Desde noviembre de 2023, en medio de la huelga de guionistas y los retos y dificultades que enfrentamos los artistas digitales, decidí embarcarme en un proyecto individual. Aprovechando el tiempo que el parón laboral me ofrecía, me propuse un desafío: crear un cortometraje de animación 3D completamente por mi cuenta utilizando Blender.

Hoy, después de un año de trabajo, quiero compartir con vosotros el resultado. Desde la idea inicial hasta el render final, ha sido un proceso complejo, desafiante, pero profundamente gratificante. Todo lo que he aprendido llevando adelante esta producción por mi cuenta ha sido invaluable.

Les presento ROBO AZUL, un cortometraje de ciencia ficción hecho por mí. Espero que lo disfruteis y, si os a gustado, os invito a compartirlo para que más personas puedan verlo y apoyen el esfuerzo detrás de proyectos independientes como este.

I realized that for a while I left this blog completely empty. The transitions I had to make due to the famous HOLLYWOOD WRITERS STRIKES have been wild to me and I ended up falling down a rabbit whole of projects that where always left half finished. I had some changes and right now im transitioning between jobs that actually dont represent the work I like to do, still Ive been feeling a bit sad about the fact that I wasnt able to share them anywere to not clutter my portfolio with things i dont really want to do as a professional.

STILL

This has also been part of my professional journey and thanks to this stuff I have been making I learned a lot about disciplines I left being long ago such as illustration, 3D animation etc. That´s why I want to make a small post here to at least show what I've been doing and also revive my blog since its been nearly a year since I posted anything!.

SO HERE IT GOES!

GOALDEN LEAGE ADD CAMPAIGNS

So I got enrolled with a project that was reaching its finishing deadline. I phone game called Goalden League who wanted to start making add and social media images to promote their new game. I jumped int right there to start making images and ilustrations for their game. All the material I made went from video with cg animation, some test with vfx, images with AI and 3D implementation and so on and so on. This a bit of the work I made

I mostly grabed all the 3D art from the game and did new set ups in BLENDER to render cool images for the game

I had to learn to use the creative hub for marketing in facebook!

Stills and images

Videos

Normally this is my strength when working for marketing in video games!

This was the teaser before the actual game was going to be released. Done with Blender and edited with After Effects and Davinci Resolve.

Here is as well a small reel of some video creatives i had to make.

There is more to it but in the end I worked in general a lot on marketing still, images and illustratiosn. This is not the main role I want to achieve professionally but I still felt It was going to go to waste all this work I did if I didn´t show it somewhere.

New year, new jam in Spain. This jam was celebrated in summer, last days of July. In Spain this time of year the temperatures rise to 40 degrees, so the experience was going to be challenging. This jam is celebrated in a cluster for small videogame industries and I got to say, from Spain. Its one of the most recomendable jam to go to have a great time, meet lots of people and over all have a very pleasant experience.

When we arrived we got our tags, some merch and started participating on some dinamics to create our team to develop the game. 

The theme of the jam was NOT EVERYTHING IS WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE.

Our team was of 5 memebers, One coder, 2 3d artists, 1 game designer and 1 game composer. The team was divided between on site work and remote. We decided to create a little platformer where the classic mechanics of a platformer would not do what they should.

Very simple idea as every other member of the team was their first jam it was a good start up.

This event was incredible, all over its a jam that is very recomendable.

Click the link to see the event

https://malagajam.com

This is my own little scene for the challenge of Infinte Journeys. I had a lot of fun. I mainly wanted to play with Blender genrators such as botanic to create the scenes. This was the reference I was based on. I add this work here as it feels more like a little sketch I put up in a few days more than an actual finished piece. Sometimes in a while its not about the final outcome, sometime is just the fun!

This year for the global game jam I wanted to challenge myself and be the programer of the team. I was allready getting to the end of my master degree in blueprints and I felt It was the perfect moment to challenge my self with some fast pace developing in 48 hours. I had a bit of an advantage I must say because what I did is, I went to newgrounds.com, played some minigames and looked at some good mechanics that I felt they could be east to tackle in 48 hours for someone of my level ( A total roockie I must say) In the team, the artist involved where 2D artist so the game had to be in 2D. It was a weird aproach regarding the fact that we where doing it with unreal but in the end it turned out to be quite easy to understand.

My role was only programing. The team was conformed of 5 people. Go fin there links here!

Katia Ulin : Artist https://linktr.ee/katiaulin

Lola Ramon : Artist and storyteller https://www.elmegafono.es/lola

Also including Jorge Briñas junior and senior. A dad and his kind who joined with uswoked as artist and music composer :D

THE GAME

The game is a simple transformer with two four types of diferent bullets you can shoot. One purple and pink and both have a kill or grab effect depending on which whan you would launch. The idea is that depending on what enemy you decide to catch first there would be a point bar filling up and substracting from the other color. The first color to reach the top limit wins and affects the ending of the level. That was the idea of the play. 

The theme of th GGJ was duality so the story was about a cow who had to diferent feeling and had to fight against one or the other.

Some of the issues we encountered was regarding to colision and some AI problems but at the end it was quite funny how the game tuned out. Your can get a playable copy in the itch.io link.

My opinion would bi biased in this case because UE4 is the only game engine I know how to use ( for programing) but the experience working with 2D was quite good in factand pretty easy to understand.

DOWNLOAD GAME HERE!

So a long time has passed since I uploaded anything related to the course. It has been quite consisten and mostly we when over a lot of parts ( no all of the yet) of the blueprint system in UE4. Starting from simple programming in the level blueprint up to interfaces which was mostly the last thing we did. We covered some cool exercises which I'm going to cover in this blog today for remembering purposes and also because I fell it is a great guide line for initiation of blueprints. This are very quick exercises to make but they cover different parts from blueprint programming from understanding how different nodes work to how to think logically in order to face a problem with programming.

From now on I would be referring to blueprints as BP, for short.

BEFORE WE START

I would like to very quickly set here a link to my latest update to the project I'm working on in this course. As you know its most like a technical demo to be able to learn blueprint but its been quite on development from the last update and It has more features that I'm a bit proud of. Also any feedback added here or in the comment section in my channer would be very appreciated. Link is on the image.

So here now I would be listing the exercises and talking a bit about them.

Exercise 01

Trace a line between two points ( two cubes in this case) and show the length between them in the space. This exercise purpose was to understand basic of data recollecting and knowing how to work with this data in order to be able to generate a third type of data that we where looking for. In this case, grabbing to coordinates in space and calculating their vector lengths in order to see what the distance was. Also to starting to understand what the construction script dose which is something that I for example didn´t understand the concept of.

Exercise 02

Make a security camera to follow you visually if you get near it. Following the same idea of working with vectors and also understanding rotation values. This also helps to start grasping the idea of why it is importan to have good oriented objects implemented in the scene when you export from your 3d program of preference.

Exercise 03

Changing to different levels of illumination on the same scene through blueprints. This is to understand level streaming and how to organise backing lighting on different sublevels. The idea is to have the same environment, one with day light illumination and one with night illumination and then with a trigger and a character switch between them in game.

Exercise  04

Switch from the player character camera to another camera animation for a cinematic. Typical thing that happens in games when you enter a new level and the camera goes around the level for a few seconds to show you the hole scene. Sometimes with a voice over or with a little tutorial, to end up back to the character and start playing. This exercise sets up various problems to handle. Apart of working out how to change from one camera to another we have to take into account that the character should not be playable when the cinematic is on and when it is back it should be allocated behind the character to start playing again. 

Exercise 05

Open a door rotating it with time line. Understand how the timeline node works.

Exercise 06

Create an array of objects where you can add different objects. Understand how arrays work inside unreal and how you can use them to create useful environment modelling tools.

Exercise 07:

A car configurator

The biggest exercise we did. We have been several days working on it. It is basically our first actual working apk that we have to create. Basically its a scene with a car where you can change the color of the hull, interior and wheel. Also you can change the time of day and watch a small cinematic. All this controlled by a interface. It was basic programming interactivity with the addition of understanding how widget and interface bp works.

This where the main exercises we did. All of them really good to challenge different problem solving that we could use in the future.

"So brace yourself". First thing out teacher told us.

We are starting to look into our first functionality nodes. The first thing to have in mind is that in order to be able to handle blueprint easily, we have to reshape the way we think as cg artist. Everything now how to be more organized, specially in out heads. 

The first blueprint nodes we got to play with where related to de level blueprint. Simple understanding of event reaction kind of programming. We worked nearly all the time with the event begin play, in order to just see the action right after hitting the play button in the edit. The pace is slow but bit by bit we start to understand the conversation between each node and is correlation when everything is being executed.. For the first week we worked specially un the level blueprint and at the end of the days we started to inverse slowly into more difficult terms such as blueprint classes and edits in the project settings.

The practice of adding every node to the begin play event is actually very useful because It can permit you understand what a certain node dose just after hitting play so you can understand its functionality in a much more visual understanding way.

The cool thing about learning like this is that is much more focused on Non programming mentality so its easier to follow.

Also, for last, I started my final master project!, where I would be making a 3D scape game, where you are an inmate scaping from a jail. The process of this project would be documented in devlogs that I would be uploading to youtube!

This is the link for the first one!

So this week we hade some experimentation with photgrammetry. Knowing how to do retopology now, it was a good thing to know in order to get models with a different technique. I had a lot of fun doing it, I never done photogrammetry before and I wasn´t sure how it worked so this was a very cool process. The software used was Agisfot Metashape. It is a very intuitive and esay to use software. I had some experience with meshroom before but I never got very good results so Im glad I had some learning time to understand full on the technique of photogrammetry and its full potential

After scanning the models we also did some process of retopology and baking to be able to usea the models in softwares like Unreal engine. I added a little render I did with all the models we scanned becuase I found it hilarious.

download stich teddy bear model here:

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/stich-teddy-ffc61a4556674fd0bd858f58eef14bff

Im going to start a new series of classes for my self to learn all about preparing interactivity in blueprint! Im very excited and I would love to share my process and learning project in here.

For the first week we started with simple retopology in Zbrsuh as we would start working with photogametry objects to learn how to treat them to import them inside UE4. I leave here a little render of the model we did. Rendered in Eevee. We worked with very little tools like zremesher and baking in zbrush.

I had the honor of participating and recieving the first price in the speed modeling contest done by lightbox in colaboration with Nvidia and Skydance animation.

The contes was modeling a prop in 3 hours. The theme was pirates

Here is the video of the event.

language is in Spanish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUVrePcVWac

My entry