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Archive for the ‘production’ Category

First footage of “Ghost of a Tale” game prototype

August 11th, 2012 4 comments

I’ve just uploaded a little video on YouTube which shows some footage from a game prototype I”ve worked for a while. Running on the Cryengine of course. I’m keeping a lot of things under wrap still, and this is all very preliminary stuff. None of the models or animations or textures are final of course. Still, it may give people a sense of what I’m going for. If you like Mortal Kombat or God of War you’ll like this gory game that has infinite weapons you can choose. That is an extremely violent, ugly and aggressive gaming experience, as you can see for yourself in the video below… 😉

Pressing the button to release my game to the public was scary. What if people hated my game? What if something was completely broken? At least so far, those fears were unwarranted. In fact, I have been very satisfied with the response to my game thus far. By no means is it a super successful game with only about 90 total downloads, and a grand total of $0.00 in revenue 💰 at the time of this writing. 😱

If you would like to play League of Legends but your level is too low and you are not very good at it, you need LoL elo boost so you can totally customize your character and skills and get better at it.

However, at this stage, success is seeing people enjoy my game. It’s seeing someone who was about to leave a party stay another hour because someone beat his high score. It’s seeing people post screenshots of their high scores or using the best gaming accessories from HotRate just to play my game. It’s having someone beat my high score (although I died a little bit on the inside). It’s seeing that people challenge themselves. It’s seeing that joy when they reach a new level of accomplishment.

So, where do I go from here? I think I want to try incorporating multiplayer, or at least figuring out how to do a ranking system. People seem really into getting a high score. I also need to learn more about the business/marketing aspect of things.

Categories: CryEngine, production Tags:

Character pipeline

April 3rd, 2011 1 comment

I’ve been reworking the overall organization of my character pipeline, and here’s the result. On the figure below you can see the way a model is broken down into basic building blocks which are then assembled into the final puppet.

The picture below shows in more details the overall Maya folder structure of a single character (let’s say a biped). In the right-hand side is a list of MEL scripts used to assemble all the pieces together.

The great thing in following such a precise organization is that you can then follow the same rules for any character you build without having to stop and wonder where you stored this or that file.

Categories: Maya, MEL, production, update Tags:

Big News!

December 19th, 2008 11 comments

I’m done with the teaser of the movie! Woohoo! 😀

It took me a long time as I had to learn much about the whole process. I was already familiar with animation of course, and I knew a bit about modeling and rigging, but I had to work hard to learn about surfacing, lighting and compositing. Well, at least the basics so I could develop a mini-pipeline to take the shots from 2d drawings to 3d animatic to final compositing without too much hassle. And boy was that hard! But it is definitely rewarding to see the scenes and characters coming to “life” which were for almost two years simple figments of my imagination…

The teaser is very short and the music is only a temp track. The real soundtrack you’ll hear in the movie is a beautiful choral piece composed by the very talented Thomas Hjort Jensen.

(Also, at the end it says “2009”, but I’m afraid it’s only wishful thinking!)

In other unrelated big news, I’m happy to announce that I’ll be directing the animation of a movie being produced by Universal in a French studio called Mac Guff Line (located in Paris). So I’ll be moving back to France in the month of January. Exciting times! :)

Categories: misc, production, update Tags:

Reporting progress on the short!

September 16th, 2008 1 comment

I’ve recently moved the first couple of shots through the whole pipeline, from animatic to “final” compositing stage. Of course, as on any movie, I’m sure I’ll tweak the shots before the production is over though, just to upgrade them to a higher level of quality. Anyway, it’s really rewarding! Yay! 😀

Oh, and a good friend of mine named Fabrice Joubert just finished his short movie called French Roast. Congrats to him and the crew! Try and catch it in festivals, it’s all good!

Categories: production, update Tags:

Network Rendering

September 7th, 2008 No comments

I’ve just started my wonderful adventures in render-land, and I’ve recently had to setup a (very small) render farm. After having experienced difficulties finding information online for doing so, I wrote a few simple tips about setting up a couple of machines for the purpose of network rendering with Mental Ray and Maya. This is fairly technical stuff, but who knows, maybe some of you will find that useful…

Categories: production, update Tags:

Rigging is under way!

April 7th, 2008 No comments

Since I didn’t post any movie-related news for quite a while, I just wanted to say I’m working right now on the rigging of the characters. Then I’ll move on to surfacing. I know I’m repeating myself but it’s a huge amount of work!

I won’t be posting many pictures, since I want to keep a lot of things under wrap still. It’s a bit silly not to be able to show the better parts of one’s own work, but I believe the impact of the discovery will be greater that way.

So I’m just posting an older picture which is one of those quick-and-dirty tests you do so many times during the course of a production. In this case I was just testing the rig when I “took the picture”. But that’ll have to do for now… 😀

Categories: production, update Tags:

Quick technical update

November 22nd, 2007 1 comment

I released a new poseLib version with a couple of minor fixes. As usual you can find it here. I also updated the shotCam rig with both a new shotCam.ma file and the matching shotCamLister script which you can find here. Another addition to the Crysis tools I put up is crysisCleanupObj which fixes the problems inherent to exporting a brush as an .obj file from Sandbox2. It’s available on the MEL scripts page.

As a side note, I see my little Crysis map has been downloaded more then a thousand and six hundred times on Crymod (and I don’t dare to look how many times on this site). That’s just ridiculous.

Oh and I’m 99% done with the first pass of the 3D layout on my movie. Yay! :)

Categories: misc, production, update Tags: