I took a course at Whistling Woods, an animation and film school in Mumbai setup by Subhas Ghai. I basically taught students how to use stepped keys ,breakdowns and inbetweening in Maya using traditional character animation techniques.They learnt how to draw on cell sheets on the monitors to make sure that their arcs were smooth and their poses "read" properly.Im posting some pics of my workshop over there and some student assignments showing the process I taught them. I think the biggest takeaway they took from the workshop was how to plan an animation before they start animating,how to hit strong keyposes and how to make sure that the arcs and inbetweens contribute to a strong perfomance.
Getting to draw on the screen definitely broke down the barriers that 3d animation creates , and since they had a strong base on 2d animation, thye could translate their animnation concepts seamlessly over to a 3d animation software such as Maya.
Been developing some matte paintings ,late nites. Having a great time discovering a good blend of 2d and 3d to push the look of my short film along,take a look...
Went to Annecy this year with some look dev. for a short film Im planning on doing. I enetered a competition called Call for Entries and lost miserably against a lot of the (fasr) superior European entries but it was a fantastic learning experience ,especially the sessions where the producers and broadcast channel executives discussed the work.High point of the trip was meeting up with Henry Selick and the Mary and Max crew,really learnt a lot from all the people there and twice as determined to actually finish off said short film. Here is a sneak peek at some of the work Ive been doing on this..
Ive been trying for the last 6 months to setup a unique look and feel for the world we're creating in Legend Of Katha. Our animation artists use these as a base for doing the in-game animations, game guide and cinematics.Hopefully we have succeeded in giving each race a fairly distinct look with very Indian overtones.The whole team is now working on converting these designs into a 3d medium ,hopefully we wont lose that 2d look and feel.
Im designing a 2d side scroller as a minigame within Legend OF Katha and here are the concept sketches for the look and feel of the BGs.Adarsh , who is our BG painter also added some lovely forms in the background to fade out the screens and give them some depth.We aim to add lava and sparks later to show that you're in the depths where the game takes place.
Ill add some screen grabs as we go along, as the programmer is making some pretty fast progress on the game itself...
We've been working on stealth mode for the last one year on Legend Of Katha here in the Bangalore studio and are finally in beta.Its been a hard slog but worth it as we have a product that we're quite proud of and which we've shed a lot of blood,sweat and tears on.For me personally,its been a great ride as we established the Bangalore studio to build this game and we have delivered.
So,please check out www.legendofkatha.com
Its a free2play browser based game which requires no download or installation to play and has a pretty decent gameplay and feature set.It gives a RPG kind of feel within a massive multiplayer environment.We have achieved several significant breakthroughs over the last year,which include:
1>Custom Game Engine and Toolset which runs on Flash and supports AI,pathfinding ,animation,scripting and load balance (What this means is that we built our own technology from the ground up)
2>Completely Virtualized Backend which runs off Amazon's EC2 and S3 service (This is usually a killer for most companies trying to make vast multiplayer games and we have ported over the entire server and DB/Backup system which would typically require a server farm and masses of tech support over to a "cloud")
3>One year dev. time for the first beta ,which alos included hiring, building out a new office and establishing our first B2b deal(more to come later).
4>Just getting the damn thing looking good, fun and playable for half an hour and working with an awesome group of very dedicated and talented people to get to this stage.I cant thank my stars enough that Im lucky enough to work with such a great bunch of people everyday.As Im typing this our entire dev. and testing team is in on a Sunday tweaking the gameplay for our first quest "just so" , for a publisher demo.
5>We got about 4500 registrations within three weeks of our launch and no Class A bugs!Kudos to the dev. team for pulling that off and Ive heard nothing but nice things about the art from the community so far..
So, Legend of Katha is on its way and Ill post a lot of screenshots,videos and dev. work which we did over the last year to give people an idea of what we've achieved over the last year.Here's a brief one to whet your appetite:
