( super cool city backdrop from Beneath a Steel Sky )

Tags: beneath a steel sky
aroundabout now, i am: happy

well we couldn't find a big huge 50th card for my dad in town ;_; but we did get a lil card which is really cool! XD

lee's folks are visiting tomorrow so its been a major tidy/clean the flat day! its looking loads better, although i've still got some random disks and papers to put away *grr*

oo! i finished beneath a steel sky today! i got a sweet screenshot of the city at the end (designed by dave gibbons of comicking fame ... he had a lot of design input in the game ^^ ) - i'll have to post it up some other time when i'm not in the middle of going on about stuff ^_~

work

hopefully something good will rise out of the ashes of a good few weeks trying to get a particular job and failing ;_; the good thing is, all the work i've done for them can now be used in my portfolio and one of the characters i've designed i think will become a major player in my modelling, so yay to that!

money-wise we're not going to starve to death just yet, but we'd been slipping into things like going n having lunch at the pub on saturdays with the guys because we were hopeful that i might get somewhere....so we've had to stop that for now.

luckily i've got a smallish graphics job waiting in the wings - i'm going to be making a 3D image to use on a company's new website design, and i'm also going to be involved with some of the graphic design. so hopefully this will bring us in enough moola to tide us over a little bit better.

i'm also going to give my old work an email on monday/tuesday (well i'm working on monday even if they're not!) and see if they've got anything going - they used to give me quite a bit of work but all's been quiet there pretty much since we moved to cambridge o.O;

...might also ask my dad if he's got any low-level work i can do (they might have some data entry or something....) but i'm not holding my breath as a lot of what they've been doing recently has been too involved and relevant-skill-heavy for me to be involved in ;_;

but i'm really determined to succeed! i will get a job in games modelling dammit!! >.< i'm going to have work to rival those on CG Talk one day! *starts dream sequence* XD

3D

i'm going to switch over to 3DsMax again from monday, so byebye softimage! i was just getting into it, but i get on with max so much better so it'll be much quicker and nicer to work on portfolio stuffs with ^^

through the feedback from the company i seem to have failed because a low-poly wheel model i made would not work in a game engine...the wheel was a really simple construction, and lee assures me there's nothing about it that wouldn't work in a game engine unless it was something particular to that company's one...maybe i'll post up the model with what they said at some point, and one of you guys could tell me if there's something wrong with it?

heh - wierd...i'm pretty sure it must have been other factors which meant i didn't get the position, but they had no reason not to tell me which factors they were...and TBH if the wheel was that wrong, it was so low poly it would have taken all of 5 minutes to revise the design (if you were doing it in the office) o.O; meh...i'm not that bothered as they didn't even have to give me feedback, its still a 'no' and its their perogative *nods* ...it was just such a wierd reason to give in the feedback...

anyway, onwards and upwards! XD

Tags: 3d blog, beneath a steel sky, work
aroundabout now, i am: tired
i've been listening to: KT Tunstall - Eye to the Telescope

3D

after taking most of yesterday off to recover from the previous 4 or so days, today i'm getting to grips with UV mapping in XSI!

the tools seem *much* easier to pick up than the blender ones (heh - which i never really managed to understand in the end o.O;; ) - altho it looks like you can't just assign a checkerboard material to the object like you can in max - you have to project a 2D texture image onto it - so i think i'll make myself a checkerboard in photoshop, using XSI's horribly garish default pattern as an example ^^

EDIT: their default is a .pic file that none of my software can open...guess i'll just make meself a 1024 square .bmp or something >.<

i'm going to be mapping a cube, a cylinder and a sphere *woo!* then i want to go on to map the character i made for the exam...that'll be good challenging practice as i've never textured a character before ^_^

oo! other exciting news, we may well have a small 3D project to do for a client! my parents' company is re-designing a company's website (which i could have had much more of a part in if i wasn't caught up in all this 3D stuff...but jobs like that seem few n far between, and TBH i'd rather be doing 3D ^_~ ) anyway to get back to the point...they want a 3D butterfly to use in various places around the site (probably taken from lots of different angles), which would be a bit challenging (we're talking pretty realistic here, which would be a bit difficult) but yay! i might have a small live project to practice on ... just gotta read up on what they need and quote for it XD

comics/websites

i started  some light CLM sketching last night and while i was going through my folder looking for the size i make cliffhangers at (its been that long i can't even remember any more! o.O; ) i realised that the last stuff i did for it was the soft shaded cast pics! that was for my 2D portfolio stuff, back when i thought i was going for a 2D job lol! i'm so sorry to take so long to get back into it anyone who reads it! gomen ne ;_;

*exciting news!* the new website is now up n running *woo!* only what 2 weeks or something after i paid for it ¬_¬ anyway, i'm going to launch it with a small competition so watch this space XD

better get back to updating ASAP *determined*

reading/watching/playing

finished my 4 volumes of petshop of horrors yesterday...i need the other 3!! *waah!* i really like it, as you never really know whether count D is good, evil or just indifferent...and are the animals really magical or just some kind of wierd druggy hallucination brought on by the count's special incense he's always burning ^_~ chuck in some mildly twisted morality tales and it makes a good talk-it-over manga XD (altho i can't forgive the cover art...its awful >.< )

still watching GITS: SAC 2nd gig...but i just remembered yesterday i've got the family guy film special still to watch (i've seen it before but not watched my own copy yet, even tho i got given it quite a while ago now...) so yay! XD

i started re-playing beneath a steel sky yesterday on ScummVM - its a total classic! i love the main guy's pithy comments like (when commenting on a hydraulic press thingy)

'its wheezing and banging...like an asthmatic dinosaur in the mating season'

class! XD

i've got like 1/2 way through the game in 1 day tho *eep*

more coolness...i also realised yesterday that i've got speilberg's 'the dig' to play through again too! XD (another one i've played countless times but never finished..) ... now how come speilberg didn't make such a dent on games as george lucas? he only seems to have directed a very few... hmm

Tags: 3d blog, beneath a steel sky, clm, family guy, ghost in the shell, petshop of horrors, softimage, the dig, work
aroundabout now, i am: working

(cause i felt like writing about something that wasn't work)

at the mo we're currently watching ghost in the shell: SAC 2nd gig - its very good, but you've gotta be on your toes with the story or you'll totally forget who's who (well apart from the usual suspects ^_^ ) - very slick production and cute tachicomas! XD *needs model tachicoma*

i just started reading petshop of horrors again today - its better than i remembered ^^ i've got vols 1-4 but have only read no. 1 as i wanted to get the entire series and read them all together (this was last year), then i left my job in bournemouth when lee finished uni and since then i have been picking them up one at a time through christmases, birthdays and this year one at easter! hmm...hopefully someone will get me the last 3 for my birthday then i will actually be able to read the whole series all the way through! XD (ah for the days when if i felt like getting some manga i could just order some XD )

its nice to read manga again - i think i've been only reading old imagine FXs and neos for the last couple of months ^^;

anyway, playing! i've just finished playing simon the sorceror I through again on super duper XP CD edition ^_^ it was still really fun, but man its not that the puzzles are hard, its that you just can't find all the things you need easily at all! stuff like a tiny rock in amongst a load of other rocks, in the shade, where you wouldn't possibly think of mousing over >.<

(heh - universal hints system's sure got a lot of hits form me lately ^^; )

so next: monkey island II, simon the sorceror II, or beneath a steel sky again? (i never did actually finish BASS on any of the occasions i've played it, so maybe that one ^_^ )

Tags: anime, beneath a steel sky, games, ghost in the shell, manga, petshop of horrors, simon the sorceror
aroundabout now, i am: working
i've been listening to: metallica - master of puppets