Here’s a little video from all of us to all of you, hope you have a happy Christmas : )

The video is a trailer we made for GGA before the summer, so the things shown in it is about 7 month old : )

It’s still nice to watch

We had some requests about two week ago that people wanted to have a look at us working at our office. So here’s a video, though from our old office (we just moved), of us at work. This is how it looks like when things are running smoothly and everyone is in.

At first you’ll see Nixi working on some concept art, then a quick look at Jona texturing, over to Jakob coding, to Dwarf making level art, to Andreas play testing, back to Jakob, and then to Jona and Nixi again. The man with the camera is King Klepot aka Håkan.

Today I’d like to share a new recording. Like the previous one I posted, this video demonstrates the process of drawing and coloring an enemy concept in photoshop. All I knew when starting was that it should be a quite heavily armored average male warrior controlled by Maag, the leader of Jedna. His equipment will vary but in this case I felt that it would be cool if he wielded a large shield, making him suitable for a little more dynamic and interesting AI. I didn’t use any reference whatsoever, I’m painting directly from my head and experimenting with different shapes to create an interesting armor.
It took about three hours to finish but the video is at high speed as usual.

Part 1

Part 2

Here’s the third part of the Velocirator series, where you get to follow an enemy all the way from first concept to a finished and animated 3d mesh.
Once again I have in co-operation with Håkan compiled this little video, it shows my workflow as I rig, skin and textur the Velocirator (Ratociraptor?) in 3ds max, at 12 times the original speed.

I will make sure to keep my camera rolling when I animate it as well, look forward to it! Please!

This week, stating today, we’ll publish a little series of connection posts that will show you how we make a character/enemy from start to finish.

Finally, I’m back at the island after a couple of smooth days back home. It was nice to eat three meals a day and do nothing at all, just dragging the feet behind me and enjoying friends, family and the wonderful weather. Thank you easter bunny and Jesus Christ.

The video below shows how I work when making a concept: in this case an enemy rat mixed with a kangaroo and a velociraptor. I knew that it had to be small sized, come in hordes and perform some sort of jumping attack, making it more vulnerable and easier to hit if you get the timing right.

I started off making a couple of quick sketches to find something that could work. As reference I found some hideous pictures of the African nude mole rat. It’s probably the ugliest animal on the planet and when you see it, you instantly want to kill it. This creature looks like as if someone copy pasted a human penis, gave it eyes, legs and a nose. It didn’t quite feel right to keep that body type so instead I decided to move towards, as mentioned, the kangaroo/raptor direction.

It took about 2-3 hours to complete but luckily the video is like 8x speed. I hope you enjoy watching it.

Next week, starting on Tuesday, we’ll be posting a series of posts that are connected to eachother and showing how we work . We will do this using one of our enemies. First of is Nixi, our concept artist, that first shows how he draws two versions of the enemy. In the Next post Jona, one of our 3d artists show how he makes a 3d model using Nixis concept art. In the third video Jona is skinning and texturing the 3d model. In the last video you’ll see the enemy move.

Here’s a little “pre taste” video of Llaknel being textured in Mudbox.

Yesterday evening Håkan, Jona and Nixi were away and tried the mo-cap (motion capture) equipment that we have at our disposal. Here are some screen shots from the warm up videos. I wasn’t allowed to post any video, because Nixi had very strong fear about becoming the new “You Tube wacko” on the Internet. As Nixi puts it in one of the 100 videos we recorded yesterday -”this is definably Star Wars kid material”
The photos are screen shots from the videos we shot. That’s why the quality isn’t the best

When I saw the video of Nixi I thought that he had the mo-cap clothing on. So I said -”nice spandex you got on”. Nixi commented:
-”Those are my regular clothes, you bastard. Not as tight as the motion capture suit and not spandex but sure, they are tighter than your tailored grey suit.”
Nice to feel some love :p Also I don’t have a grey tailored suit, only a black one and I only use it for weddings and funerals.

* HERE’s some more stuff about the mo-cap room + video.

Hi, Stoffer the narrative guy in the PoH team. I’ve bee trying to make a video in a non functional editing tool has been a pain in the ass ever since I started working with this game. However, I now finally have one that works. A new test video with speech bubbles is on it’s way. We use “test videos” to see how things will/can look without putting the time and effort to implant it into the game engine. This way we can see if things will or will not work.

The earlier projects involved frapped videos from my best friend You tube, where I used TMNT (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) In Time as a substitute. It was an in game video with four players from the arcade version of the game. I experimented with different types of texts. From toned bars at the upper part of the screen to colored speech bubbles. Speech bubbles seem to be the best choice for adding dialog to the game. However it didn’t look good enough and the crappy quality of the frapped video made it even worse.

My guess is that my new video will resemble our expectations of the dialog part of the game better than the TMNT one. Hence I now use our own design of the first level as our own characters.

When me (Jens), Nixi and Håkan had a meeting yesterday, Håkan suddenly got some serious cramp in his jaw *lol. The thing that made it even funnier was that we got in on camera since we had the meeting on Marratech. Håkan is yawning and then the cramp comes and stays for about 30 sec. Me and Nixi first thought that it was a joke so we’re joking about calling 112 (Swedish 911) or putting the movie clip on You Tube or our blog (which we now do).

I just took my digital camera and shot the video at my computer screen so the quality isn’t the best, but the fun is ; )

So if you want to learn some useful Swedish:
-“sendrag i käften!” is something like -“cramp in the jaw!”