Hey all, as of today, I'm going to be offically moving this blog over to
http://www.charlottegrantanimation.com/#!blog/cegh
I started moving posts over there a while back, with the intention of continuing both blogs, using the import feature in wordpress to move things across, but unfortunately, it seems this sometimes misses out things and I've spent a lot of time putting in the embed codes again by hand. So now I think would be a good time to move it over there officially!
Sorry for any inconvenience! It's just nicer to keep everything in one place :)
See you over there!
~Char
Wednesday, 23 April 2014
Sunday, 6 April 2014
Personal Projects
Along with the numerous compulsory projects we've been given over the past few months, I've been working on some more personal things in my free time too :)
Since new year, I've been trying to get into the habit of doing 30 minutes of creating a day, this could be working in Maya on an animation, drawing something, writing something, it can be for university or just something I want to work on and so far, I've kept to it. For the most part, University work takes up this time and usually much more than 30 minutes a day, but when I've found I've not had any work to do for university, I've worked on my own projects or projects for other people, which I guess I'll show and talk a little about below :)
One of the first things I worked on, in January was a walk cycle of the Bull Creature Rig, I worked on this for around 5 days, 30 minutes a day. I really enjoy working with quadrupeds and it was a nice, simple rig to work with :) The walk cycle is below. It's still pretty rough and could do with working on a little more, but I'm quite pleased with it.
As many of you know, I participate quite regularly in the Guild Wars 2 community, it's one of my favourite games, so I often find myself doodling fanart of some of my favourite characters in it. Below are a few digital paintings I've done recently......only now realizing that every non-university digital painting I've done in 2014 (that I'm able to show) has been Guild Wars 2 related and that does make me come of as either a fangirl or a little obsessed...but oh well :P Here they are
Just a quick doodle of my character Gwylen, I'd gotten a letter from an NPC talking about how they'd named some of their children after me, in my honor (after I'd helped these NPC's out with some stuff) and thought it'd be fun to draw some of these babies with the GW2 name tags showing my characters name, above their heads.
The two paintings above are of Marjory and Kasmeer a couple in the Guild Wars 2 living story, who I'm quite fond of :) I plan to post a little about the Guild Wars 2 living story on my personal blog at some point, as I have a LOT to say about it. I do plan on starting up personal blogging soon, as I have a lot to talk about, I've recently completed several games, including Depression Quest, To the Moon and a few others, so I'd really like to discuss more about them on here :) Of course, this blog goes towards my grades at the end of the year, so blogging for coursework is going to be my main priority here and I've been very busy lately, so have been putting starting it off, more than I probably should be. Bare with me, I will sort out the website and blog soon though, I promise! (I only have 7 weeks left of uni right now anyway, so in the worst case scenario, it's going to be no longer than 8 weeks ^^)
When I get around to it, my plan for my website is to have (Main/Blog/About Me/Resume/Contact me/ for the main page and then for the blog to be split into two, tags wise (Game Development/Course Blog/Personal Blog) and all feed into one place, similarly to how it is now, with my blogspot account, but I'm hoping to phase out usage of that, when I can figure out how to get it displaying more clearly on my website (with tags and things till in tact) as I've noticed many embeds from my main blog didn't make it in the transfer, so I'm going to have to go back and fix all those, before I really get rid of the blogspot one.
Probably not helping me on the "looking like a GW2 fangirl" front, I've also done a lot of edits recently, using footage from the Guild Wars 2 living story. Editing is something I really enjoy a lot, so I've taken to picking a random "Creative commons licenced" song off the Newgrounds audio portal, that I like and then spending the night editing it to Guild Wars 2 footage and sometimes audio, when I'm finding it hard to sleep. There's something quite therapeutic about timing footage to beats :3
Below are all of my recent edits.
Along with these random edits and things, I've been working on a couple of undisclosed projects that, unfortunately, I can't talk too much about.
One of them is a card-game project for the company When Worlds Collide the company responsible for the RPG system with the same name :)
There's 5 of us working on the project right now, as artists for their upcoming card game, set to be released on Kickstarter sometime soon, I've been working both as an editor for promotional material and as a digital painter for some of the card art. We're very close to having completed all of the work we were commissioned for soon, so it won't be too long before the game is released and I can show some of the art created for it.
One other project I was working on was Project TDHAS, a project I've been a part of for a while now (I think I've talked a little about this before). It was originally a game made by Tristan for a university assignment, that he chose to continue working on. It's made in Unity 3D and went from originally being a top down game, to being a 3rd person game. I was on the team as an art director, producing seamless textures, UI graphics and backdrops for the game and was going to go on to work on animations, once the project got further in. Tristan was the main designer, modelling and coding it and there was also a composer on our team.
Both Tristan and I are juggling a lot of work right now (and he's started on a new project and the assignment has been handed in) so I'm not sure what the fate of this project will be, but it was fun experience working for him on it.
I'd never done any kind of texture work before, so it was a new experience for me. The game works on PC and is able to connect to an android system, for puzzles such as lock picking or safe breaking. Here's Tristan's blog post on integrating those, showing the android lock picking game and one of the environments (albeit not very textured) areas in the game.
Finally, I'll talk about this more soon, but in my free time I've been working on a personal project of mine called Taking Wing. It was an idea I jotted down whilst at Bradford games festival, being inspired by the talk Jaromir Plachy gave on his inspirations behind Botanicula. Falmouth University is starting a games development degree next year (one I wish I wasn't too late to be a part of) and as a result, 3rd year animation students can now submit games as well as films, for final year. We'll be pitching these ideas soon and I'm hoping Taking Wing gets greenlit, so I can put it towards my degree in 3rd year and collaborate with other students on the campus, such as composers.
I'm currently working to build the game in Stencyl, although this is subject to change, depending on whether I find the program too limiting or not (I only have experience in RPGmaker XP and Game Maker but chose Stencyl because it seems to be more versatile from an animation perspective, something I'd need if I was to submit it as my final animation project)
Here's a screenshot of the production bible I'm working on and a concept for the first level and the current title screen (working, but subject to change...the writing is animated with a flicker)
Fingers crossed pitching it goes well, I guess! :)
I'll talk more about games and other projects soon (particularly past games projects, as I'm about 98% sure game development and 3D character animation are the areas I'm most passionate about and would most like to go in, now)
But for now, Char out!
Since new year, I've been trying to get into the habit of doing 30 minutes of creating a day, this could be working in Maya on an animation, drawing something, writing something, it can be for university or just something I want to work on and so far, I've kept to it. For the most part, University work takes up this time and usually much more than 30 minutes a day, but when I've found I've not had any work to do for university, I've worked on my own projects or projects for other people, which I guess I'll show and talk a little about below :)
One of the first things I worked on, in January was a walk cycle of the Bull Creature Rig, I worked on this for around 5 days, 30 minutes a day. I really enjoy working with quadrupeds and it was a nice, simple rig to work with :) The walk cycle is below. It's still pretty rough and could do with working on a little more, but I'm quite pleased with it.
As many of you know, I participate quite regularly in the Guild Wars 2 community, it's one of my favourite games, so I often find myself doodling fanart of some of my favourite characters in it. Below are a few digital paintings I've done recently......only now realizing that every non-university digital painting I've done in 2014 (that I'm able to show) has been Guild Wars 2 related and that does make me come of as either a fangirl or a little obsessed...but oh well :P Here they are
The above was drawn for a friend of mine, who sent me some materials in-game to help with a weapon I'm working on crafting, I drew this to thank him :D
Just a quick doodle of my character Gwylen, I'd gotten a letter from an NPC talking about how they'd named some of their children after me, in my honor (after I'd helped these NPC's out with some stuff) and thought it'd be fun to draw some of these babies with the GW2 name tags showing my characters name, above their heads.
The two paintings above are of Marjory and Kasmeer a couple in the Guild Wars 2 living story, who I'm quite fond of :) I plan to post a little about the Guild Wars 2 living story on my personal blog at some point, as I have a LOT to say about it. I do plan on starting up personal blogging soon, as I have a lot to talk about, I've recently completed several games, including Depression Quest, To the Moon and a few others, so I'd really like to discuss more about them on here :) Of course, this blog goes towards my grades at the end of the year, so blogging for coursework is going to be my main priority here and I've been very busy lately, so have been putting starting it off, more than I probably should be. Bare with me, I will sort out the website and blog soon though, I promise! (I only have 7 weeks left of uni right now anyway, so in the worst case scenario, it's going to be no longer than 8 weeks ^^)
When I get around to it, my plan for my website is to have (Main/Blog/About Me/Resume/Contact me/ for the main page and then for the blog to be split into two, tags wise (Game Development/Course Blog/Personal Blog) and all feed into one place, similarly to how it is now, with my blogspot account, but I'm hoping to phase out usage of that, when I can figure out how to get it displaying more clearly on my website (with tags and things till in tact) as I've noticed many embeds from my main blog didn't make it in the transfer, so I'm going to have to go back and fix all those, before I really get rid of the blogspot one.
Probably not helping me on the "looking like a GW2 fangirl" front, I've also done a lot of edits recently, using footage from the Guild Wars 2 living story. Editing is something I really enjoy a lot, so I've taken to picking a random "Creative commons licenced" song off the Newgrounds audio portal, that I like and then spending the night editing it to Guild Wars 2 footage and sometimes audio, when I'm finding it hard to sleep. There's something quite therapeutic about timing footage to beats :3
Below are all of my recent edits.
Along with these random edits and things, I've been working on a couple of undisclosed projects that, unfortunately, I can't talk too much about.
One of them is a card-game project for the company When Worlds Collide the company responsible for the RPG system with the same name :)
There's 5 of us working on the project right now, as artists for their upcoming card game, set to be released on Kickstarter sometime soon, I've been working both as an editor for promotional material and as a digital painter for some of the card art. We're very close to having completed all of the work we were commissioned for soon, so it won't be too long before the game is released and I can show some of the art created for it.
One other project I was working on was Project TDHAS, a project I've been a part of for a while now (I think I've talked a little about this before). It was originally a game made by Tristan for a university assignment, that he chose to continue working on. It's made in Unity 3D and went from originally being a top down game, to being a 3rd person game. I was on the team as an art director, producing seamless textures, UI graphics and backdrops for the game and was going to go on to work on animations, once the project got further in. Tristan was the main designer, modelling and coding it and there was also a composer on our team.
Both Tristan and I are juggling a lot of work right now (and he's started on a new project and the assignment has been handed in) so I'm not sure what the fate of this project will be, but it was fun experience working for him on it.
I'd never done any kind of texture work before, so it was a new experience for me. The game works on PC and is able to connect to an android system, for puzzles such as lock picking or safe breaking. Here's Tristan's blog post on integrating those, showing the android lock picking game and one of the environments (albeit not very textured) areas in the game.
Finally, I'll talk about this more soon, but in my free time I've been working on a personal project of mine called Taking Wing. It was an idea I jotted down whilst at Bradford games festival, being inspired by the talk Jaromir Plachy gave on his inspirations behind Botanicula. Falmouth University is starting a games development degree next year (one I wish I wasn't too late to be a part of) and as a result, 3rd year animation students can now submit games as well as films, for final year. We'll be pitching these ideas soon and I'm hoping Taking Wing gets greenlit, so I can put it towards my degree in 3rd year and collaborate with other students on the campus, such as composers.
I'm currently working to build the game in Stencyl, although this is subject to change, depending on whether I find the program too limiting or not (I only have experience in RPGmaker XP and Game Maker but chose Stencyl because it seems to be more versatile from an animation perspective, something I'd need if I was to submit it as my final animation project)
Here's a screenshot of the production bible I'm working on and a concept for the first level and the current title screen (working, but subject to change...the writing is animated with a flicker)
Fingers crossed pitching it goes well, I guess! :)
I'll talk more about games and other projects soon (particularly past games projects, as I'm about 98% sure game development and 3D character animation are the areas I'm most passionate about and would most like to go in, now)
But for now, Char out!
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