Testing Particles

Rediscovered this treasure. My bible circa 2009; discovered I still use most of the tricks I learned from this book today. Animating waves using masks, proper gradients, animation principles, etc. Its advice is still relevant even after Flash's demise.

I had a lot of game ideas I wanted to make in Flash, most of which never escaped their notepad concept. Had a few successes, a Tetris-blackjack combo called DiceJack, and Rawrysaurus, a kaiju game where you escaped from a tidal wave. My first forays into game dev.

Thanks Chris Georgenes.

MeaBea 🧡💙

Wildly different characters (Quark, Dr Nefarious, Andrew Ryan) who share the same actor: Armin Shimerman.

Hello GameDevs! I'm Roy from Scotland, an indie dev working as one half of Bounder Games (alongside CodingDino)! You might have seen us at DevCom, Insomnia, and EGX Rezzed.

Currently working on three titles; "Stardust Survivors", a survivors game set in a bizarre space land, "Gobbos, Hunt!", a monster hunting card game, and "Armoured Engines", a wacky side-scrolling tower defense in the wild west!

I'll be posting some of my work here in the future, hope to see all the wonderful things people share here! <3

I've been called into college to fill in for an animation class. Looks like they're using Illustrator to make art and After Effects to animate. It's pretty early on in the term, so I'll start from the basics to see what they know already. I use Inkscape for Armoured Engines (main art) and Stardust Survivors (icons).

I'm not that familiar with Illustrator; Inkscape is my vector art program of choice. I'm going to be helping out the students with their work, so I've got to familiarise myself with it. There's a few oddities; you have to use a different tool to add nodes instead of just double clicking. But it's functional so far, once I looked up a few shortcuts.

A little snowman should be easy for them to make, simple shapes for a simple character.

bitch this is all you’re gonna get. this life, this face, this body. you better not ‘maybe in another universe’ your way out of everything. sit your ass down and face this. go make tea and have a picnic and read a goddamn book. kiss your loved ones, send that damn text, and hug your siblings. this is all you’re gonna get.

Popped down to Edinburgh for the MOVE Summit, a series of talks on the UK Animation industry. The Thursday portion began with a talk from Christopher McDonald from Framestore, showcasing the technological pre-production (or "Previs") done for movies, with Wicked Part 1 as the example.

They start by using overhead "Blocking Maps" to figure out the space of a scene, where each character is going to stand, position of objects, camera locations, field of view, etc. Then they make CG mockups of characters and locations, using concept art as a base, then animate based on the director's vision. It's sort of like the next step up from storyboards.

This helps them gauge the spacing and stage setup required to pull off practical effects ("Techvis"). For example, the scene where Glinda is sailing to the university, the camera is underwater, showing her hand beneath the water's surface. This means that for the camera to be below her, the actual prop boat needed to be several feet off the ground, something they might not have caught if they just started shooting.

"Postvis" is of course the post-production of adding all the effects together for the final shot. This was also the first time I'd heard the term "Plate", for the base shot that all the effects are later layered onto. Like a sandwich, I guess. Big thanks to Chris for that talk.

Talking about the level design in ‘Jak & Daxter’ on the PlayStation 2. Source: Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine Demo Disc 51. Support us on Patreon

Following on from yesterday's post, another interesting presentation came from Victor Paredes of Moho. Moho is an animation software that does quite a few interesting things with vector art. Two things really caught my eye; the first was pairing recorded "actions" to control bones, causing really smooth 3d motion for 2d objects. Full on head turning for 2d characters can be pretty challenging, but Victor made it look effortless.

The second was "Line Boil", which reanimated the art applied to vector lines, giving it a really nice, natural, hand-drawn look. There's a certain stiffness associated with vector art, and this completely masked it.

I'm gonna keep my eye on it; there's a 30-day free trial if you want to have a go. The demos they had on display were immediately eye-catching, so if you're interested in a bit more "art" on your vector art, give it a gander.