A Short Visual History of Videogames

Hallo people! Sorry I haven't posted in ages, I've been busting my balls on my final year uni assignment, and doing some freelance work.

I've also been trying to get together a visual effects folio website, which I have just finished uploading, and you can totally check it out here:
www.ultra-awesome.com

Anyway, about my uni piece; It is an entirely animated 3D piece called "A Short Visual History of Videogames".
It is a 3 minute long "visual essay" (or whatever you call these things) about the history of videogame consoles, from 1972 when Ralph Baer invented the Odyssey with Bob Tremblay, to the launch of the current generation of consoles and beyond.

I did my project about the history of videogames because; I know lots about it, and I'm not very good at the deep-meaningful/pretentious stuff that most student films/animations seem to consist of. Plus ultimately my piece was always mainly intended to be a sort of modelling showreel, with the narrative taking a back seat to pretty visuals designed to show off my technical abilities with 3D modelling and lighting etc.

My aim here was to develop my modelling/texturing/lighting/compositing skills to the point where I was able to achieve photo realistic visuals with all of the consoles.

Anyway, you can view the finished piece here, or you can go to this page on my folio site:
A Short Visual History of Videogames
To view it in a larger size (since blogger makes the video really small and low resolution here, lame).



If you want to see this full sized 1024 by 576 resolution video, click on the the vimeo button in the video player, scroll down and click "download original file" (although, you'll need to create a vimeo account to do that).

I'd also made a snazzy looking DVD case for when I handed in all of the submission stuff to the lecturers:Here is a super hires image with random screenshots, that I used for the back cover of the DVD case.

Also, here is the front cover of the dvd case I made, in a handy desktop wallpaper size, for if you want a bit of old school arcade action on your computer desktop:


Here are a couple of screencaps of the Maya scene files, to give you a bit of an idea about my mesh topology and the lighting setup I used:

Lighting was pretty simple for most scenes; only 3 directional lights with soft shadows, to simulate studio lighting and to provide soft reflections on the consoles made of the black low-sheen plastics (I used an anisotropic shader for this with a volumetric brownian bump map).

Some scenes had more complex lighting; for the xbox/PS2/gamecube/dreamcast scene, I had to use a heap of light-linked area lights to get specific reflections off certain objects for the desired camera angle.

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Ego boosting news paper scans!

To anyone actually following this blog; sorry about the very slow rate at which I post here.
I figure it is better to do less posts, with lots of substance, than more posts that are just pointless and completely uninteresting.

Also, I've been working like 15 hours a day on my final semester uni project, which is sending me slightly mental, so I haven't had time to try anything else constructive (I'll make sure to post some updates on how that is going a bit further down the track).

Anyway, since a couple of friends have been asking to see them, I thought I'd better scan-in-and-upload a few of me super famous news paper appearances of the last few weeks.

So here you go:

This was the first one to be published, the guys from the Extra:Tech section of the Herald sun decided to do a short write up for the July 16th news paper:


Soon after that, The Australian called me to ask a few questions, they also sent out a photographer to get some snaps, this article was published on the front page of the Higher Education section in the 23rd of July paper.

Also that week, the Moonee Valley Community News called as well as the Leader, to organise a photographer to be sent out , unfortunately I was going away on a ski trip with some friends that week, so the leader wasn't able to get a photographer out in time, but the community news was able to.

The photographer from the community news was really nice and totally took the best pictures I reckon (the guys from the bigger papers were a lot older and kind of hostile).
So I totally hit the front page of the local paper as you can see here:

And there was a photo of both me and Emily on page 12.
Holy crap, I am so pasty white in this picture, you can't even see where my T-shirt ends and my arm starts....

So yeah, all this has been quite beneficial for me, especially since I am finishing uni in a few months and will be looking for a job soon, and any publicity is good publicity.

I reckon the coolest part so far though is hearing from other people who have been inspired to make their own giant videogame accessories and stuff.
That's a pretty fucking cool feeling; inspiring people.

My favourite so far is definitely Matt from http://scadinc.blogspot.com/ who has (apparantly just finished) making a giant SNES pad.
That thing looks fucking awesome, I'm pretty impressed by how he has done the round edges, that's a whole lot of gap filler he must have used there...
The only problem I've got is the colours, he totally should have done the PAL/Jap colours, the US version of the SNES just looked like arse, with it's pansy purple colours.
But either way, that takes nothing away from his awesome craftsmanship.

Oh also; every asking for a wiring diagram for the controller;
There is none! Just locate ground on the pad and wire it to the ground wire in the buttons, then link each of the "active" (or whatever you call them) wires to their corresponding ones.
The Male/Female plug was just so that I could unplug the controller from the original.
Either way, I might post a tutorial in the future explaining how to wire old controllers into USB-computer controllers, so you can play NES/SNES/Megadrive etc. emulators with their original controllers.

Till next time, awesome.