the characters and would have liked to have built them but that's just how it goes. There was a lot of game built and some quite cool characters before Sony decided they wanted a zoo in space instead. As far as I remember the game was a Ghostbusters sort of thing where you played the agents that dealt with the ghosts.

Some sketches of the ghost pirates in different positions.

Lastly another one I did while waiting on my renders, a cartoon wolfman. I was thinking about this the other day, it used to be that I would constantly doodle. When I started out in 3d animation I would have a sketch pad next to me and I would sketch my key poses out but also just doodle, because well.... there was a pad there. These days unless it's something really difficult to animate I don't need to sketch my key poses so I don't have a sketch pad on my desk. I've got my tablet of course but firing up Photoshop just to do a doodle just doesn't happen (unless I'm rendering of course). Doodles were most of my creative output when I was at school. Drawing was what I did to take my mind off things. These days I occasionally draw something for my kids but doodling has hit an all time low and I didn't even notice.

I think part of it is that I'm very critical of my own work and I think about what I'm going to achieve with my next project. What's it for? what will I get out of it? This may be obvious but the trouble with my approach is it slightly sucks the fun out of it. I always aim to take on work that will be fun for me because it's hard to do a good job if you aren't interested in what you're working on. I know that from experience and always keep it in mind. However doodles are just thinking out loud. They serve no purpose, that's what allows them to be so free and fun. You can't doodle wrong because how can something be wrong if it serves no purpose?

What's it for? what will I get out of it? That is not what you ask yourself as you doodle on a scrap of paper, but you can get an awful lot from doodling. For starters it's good drawing exercise, but also if you are doodling while you're mind is focused elsewhere (talking on the phone, in a lecture etc) it allows your subconscious to take the wheel. This can lead to some great ideas. I think I need to get back to my doodles.

Space Trooper poly character model

2013-05-22T06:22:00.000-07:00

Here is a character model I've been working on in the background for some time. You may remember previously in Deranged Scratchings I put forward the character design for a Space Trooper but readers wanted me to build an alien with his brain in a jar and his eye on a stalk. I of course sympathized with this point of view and was happy to build said alien. I did however harbor a sneaking suspicion that there might be more of a demand for space soldiers than cooky looking aliens (I know heart breaking right?) and have been spending some time getting my camouflage and blast resistant kit into polygonal shape.

Above you can see the original design something between Street Fighters Bison and a padded UN soldier but in red instead of blue. Not my best character design I admit so I had another go. I did a bit of research this time and looked at what the latest fashions are in military apparel, added a sprinkling of sci-fi pixy dust and came up with the second version which I was much happier with. I then want on to make the character in Z-Brush which......doesn't look anything like my concept sketch at all. This is not in any way to do with me getting distracted from my original concept, I have an iron will and would never start thinking that this character would look cool with giant spider, bionic spider legs with skulls on, with ethereal spirit aliens from dimension x riding a plinth of bones on his back....soooo anyway, below you can see the character running in Maya which is where I do all the skin weighting and rigging.

Actually I'm getting ahead of myself I did a rough version that I had to throw away, there was a problem with the base mesh which meant I had to go back and start from scratch. I didn't get that far into the sculpting but it was still a pain at the time. I approached this model in a slightly different way to how I usually do my character models. Basically my normal method is to get a model that works properly in Maya and then take it into Z-Brush to add details. This model was created much more in Z-Brush, the idea was to take a much more loose organic approach to the modelling more like sketching in clay and then working over that to get the finished model. It did work but there was more than the usual amount of trial and error. I had some problems with skinning because when I build the mesh in Maya I have more experience and better control, got there in the end though. The below character went missing in action before he even got any colour to him. I have swapped over to xNormal for normal mapping now as it's much more consistent for creating normal maps. Z-Brush is great for modeling but there are often problems if you use it to generate your normal maps.

Above is the Z-Brush model from which I generate the normal maps from. He doesn't have his giant metal cuffs on as they needed to be done as two separate models. I learned a bit more about modelling machined metal surfaces from the cuffs which I also ended up doing over, three times in the end but I guess it was worth it as I went onto you tube to track down some useful tutorials which will be useful for the future. I would still like to make a robot model at some point and have not forgotten how popular the steam punk robot design I did was.

You can see the rigg above. I accidentally left a triangulated laser gun in with the quad mesh which probably sounds like gobeldy gook to most of you. However as a result I finally got round to swapping in a rifle, just the quad version but what this means is I discovered it's very easy to swap in different rifles. I have been planning on creating a new rifle model for ages. Now I know that there is no technical problem in the way.

Above is the UV map as usual I got everything on one sheet to keep things nice and simple. That's the colour map there which you can use without any of the other maps if you want. The normal map does look great but at a distance you can drop it to save memory.

Next the wire frames, it's a slightly higher poly count for this model at 3756 but still relatively low. The rifle is relatively high at 598, another reason I've been thinking about making a new one as I reckon I can get a lower poly version that actually looks more detailed now I have more experience with Z-Brush. You can see that the cuffs are separate pieces although the mesh is one node. The cuffs are skinned with a value of 1 to a forearm joint which handles the twist you get when you rotate you wrist. I've refined the rigg on this and it's working nicely.

On to the animation set, I added a walk cycle and a jump animation to the old set so he still does all the running, strafing and death diving as before.

So there we go mission accomplished. One Space Trooper reporting for duty.

Cyber Punk Shoot Out

2013-04-28T06:09:00.000-07:00

Zap zap pew pew pew kaboom arrrrrrrgh! It's time to shine up your laser cannon and make sure the batteries are charged! Those crazy cyber punks are having a proper shoot out and it doesn't look like they're planning to quit till things get crispy.

I have been saying that I was going to post this video for months and now I have finally got round to it. Would you believe the only thing stopping me was that I needed to do the screen grabs you see above? Well I finally got my act together. I am feeling a bit burnt out today working on a set of animations for my current project. I am working on a really cool game at the moment that as usual I can't talk about (I think saying that it's cool and something I've always wanted to work on is allowed).

I finished making this video months ago but I still remember how much of a pain in the ass the rendering program Mental Ray was. I got this horrible error message when I tried to use motion blur "shapes are not equivalent, no motion vectors computed". It took me quite a lot of fiddling about to get it to work. It seems it's one of those errors where you find lots of dead ends when trying to search for a solution online. I wasn't prepared to give up on having motion blur, it seems like a basic right that no animator should be denied so I persevered. It can be as simple as deleting history from a model but in this case it was because I was animating visibility, so be warned. I still find it utterly ridiculous that Mental Ray can't cope with animating the visibility channel. A very basic and useful technique that I've been using for years.

The video pretty much speaks for itself, lots of crazy punks with laser guns blow the crap out of each other. Enjoy!

Deranged Alien Invasion

2013-02-14T04:48:00.001-08:00

Look out the aliens are invading Deranged Scratchings, these extraterrestrial fiends have been running the show round here for all of 2013, I may have managed to finally kick them out the door. I was unable to stop them multiplying and changing colour, they also drank all the beer and ate all the pizza.You can now get your very own invader from out of space. He is happy running around any 3d game and comes with his very own set of games animations, for more details click this Alien Invader Rigged & Animated link

Wub wub wub!

Red- "You're funny looking" Blue- "But were on the same side"

I am happy with the way the colour variants worked out, I think I like the blue one best. I always seem to leave sorting out the team colours till last. It's a pretty easy and rewarding job, all the work goes into the base texture which was green for this character as green is the time honoured colour for men from outer space. Once the base colour is in place and looking good I separate out the elements which will remain the same on all versions, like scratches mud and also the bare metal details on this model. The next step is basically a colour tweak in Photoshop.

This is a longer than usual post so I added a jump break. To watch this alien eat his laser rifle and burp it back out again and to see the other animation you need to hit the read more button.

I put in a screen grab of the controls this time, Turbosquid seems to like it. You can get a feel for the world of grey boxes that is character rigging. It is the characters job to have the spark of life, the inner workings need to be utilitarian and functional. This character is well behaved and easy to control as a result of plenty of trial and error over the years.

Some details on how to control alien invaders.

This would look good with some wall mounted earthling heads in the background.

Below is the animation list. Thanks to Ki Ki for giving me the idea for the last animation in this set, I managed to get the alien to eat it's laser rifle and burp it back out again. The list is a capture of the character from Maya's view panel so you can see it running happily in real time. There is a nice suspicious look around animation in there as well. I like the idea of a paranoid alien, it fits well with the 50's B film genre that I'm trying to evoke. It would be great to build him a shiny hub cap style UFO to sit in.

Above is the Colour file for the alien with a wire frame overlay showing the characters polygonal shell. Below is the model with the colour file removed so that you can see the detail given by the bump map or normal map. The normal map was generated with Z-brush and Xnormal. Further below you can see the model with no texture files at all showing the wire frame so you can see the individual polygon faces.

Thanks again to readers who voted at the character concept stage, I hope you're happy with the way that Alien (in a jar with cyborg body) turned out. From the humble beginnings of a tablet sketch.....

an intergalactic being with B film charm has evolved. Who now can question that alien life is out there and that it looks sort of like a water cooler? Is it intelligent? Only if you can write good A.I. Even if it is dumb as a bag of nails at least it comes with a giant laser gun!

Aliens Are Better Than Zombies

2013-01-20T02:44:00.000-08:00

Right then following up from my previous entry Zombies or Aliens Which are better?, I asked my readers to choose from eight character designs to determine which would become a fully functioning rigged and animated games character model. The people have spoken, the votes are in, and it turns out aliens are better, zombies didn't even get a look in. The real race was between a steam punk robot and an alien.....

In the green corner Alien (in a jar with cyborg body)
The peoples choice by a whopping one vote.
Total votes five. Winner!

And in the red corner Steam Punk Cooker!
Four votes total runner up and all round friend of kitchens

You can see at the top of the page that the lucky alien has made it into polygons and is now decidedly three dimensional. Thanks to everyone who voted it was great to get so many comments.

My influences for the character were probably many I've watched lots and lots of old science fiction films from a pretty early age as my Dad was a big fan of sci-fi films and books. The last time I looked, his garage was a sci-fi library which would put many small book shops to shame. I guess one film that sticks in my mind would be This Island Earth which has a great monster, Fiend Without a Face definitely had an influence. Invaders From Mars a film I can remember nothing about except a weird head thing with tentacles in a gold fish bowl I guess that right there is movie genius. But the main one and probably my favorite film sequence ever would be from The Life Of Brian the bit where Brian is trying to escape a roman patrol and falls off a half finished tower into a passing UFO. It pretty much documents the entirety of how my mind works and you can watch it here.

Some minor aspects needed to change from the concept painting because this model is a variation of the cyber punk model. This means that the aliens skeleton has to line up exactly with the previous model. If elbows knees or finger joints aren't precisely placed, you get a very ugly mess. It's a bit restricting but I quite like to see how great a variation I can get using the same skeleton and only altering the skin. In games terms it's called a re-skin.

Below you can see the journey back into 2d that every character must make if it is to be painted, the uv map. One flattened alien opened in Photoshop and painted. I still hate uv mapping and this alien was a right pain. I used Z-brushes UV master plugin which is very buggy and has a mind of it's own. It seems to do a great job if you just leave the default setting and just flatten your character (yes there is a button which says flatten) however if you try to make the program do what you want it either resists or crashes......joy!

Actually I'm getting ahead of myself before I painted the model I sculpted the details in Z-brush. Below you can see the aliens organic bits. I also had a nightmare with this model as I could not get the details to export properly out of Z-brush and needed to get a new program, Xnormal to sort out the mess. I don't know which wastes more time for me, software or the amount of time I spend swearing at it. It has not been a smooth ride getting anywhere with this model but hopefully I will be able to finish off the last bits and bobs without so much trouble.

Still Z-brush is worth it for the sculpting results. I was just recently telling some fellow artists what a great program it was and how I had found it easy to learn.....oh the irony. Anyway below you can see where I am currently at with this odd ball B-film creature. I think he was worth all the hassle after all. Some of you may have noticed that to get started on this model I had to vote in my own competition because voting kept reaching a tie between the cooker robot and Mr brains in a jar. I picked him because mechanical characters are not easy to sculpt in Z-brush it's much easier to do organic creatures like this one, even though he does have some mechanical hard surface elements. After I left the comment that voting was closed, Steam Punk Cooker got another vote. Maybe I need to build the cooker too?

I still need to finish up the skeleton and controls for this bug eyed space creeper. In the early tests I managed to get him to blink and the eye should be able to move too, I sacrificed a few of the cyber punks fingers to get the extra joints (I try and keep the joint count the same between variants). I have had a rough version playing all the cyber punks animations so it shouldn't be too hard. The cyber punks animations will be showing here shortly. Also it's worth mentioning happy bloody new year! and 20000+ page views thank you for taking the time for Deranged Scratchings!

Zombies or Aliens Which are better?

2012-12-11T04:08:00.000-08:00

It's reader participation time again here at Deranged Scratchings! The question is Which is better aliens or zombies?.....but only because the real question I am bringing to your attention was just too damn big to fit in the title. That's right this is one of those big questions, the sort of question theologians and adepts of science have turned their backs on from fear of losing themselves to it's complexity. I know that readers of Deranged Scratchings are a rare breed who breakfast on the dilemmas other mortals dread, so hear it is in it's awesome entirety: Which is better?

Aliens(in a jar with cyborg bodies)
Insect Men
Gelatinous Goop Aliens
Lion Men
Steam Punk Cooker
Robots
Space Troopers
Zombies

Insect men can of course have more than one set of eyes, antenna and segmented external skeletons are also very in next year.

Alien gelatinous goop could be due a come back, you herd it here first

Erm...... it all went a bit Thunder Cats (what ever happened to the movie?)

Steam punk stove robot, can kick your ass while making a nice cup of tea for afters.

Robot? Any takers? Formerly owned by Captain Antilles. No faulty motivators as standard.

Space trooper.... a soldier in space not terribly original but it seems I had to do it. (yes of course he gets a laser gun)

Lastly but no means leastly it's the video game and internet phenomenon that is the zombie! Bath salts be damned better look out or he'll have your eye out!

I have been busy rendering a cyber punk laser battle which will be my next post. While my main computer was busy with the render job, I got into my character concept painting. It's been great fun, now all I need to do is pick one to be taken into polygons.

So Your mission, should you choose to accept it, involves choosing a concept idea from the above for me to turn into my next character model. Here are your choices again:

Alien (in a jar with cyborg body)
Insect Man
Gelatinous Goop Alien
Lion Man
Steam Punk Cooker
Robot
Space Trooper
Zombie

Stick your choice in a comment and which ever gets the most votes before I get a chance to start building, will be made into a character model, the same way the cyborg was done last time.

Cyborg #3 Renders

2012-10-14T09:40:00.000-07:00

Back with project Cyborg for the presentation renders, these are done in Mental Ray with Maya. I ended up using the blue version for the signature image. I was thinking of using the green cyborg image below but I decided that the blue image was more readable. Maybe it's because the laser rifle is old news to me now. You can see that he has a nice collection of staples over his belly and some over his face too, giving him a bit of a Frankenstein's creation look. The Cyborg model is up and ready to buy on Turbosquid, if you already have the Cyber Punk the Cyborg will make a handy team mate for your project.

I think the metal textures work very nicely in the green and it helps to make the character quite menacing and creepy. The blue version has a nice gun metal military feel to it. It seems slightly reminiscent of Robocop which I also like. I don't think my character looks much like a cop though more like Robogrunt or Roboredneck. Beered up with a laser cannon and a right hook that could cold cut a wooly mammoth, not something I would like to run into.

Here is a back view, I was thinking of adding some animated pistons to the four circular areas between where his shoulder blades would be, but I wanted to keep the poly count fairly close to the Cyber Punk and I ran out of polygons. There are lots more polygons in this characters cyborg arms than there are in a more normal organic character. I would like to try some kind of bio-mechanical creature as I am a big fan of HR Giger and I think it would work very well as an approach in Zbrush. I have been neglecting the animation for these characters though so I am planning on getting down with some basic game set animations next.

Above are the wire frame shots, it's mostly quads. I cut out some polygons from his legs which were present in the cyber punk version of this model. The Zbrush sculpt, textures and UV map are totally redone from the cyber punk version. I just felt like I needed the practice, I think the boots worked out better but I like the trousers for the punk.

Looking around at other artists interpretations of cyborgs I've noticed a lot of what I would describe as robots. I wanted to deal more with a man machine cross and the slightly unsettling quality of the amalgam of the organic with the synthetic. I imagine that there would be all sorts of complications and new qualities to such a creation, no longer entirely human but still very much more than machine. You might have noticed that the slots which are present in the place where a normal human characters eyes would be, on this character go very deep into what would be the characters head. I imagine the mix of machine and man with this character to go very deep all the way through to his senses, emotions and how he thinks.

I do like setting up the team versus scenes even though my computer struggles with them. As you can see I have again opted for the colour variants so that you can use the model in a four way battle even if you only have the cyborg to play with. Rendering one character is no problem but four at once makes my computer chug. I find it hard to go for a draft low quality version, I am good on my first render but once I've turned all the refractions reflections and fancy shiny features on I find it hard to go back to the bog standard render which would be better for my work flow.

It's that corridor again. I keep using it even though it is not a friendly render object in any way, I really should build another one that's faster to render.

So this leaves the clear question which of course is pressing on all of your minds: who would win in a fight? the Cyborg or the Cyber Punk?

"Hey stitches....your ugly and you smell of spark plugs"

Cyborg #2 Polygons and Zbrush

2012-09-29T14:14:00.000-07:00

I've been working on the cyborg taking it on from the concept in my last entry. The second design, the green cyborg got the most votes from my readers so that's the one that I'm working on. I did also like the red design, the first cyborg so I may try that one as well. I have also been thinking about doing a zombie character, an alien and also some generic kind of space trooper.

Above is where I am currently at with the cyborg. I am close to done with the painting, there are some fine details that are not showing up on the trousers and boots. That's probably down to the lighting, I can maybe get the paint job to help out on this with some more work. The first job was to get the basic polygonal shell in place, you can see it in it's bind pose below. Most of the polygons went into the robotic arms and the cross design on the helmet.

The next job was to get it set up with the same skeleton the cyberpunk is using. It went quite smoothly and because there is a run animation on the cyber punk I could straight away see the cyborg animating, this makes setting up the deformations on the polygon shell much easier. The laser rifle is the same model I used for the cyberpunk. I am planning to add some more animations although the next post will likely be some better renders with nice lighting, poses and the paint job finalised.

I then took the model into Zbrush where I started by mapping the UV's. Once that was done I set about sculpting the fine details in. It's a fun job and makes me feel much more like a proper artist than pulling vertices about in Maya (building the base poly mesh above). Poly modelling is quite a cold clinical business you need to be accurate and give the impression of a natural rounded form while working with harsh sharp edges Zbrush really changes that, it's much more tactile. As I said before it's something like painting with clay, you use a graphics tablet and either add or subtract strokes of simulated poly clay. You're still working with polygons but I guess a single stroke is pushing hundreds or thousands of polygons at a time. There is probably a hundred polygons or more in a single scratch in the cyborgs metal plates. Zbrush is great for natural forms like the contours and wrinkles of a face but it is quite tricky for less natural more mechanical subjects like this character. It was quite a challenge but still fun. Putting all the dents, scratches and rivets in at the end was an easy way to add character to the cyborg.

Cyborg #1 Concept

2012-08-27T11:04:00.001-07:00

I have been working on some cyborg concept, these were created with my graphics tablet in photoshop.

I wanted to throw some ideas around before I start a new 3d poly model. I may try losing the little finger from this character, that way I can use the joints I save to create animatable pistons or other mechanical gubbins for my human machine hybrid. The idea is that this model will work with the same skeleton as the cyber punk from my last entry and so be able to play the same animations and use the same props. I'm planning to keep the team colour ideas as with the cyber punk. I have stuck with just the torso arms and head being mechanized, I did consider going further but any more and I think I might as well just make a robot (I probably will at some point). I also should have a cool bit of 2d work coming up and wanted to get my drawing head on.

My idea of a cyborg is someone who doesn't know when to quit. A character who really should take some time out after losing some fairly important parts of himself but no, not this fella he will just head down to his local Cyber Cyborgs 'R' Us and buy some replacement parts. Something like the Black Knight from Monty

Python's The Holy Grail but with the perks of science fiction.

It's all gone a bit dark and twisted, I guess the Borg from Star Trek are shuffling around in my subconscious, that along with Mean Machine from 2000ad, he pretty much fits the mould for how I see a cyborg, not a character that would ever sit out a fight. There are some much older influences creeping in from things like Frankenstein and all those science gone bad cautionary tales. Also recently I bumbled onto the world of Transhumanism and the idea of septic cyborgs seems to have taken root. Apparently if you're the sort that takes a practical approach to recreating yourself as man-machine or human 2.0 a major stumbling block is making sure your body doesn't reject your up grades (yes that is as yucky as it sounds). If you fancy giving it a go there is some handy how to stuff here. I wont be trying it any time soon as I'm sure it would play havoc with my RSI.

I would be interested to know which of the three I've painted you think would win in a fight, or alternatively which one is the most pleasing from an aesthetic point of view.

Cyber Punk Character

2012-07-23T06:03:00.004-07:00

As promised here is the Cyber Punk character to go with my last entry the LP33 laser rifle. Like the laser rifle this model is available on TurboSquid. Another low/mid poly games character fully rigged and poseable with IK switching. Intended to be used for FPS. The Cyber Punk would work as a grunt character for sci-fi games but would do equally well as an anti hero. On the darker side perhaps a goon for some evil master mind. I don't see the Cyber Punk as the brains of an operation but he might be quite good at throwing grenades.

As I mentioned in my previous post I built this character as a sample for a sprite based game. Above is the version I started out with created to be used as a sprite, you can see that I altered the geometry on the laser rifle a fair bit. You can get away with very basic models for sprites, also because your dealing in images not polygons you can go mental with your poly count (although I haven't in this case.... you can). You can also go as mad as you like with your lighting using whatever fancy memory hungry set up you like, sprites are fairly liberating in a number of ways.....ok that's enough about sprites I'm going off on a tangent.

Here is the lil' fella as a sprite.

When I started making this character I was thinking of the old arcade game Crude Busters, but I think you can also see a bit of the cool bike punk from Akira in there. I also realised later that the mutant gang in Frank Millers graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns have sneaked into my sub conscious, probably pretty obvious to anyone who's read it. My brief was to make a character that looked like he was from 2000 ad, a UK comic which I was into from about the age of 8.

PEW PEW PEW!

Obligatory wire frame picture below. you can see that the base model is pretty simple, created from mostly quads there are some triangles in there too. Quads are what you want to allow easy editing of your mesh, also if you want to do a mesh smooth to up your poly count, a triangulated model can give some ugly results. Most games engines want triangulated models especially if they are animated so once you're done modelling you need to triangulate your model, some engines do it automatically.

As you might be able to tell I have finally shifted over to Z Brush. It was the reason I forked out for a new tablet recently and I've finally bitten the bullet. Z Brush is used to give models a higher level of detail and provides tools to manipulate thousands of polygons in a more intuitive organic way. It's sort of like painting with clay. It does take a bit of getting used to, below are the warm up models I did to teach myself how to use the program, from my first attempt on the right (chocolate Davros has melted in the sun) to the last on the left (Yul Brynner meets Ken Watanabe). I'm not sure I should be posting up dogs dinners like chocolate Davros. It doesn't make me look very competent but, for anyone who picked up a copy of Z Brush and made a horrible mess the first few times, you know that you are not the only one.

Below you can see the Cyber Punk in Z Brush. The Z Brush version has millions of polygons in it and is no use for a games engine. In fact it has so many polygons, it will barely run in Maya. So what use is it? well what I want Z Brush for is to create normal maps. Normal maps are a type of bump map that you can generate from a high poly model and transfer onto a low polygon model as an image or texture file.

Below you can see the normal map goes in the bump map slot for you material and gives your low poly model the ability to masquerade as a very high poly model indeed. The models profile, the silhouette still gives away your model for the low life low poly impostor he is but it's a great technique for making poly counts look much higher than they actually are.


The normal map is the bottom node.

Low poly masquerades as high.

I am planning to add some more animations to this character when I have a chance, standard games anims like a jump death and strafe. I may use this model as a template to create more characters in the future, I am liking Z Brush and am keen to get back to modelling some more characters. I'm thinking maybe a cyborg next, any requests? Are there any character model you would like to see in this style? Bare in mind I can't go building Darth Vader or Batman, it needs to be a new character or I will get in trouble for copyright infringement.

The Cyber Punk will be back.