Wall-E

It was Great :) From an animators perspective, there was about 6 minutes total of live action that I would have perferred to see in CGI, but I thought it was awesome none the less.

Rogue

Maybe just because it's an Australian creature horror, this caught my eye during it's marketing time. I liked Rogue (I didn't like Lake Placid 1, 2). It was clear, clean and had some fun moments, not to mention some very nice Australian landscapes. Perhaps there isn't enough monster crocodile overall (it's about a monster crocodile by the way), but it didn't have any blurry 0.65 second CGI action shots, which is something I very much appreciate. Only one shot was a little funky on the animation side, but it still looked great. There is a great one of the croc eating a dog, which is pretty enjoyable. That dog was acting very strangely.

The Mist

I wasn't expecting anything from The Mist. It's one of those titles that has you assuming it will be crap, and the special effects shots turn out to be filtered actors behaving like cranky ghosties. But with this movie I was pleasantly surprised; this mist has monsters in it! Terrorizing a large cast of characters trapped in a supermarket. While the monsters are cool, the movie is quite long and heavy, including a drawn out bible bashing segment and an ugly ending. The monster segments work really well to loosen up the mood. And there's a healthy dose of gore as well!

Cornered Goodness!

There is some goodness coming out of the Cornered mini challenge! Digitalwerk, Sandr0, Mellbrix, cook5000; I reckon these peoples are on to something special! It's great to watch, gives me some ideas on how to approach my one. Looking at these entries though, I've got a long way to go!

Cornered 3D Mockup

I haven't had a lot of time to work on this, just bits and pieces over the last couple of weeks. I thought I should try and sort out the overall look with some geometry and lights, before getting into the texturing. I have to finish the modelling once I am happy with it, then do the UV's, then bake the lights, probably play with some other lighting as well, then get started with some more detailed stuff. Below is the wire.

Angel Cop

 

Watching Angel Cop on my VHS back in the day is definitely one of my favorite childhood memories. It really has everything you want in an 90s Japanese anime; a healthy mix of elite police, terrorists, scientists, cybernetic bodies, and rouge psychokinetic agents. Oh, and gore! It's fun, and neatly contained in 6 episodes, taking you from urban action to epic showdowns.

The art style is reasonably consistent, changing only a little after the pilot, and the synthesized soundtrack will glue you to every moment. I'll have to watch it again, even if it's just for the slightly tacky title sequence!

The Peon's Crusade

I've been busy lately! At work we've been discovering the wonders of the infamous 3dsmax motion-mixer, which will undoubtably lead to an animation production that is slightly wonky! I have been getting a hang of all of the issues though, which include character playback offsets, memory leaks, and backwards compatibility (yadda yadda yadda). The secret is: Don't ask too much of it, and fewer things will go wrong! 3dsmax really is a lackluster program sometimes! The memory leak in 8 SP3 is particularly woeful, which eats memory every time you adjust timing until the the program dies. Fortunately mix files are backwards compatible, otherwise the whole thing would have to go out the window!

Corner concept

Am planning on entering Cornered to get my game art practices up to scratch. It's the kind of thing I know vaugely how to do, but am not directly exposed to it at work. In this corner, a giant something lives in the wall and eats people... I'll add more clutter and chaos in 3d, depending on my budget. My entry is here.