New site up!

New site is up, I have t he tutorials to do which are left unfinished for now. If I waited until they were all done then the site wouldn't be up for a very long time :s

I'd appreciate any feedback for issues and such .

Cheers.

Karribu.com

New site in the works....again

I'm currently working on a new website in HTML5. The current one was only ever a temporary fix and if you notice, half the pages don't work and its not responsive whatsoever. So I've had my pen and paper out drawing designs and finally come up with one I like.

Watch this space...

Spaceship engine size comparison.

And just for kicks, here's a size comparison, although I am thinking of making the difference even more extreme...

ahoooooy...

Spaceship progress - Engines modeled and fitted

More progress on the engines which have been placed correctly now. It's actually the second time in two days I've modeled these. The first time around I realized I didn't have enough geometry in them to look smooth enough and with no realistic way to add the extra lines to smooth it out I had to basically re-do them. A case of trying too much to optimize the mesh. Subsurf was also out of the question because of all the greebles in the engine housing; the geometry would have been insane.

I like big butt's and I cannot lie...

I'm not settled on the colours yet, they are for the most part, just a placeholder. I do however want to keep the orange as I want the ship (last of its kind) to stand out from the rest. I'll grunge it up when in the texturing phase to make it look like it's drifted through a big pile of space poo....

Horsepower...Space horsepower...

I messed around with compositing to add some glare and glow but It looked horrible and I need to find out how to do it properly before I post a picture. I notice that a fair few space animations don't use much glow for the thrusters so I'm not planning to go overboard but these are supposed to be some immensely powerful boosters and I need to get that across somehow.

More updates to come....

Main Odessa 10-4 spaceship progress (Blender modeling)

A while back I made a model spaceship called "Fat Betty" for the Odessa 10-4 Project I'm involved in. Progress was great and I learned a lot in the progress, mainly about texturing and lighting. Here's a brief video of what I had....

Notice how I said had.....

I was on Linux at the time and wanted to duel boot so I could have windows and Linux on the same computer.....yeah, didn't work out so good. I lost the model and all the assets above which all in all was about 2 weeks of work down the toilet.

But It might not be as bad as I thought. I'm currently re-doing the model and with all I've learned from before I've made it slightly different with more thought put into scale!

There was an article from Neil Blevins about how to make things look huge and I'm going to be putting that to good use. Basically by have 3 different size layers you can trick the viewer into perceiving the smaller objects in relation to the largest thus giving the size impression. I think it will work more effectively if I can somehow show the size of a human, maybe by putting an airlock here and there.

So It's still very early and I've only just started again, zipping from segment to segment with no definitive final end look in mind I'm liking what I have so far. Keep in mind it's very early on and I have all the textures to do. Talking about textures, I'm going to be using more of them and as many 8k's as I can comfortably fit on it. Half will be procedural and the big chunks will be hand painted or a mixture.

It's a project I am looking forward to push forward and there is lots to do!

Old Betty Model

New Betty Model

Closer look at the smaller objects

Fall City HallwayScene

Moving onto some internal scenes now. Still jumping around to keep things fresh. Here's a WIP of a corridor scene where one of the villains goons are going to be hanging out while he is conducting his business.

I'm thinking of hand drawing some images to put into the picture frames. The scene has a Yakuza theme to it so might try my hand at some oriental style pictures. It's also worth noting that I hope to make the corridor modular so that I can just use blender's mirror and array modifiers to create other scenes relatively fast, perhaps just change a few colours and textures around. In fact I'm hoping to do that for a lot of props. The ashtrays and cigarette packets took me a wee while to model so If I can be lazy and reuse them I will.

Rose's katana blades Ebony and Ivory - Project Fall City

Just a quick one!

Fall City is coming along nicely although I'm jumping around from asset to asset to keep things fresh. I guess I'm putting off the character modeling for as long as I can as it's definitely a weak point of mine. One of the main characters 'Rose' is a young energy drink addicted semi-psychopath on a mission to save her mother, and she's going to do it with kick ass swords! Katana's to be more specific!

Here's Ebony and Ivory so far...

New blender comic style render direction

I decided to take the new project away from the black and white images I posted before. While I liked them, especially for a 2D comic they proved a little limiting when applying it to an animation. There was just such a loss of detail say when a character who was already cast in shadow, standing in an alleyway...cast in shadow. I tried messing around with colour variants and while I'm still not happy with the colour palette just yet, I am more happy with the general tone.

Obviously still early days yet, I'm thinking of sticking to the de-saturated colors. I'm rather fond of the Jin-Roh palette. The artist Bengal's colouring has always made me want to try something similar and I think this is the project I'm going to do it!

Just a quick update on the Fall City project. Got the Inner buildings feeling good and now planning out the rest. Also went with a stary sky, in a more realistic style. I think It compliments the style. Also a red sky for some kind of funky effect, maybe a fight scene.

2D Animation Effect In Blender

      While I'm working on my other projects I need a break from time to time or I'll burn out. I do admittedly have too many 'projects' on the go but my focus still remains on Odessa and a few others. One mini project that has got me exited however is Fall City (working title). A 2D Animation effect in the style of Sin City. In fact you could guess that Frank Miller has influenced me a lot in the style I'm going for.

      As you can see I'm definitely going for a 2D effect with a black and white ink style. Visually it will look like Sin City but the tone will be closer to Watchmen, another favorite film of mine, nice and gritty :)

      So far everything is early, in fact what you see there is what I have. I'm planning on making lots of building models in blender to form a city. I won't be seeding them in a particle system like Andrew Price's tutorial for two reasons. Firstly I want to make a 'real city' where everything is laid out where it makes sense, a real down town, shopping district, park areas. Secondly I down want it to be random and 'generated'. Normally this wouldn't be a problem but as I'm going for a 2D animation effect then a lot of the background is going to be in the spotlight often.

      It's going to be a pain in the backside to model the buildings but as I'm doing more and more I'm getting faster and eventually taking a model and splitting it into variations will quickly bump up the amount of assets available.

      There's a lot to figure out, getting to the characters will be interesting. Modeling human forms is not my forte, I'm much more used to hard surface assets but I'm willing to stick with this one as the story is already advanced in my head :)

Well, here's a glimpse of the first character who is more or less ready for one of my projects called "Find The Humans" although I'm pretty sure that title will change.

Website Progress

Well, I've really enjoyed my time learning the basics of HTML 5.  This is the 3rd iteration of the site now, first in Wordpress which was quickly discarded for reasons I'll go into shortly. Second was a fresh bare-bones html version which was too bloated with design elements and fancy graphics which looked great, but not user friendly having to do a lot of recoding just to make a blog post. And now, here is Karribu.com mkIII.

So Wordpress. Nothing wrong with it, a great base with a lot of features. Originally I was really into search engine optimisation and to an extent I still am, and this is where wordpress really shines. But a little too much. Out of the box it’s decent and with all the addons you can get and there are several that are recommended, but once these are installed something strange happens.

It runs slower.

At least that was my experience twice now. I’ve spend weeks scouring the internet on ways to squeeze 1% out of the performance and bloody google site speed test really can make you pull your hair out. That’s when I threw Wordpress in the bin for now and embraced a pure very basic HTML version that is catered to just my needs. The site is around 70% done with just a few things to do, and I’#ve gone for a (hopefully) visitor friendly navigation.

It won’t be breaking any records in the google site score for now but I’m not overly concerned at this point in time and will look at it later on.