(written May 12, 2014)
I love animation.
I love traditional animation.
I love to draw.
Then why am I so exhausted only after a week?
Tag Archives: artist
How Long Does It Take To Make A Good Game?
Video games are difficult and time consuming to make. Every year, we hear of Hollywood films costing hundreds of millions of dollars, and we see credits at the end with thousands of names. Games are more complicated than that: they often require all the narrative, audio and visual prowess that films do today, and also require programming expertise on making these worlds interactive, further adding to the complexity.
But how long does it take to make a game?
“Duke Nukem Forever” reportedly took 15 years of development time. And yet, we see several games from large publishers (“Call of Duty,” “Assassin’s Creed”) get made in under a year. What’s the difference?
An Important Decision…
(A open letter of personal conflictions.)
If you religiously scan everything about me on the Internet, you would be a little creepy. And, while there isn’t too much out there to go on, you’ll know I am a university student. I am finishing soon, expecting to graduate within months with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science. As my classes come to a close, I have some important decisions to make.
Most people are asked throughout their student lives the same question: “What will you do when you graduate?”
How do we answer? Often, we don’t know yet. Some people, even after college or university, don’t know exactly what they want to do.
At least, that’s what they say. I think, deep down, everyone knows exactly what they would like to do. The problem is that it may or may not be viable or realistic, or are just too strange for people to be willing to admit. If you have a passion for becoming a Fortune Cookie Writer or Professional Whistler, then great, but that might be a difficult job to obtain, let alone the fear of what your family or friends would think.
Make a Successful Indie Game Using Kickstarter… Why? (part 1 of 7)
So, you’ve been thinking.
You’ve been watching television. You’ve been reading internet news. You’ve been reading the local newspaper and magazines and books.
You’ve seen that Kickstarter is a great way to get money directly from fans/customers for you to use to create your product.
You’ve seen that many indie games have achieved success on the site.
You’ve decided that you will make a Kickstarter campaign for your game!
Merging 3D and 2D Animation: “Three-dimensional Proxies for Hand-Drawn Characters”
I’m surprised I didn’t see this research before, but I’m glad I have now, and wanted to quickly tell you about it.
Hand-drawn (traditional) animation and 3D (computer) animation have been separate forms for a long time. The over-abundance of computer animation has caused some people to mutter, but computer animation is easier and more effective in many ways, so some animators have tried to merge the benefits of both mediums. Oscar-winning Disney short “Paperman” is one such example of how such a style might work (still not able to replace hand-drawn in my opinion, but it comes very close and captures the general heart and soul very well).
But on this webpage, you can find a research paper by Eakta Jain (and Yaser Sheikh, Moshe Mahler, Jessica Hodgins) at Carnegie Mellon titled “Three-dimensional Proxies for Hand-Drawn Characters,” just one of several efforts made by Jain to somehow use traditional animation with modern technology. The included video shows the potential of combining 3D computer models for physics (with environments and cloth effects) with hand-drawn characters. It looks great, and was partially funded by Autodesk (creators of 3D software “Maya”) and Disney Research. Love or hate Disney, their research division really does catch on to some fantastic work.
Of course, it appears additional technical input is required on the artist’s part to make the two artworks mesh together properly, and I assume this is all pre-rendered and may have little to do with the potential in games or real time tech demos, but it looks good nonetheless.
The website I’m talking about is here: http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/threeDproxy/ . Give it a look, it might inspire you.
