Free Time Doodling

I've been doodling in Flash again, just visualising ideas floating around. I came up with this cartoon skull:



After letting my mind wander firther, I decided to make it lip-sync to something. Maybe a quote from a movie or TV show? A sample from some stand up I like? Or make him sing-a-long to a song? Yes. An evil-looking skull singing might look quite amusing, I thought.
After seperating the movable parts into manipulatable layers, exporting about 10 different facial poses, editing them in Premier Pro to match the words of a 90's dance song I had, which has had a bit of a come back in the clubs at the moment (well the ones in Nottingham I've been to anyway), and adding some club, dance-esque light effects, here's the final video. Enjoy!:

Yes!

Finito! Well, almost. After silly hours playing catch-up on my schedule i'm pretty much finished. I added all my cover objects today, pretty much perfected the lighting and inserted all of the weapon, health and shield pickups. All that's left to do is test it with bots and tweak the placement of objects, pickups and possibly lights. The finishing tasks I need to do, like putting the map (and packages?) on CD i'll do tomorrow before the hand-in.

I'll be surprised if I have enough time to do much tweaking tomorrow though, as it's operation essay now before the deadline at 2pm on Wednesday. Oh dear - not much time!

Here's a couple of screenshots of the (pretty much) finished map:

Oh fffffffffffffiddlesticks!

I decided to remind myself about backing up computer-based work today. Remembering I was due for a backup, not having done one for 4 days, I made a note to do it that night. Then, upon saving my working file, Unreal Editor crashed. Imagine my delight when trying to load my saved map, already an hour behind where I should be with my progress, it crashed again, confirming my suspicions that the file was corrupted.

32 hours work lost, including all my lighting, half of the texture placement, scaling and rotation including 4 staircases and 2 rounded staircases, and a few static meshes lost. (well, 32 hours ish, I am unable to type 30 at the moment as it's not a power of 2 and thus my fingers cannot type it)

Oh well, as it's the 2nd time around I've improved on my first effort and done it in a quarter of the time. But now I'm a day down on a solid work schedule with an entire essay to fit in. On with the show!

Here's something nice I found at the end of operation catch-up; textured and lit static meshes vs converted mesh brushes. On the left is my queen chess piece additive brush, created from the static mesh, textured with white marble (the colour which shows up poor detail best). On the right is the static mesh normally inserted. Clearly, there's no need to convert meshes into brushes.

Mood Lighting

I've put a LOT of hours in every day this week, and got a lot done. Too much in fact, to be worth making the effort to blog about it all. So I'll show just a taster.

Quite a lot of my time has been spent lighting, mostly due to the fact that my laptop takes ages to compile a playable test map. I've added some small purple spotlights to the walls of the poker room for some mood lighting. I think it looks great. I then decided to make an actual light static mesh, so the light looks like it's actually emitting from something, rather than out thin air.