You may have noticed a 3D effect to my website. This will appear if you're using up-to-date versions of Google Chrome, Safari or Firefox, among others. It works best in Webkit (Chrome/Safari), but if it isn't working smoothly, it should turn itself off. Or you can control its effects using the options at the bottom right.

Older or non-standards compliant browsers (yep, that's you, Internet Explorer) can't do the effect at all. Even mobile browsers do it to a degree, although because of the lack of a hover I've disabled the effect by default on mobile browsers just so it doesn't confuse the users, but it can be turned on manually.

I've wanted to create an effect like this after being impressed at the Crysis 2 game menus, which had a pleasing 'wobble' to the screen as you moved the mouse across its interface. I've seen sites doing similar things before, but in Flash, which I prefer to avoid.

How the magic happens
Have a look at the source javascript file and look for 'updateScene()'. This is called every time the mouse moves, passing to it the new coordinates of the mouse. Depending on what options are enabled, it will then tilt and/or scroll the page appropriately. A quick calculation is performed based on the window width and mouse position to work out how much to tilt by. The tilt then happens by updating the CSS of two containing divs - one across the X axis, one across the Y axis. Two divs were required because the CSS 3D transform cannot update both X and Y simultaneously, so I just decided to move the outer div in X, and the inner div in Y to achieve this effect. It also moves the background in the opposite direction.

If 3D scroll is enabled, it will call a jQuery plugin which enables CSS transformations to be more easily called by jQuery. A 3D scroll to this script then happens based on the class name of any element named 'layer' on the page. Each element with a 'layer' class also contains a number to say which layer this element should be moved as if it is contained within.

What next
Opera and IE interpretations of 3Dness appear to differ from other browsers, so I'd like to get something working in these. The whole thing is a trial at the moment - mainly to see if it could actually be done in any browser, and it could certainly do with some optimisation and tweaks. But I'm fairly happy with it... for now.

This is a website designed to share motorsport news and videos.  Once logged in, you can view feeds from various websites and have the option to share them on the home page to comment and rate.  

 

There is also a countdown calendar to the next race for sports covered, as well as relevant Twitter feeds.  A mobile view allows content to be displayed seamlessly - whenever the screen is detected to be less than a certain width, mobile view is enabled by adding a class to the main container.   Items are then selected through CSS based on this new container to switch dynamically between views when required.

 

The content for the feeds section is dynamically retrieved from public RSS feeds after a fixed period of time, and the first 200 characters of the feed are stored in a local database, so as not to keep pounding external servers each time a page loads.  The URL of the original article is also stored, so a link is displayed to view the whole article - the website acting as a kind of advertisement for multiple relevant websites.

 

View site

I'm refreshing everything on my site, and so older blog posts may now have links that point to places that no longer exist.  For history's sake, I'm keeping the old blog posts as they are, as all the content within them should still be fine, but links may not be!

Animation highlights reel, July 2011. Everything keyframed except for the judo motion capture section near the beginning.

Music: Kevin MacLeod.

A soldier running and jumping over orange boxes.

Wasn't really sure how to end it, so that's why he stands upright looking very pleased with himself.

A soldier running and jumping over orange boxes... work in progress.

Wasn't really sure how to end it, so that's why he stands upright looking very pleased with himself.

A run cycle animation.

Ball physics using key frames

I wish I could say I worked on this, but I just wanted to comment on how amazing it looks - I hope there's a lot of motion capture, otherwise my head may explode from the amount of awesomeness if I discover it's all key framed. Make sure you watch the 720p version and in full screen. ;)

The trailers for the previous games are also equally impressive, getting better with each year - here's the one for Brotherhood:



Assassin's Creed 2, and the original Assassin's Creed trailers. All brilliant! So easy to forget they're CG at times.

Highlights demo.

Music: Kevin MacLeod.

My entry into May's 11 Second Club competition.

An overly dramatic jump.

Thin air chasing a strange guy with a mask and forcing him to leap from a tall building. Luckily he has strong bones.

Facial expressions animation, with lip sync and menacing looks, just before he skins and eats you.

A demonstration of facial expressions and postures, as well as a total disregard of real-world physics for comedic effect. Character rig from 3dluvr.com.

An older version of this animation can be viewed here.

Character rig - Max (from 3dluvr.com).

The most up to date version can be viewed here.

A character animation of a guy climbing onto a step and becoming the saviour of his glasses. Presented in cartoonvision for no reason at all.

Dragon animation cycle.

A character animation demonstrating interaction between two robots. The large robot rig is not mine, everything else is my own work.

An animation of a model and rig from The Matrix. The model isn't mine - purely used to animate.

Robot run cycle - to be animated further. Model and rig from ilasolomon.com.

Character animation loops of various characters and skeleton rigs intended for use in game engines.

Links to individual cycles:

Dragon flying cycle
Robot running

A video containing animated characters. Some are key framed, some motion captured and others simulated.

An animation of my dragon model in flight. The animation could've done with some more work, especially on the neck, tail and front legs, but it'll do for now.

Composited in After Effects as a bunch of layers to edit in the environment, clouds, dragon model and other effects in separately, to control the motion blur and depth of field independently.

A compilation video created in After Effects showing some quick highlights of my work in animation and effects.

A special effects animation of a crashing helicopter.

Click here for some of the work in progress videos

Character animation loop

Monkey animation loop

This is a version of the BBC F1 intro I made in Lego-like bricks.

The actual TV version can be seen on YouTube. You'll notice I've focussed on the first section of it, despite the second part containing car motion, which I have done a lot of in the past. This is because, well... I've done a lot of this in the past. And the first part is more interesting and better made too.

I posted this video on YouTube as well (link) where it has so far been met with praise, and quickly spread across sections of the internet, mostly via Twitter, eventually arriving at the BBC F1 homepage where it was linked to!

It has received over 5,000 views in its first week, so now I guess I'd better make part 2, which I didn't really originally intend to do, but one day I'll return to it.

This is a project that formed part of my postgraduate degree which I have continued to improve afterwards, and the videos in this post should demonstrate some of its functions. I'll also explain the methods used, although I won't go into too much detail, but feel free to ask me about any specifics in the comment section after the post.

The intention of the rig is so that you can quickly and easily animate a vehicle that has been modelled without having to worry about the physics, as the rig will handle that with scripts.



The project started off life as a reactor-based rig, which was fairly easy to set up, and can be seen in a tutorial I wrote on building it. This method works well for simple animations, particularly over bumps, but I found to be quite limiting for manipulating the steering or for swapping the vehicle for another one without having to change all the settings.

I soon decided that scripting was the way to go. I followed techniques similar to this tutorial. I didn't actually follow this tutorial, but it does contain many of the techniques I did learn how to do, and I wish I'd have found this while constructing my rig. The main difference is that that is designed for a tank with tracks, while mine needed to be to suit any four wheeled vehicle, which I later expanded to allow any (even) amount of wheels, but not tracks.

The first thing I needed to do was to allow the wheels to determine where the ground was, so they could travel up and down terrain. This allowed the vehicles to not be stuck in flat, boring car parks. To do this, as in the tutorial mentioned above, I used the Conform tool on a plane and attached the wheels to it. I then used a spline curve as the path and made the conformed plane controller move along the path.

I now had a path and height sorted, the next thing was for the wheel rotation. A scripted expression was needed for this and required knowing the radius of the wheels, the length of the path, and the percentage of the path that the vehicle is situated at any given moment on the timeline. After adding these as variables in an expression for the z-axis rotation of one of the rig's wheels, the following expression should then calculate the correct rotation at each frame:

where pathpercent is the current percentage along the path that the vehicle has travelled, distance is the total length, and rad is the radius of the wheel.



The rig was now at a point comparable to reactor, minus the bump physics, but allowing the vehicle to have direction without having to pause the simulation and create new settings. The problem with the direction change is that the wheels remained pointing forwards, rather than in the direction the car intends to travel - it needed steering. This was done in a similar way to the wheel rotation, in that it was done with expressions, although it required further objects to be placed in the scene. One such object was for a marker to follow along the spline curve path slightly ahead of the path that the main rig is about to travel. This meant there was a way of knowing which direction is coming up, and so the wheels could face this direction, taking care to ignore the axis controlling the wheel rotation.

The final major obstacle was getting the vehicle to bank realistically on corners or when traversing bumps. In the following image, you can see a couple of controller points to act as the main chassis, and these were used by adding position and orientation constraints in the motion wheel tab, then making the geometry that is following the spline curve bank on corners and using appropriate settings, and making one of the two objects in the rig mirror this position. The other object remains static. A third object is then placed and takes the average orientation of these two objects, and it is this that the main body of the model will be attached.



For acceleration and braking banking, the current speed was calculated using an expression, and set to a slider manipulator in the interface, and this speed controls two objects in the world space, one of which moves in the vertical axis depending on the speed. The difference between the two objects (one of which remains static) is then used to determine how much the car should rock forwards or backwards - ie, it calculates how much the speed has changed from one frame to the next. This is then multiplied by a multiplier variable set by the user using a slider manipulator to control how much the car should move - so how stiff the suspension should be. An F1 car for example would have stiffer suspension than a road car and thus be less visually active on weight shift.

The rig is controlled by the user using sliders (create > helpers > manipulators > sliders), which are tied to various elements of the rig. Things like the wheel size and heights of the front vs the rear wheels, ride heights and wheel base and widths can all be controlled, allowing easy addition of any wheel-based vehicle. Other elements such as the steering look-ahead, steering override (to allow for oversteer - see below), speed and weight shifts are also controlled in this section to cater for different vehicles - a truck will clearly behave differently to a Mini Cooper, but they can both be used on the same rig without needing to change any of the scripts.



The sequence below will demonstrate how to add a custom model to the rig, and give a further insight into how the rig is put together.

Start slideshow

And that's the basic story of the rig. I went on to add further controls such as oversteer and the ability to add a driver, and these can be seen in the Motorway F1 video. The oversteer, which is a slider attached to the y-rotation of the main rig, ties in with the steering override, and is to be done manually, as it is difficult to predict how much oversteer is required. Wheelspin is a further addition and behaves in a similar way, allowing the front and rear wheels to rotate independently and at varying speeds, or to behave normally - this is a choice left to the animator.

I hope this helps someone, and that I have the balance between detail and being boring right.

Links to other videos containing the car rig on my site:
Motorway F1
Bugatti Veyron vs Eurofighter Typhoon
Reactor Physics
Car Rig Tutorial - 3dsmax
Car Rig - WRC
Car Rig - F1

A compilation of some of the videos on the site.

An effects animation of the Earth in the process of being destroyed. It's based on layers, with each effect just being a new layer, so the thing could just go on being added to forever - but at some point I had to declare it finished, and although there are still plenty of things that can be added, I think it's a decent enough final piece.

Demonstration of my improved car rig, updated to include a driver, oversteer and wheelspin options. It includes a blend of reactor for when the car needs to bounce, and the rig. The transition could be more subtle, but it works well enough.

Also an expansion of mental ray rendering, with glow effects and lighting systems. I also developed some After Effects skills, adding lens and video effects and manipulating time, as well as creating some extra special effects to composite over the top of 3dsmax effects.

The motorway is also scripted, looping and independent from the main animation - it's just a shame that it isn't really used all that much in this section, but work in progress videos of the motorway construction can be found elsewhere on the site (search for 'motorway').

A quick character animation in which the challenge was to demonstrate the word 'careless' in 10 seconds. The character is actually stationary, with the environment moving to easily create the motion blur on the background while retaining camera movement in the opposite direction.

A short animation to test mental ray texturing, effects and rendering, as well as caustics and soft body simulations.

An improved car rig, with enhanced scripted physics effects, the ability to have a driver added, with arm motion and head lean, and the option to have oversteer and wheelspin. These extra parts can be seen in the Motorway F1 video.

The car rig is intended to be easily adaptable to suit a variety of cars, and give options for dynamic speed, steering, weight transfer physics and other car simulations, with real-time updates using the sliders.

A more detailed explanation of the car rig can be found in the blog post about the car rig.

A quick effects animation, with a breakdown of some of the techniques used. It starts with the bullet model, and a morph target manipulation for when it hits the wall, and then the bullet animated. From here the other effects such as smoke, shock waves and lens flares are added.

The main steps taken are as follows:
Models and textures | Bullet, wall, bullet decal, shock wave models were required
Morph targets | of bullet to change shape on impact by manipulating the vertices
Animation | of the bullet to hit the wall, and of the morph target to change the appearance on impact
Debris particles | layer 1/3 of the smoke particles
Smoke particles | layer 2/3
Explosion | layer 3/3
Shock wave | expanding torus models to give a greater sense of stopping speed
Wall ripple | an animated noise modifier applied to the wall
Camera effects | movement of the camera to show time slowing down, and also other post effects such as blur to give more focus to the bullet, noise and grain, and brightness/contrast manipulation for effect

How it could be improved:
The bullet impact decal needs more work, the texture doesn't particularly work, although it obviously wouldn't be difficult to swap to a more suitable texture once made.

The debris smoke lingers and spreads out too much, and feels a little too 'floaty', so needs to have less wind force modifier applied to it, which is what is currently making it rise.

A sequence showing the bullet leave a gun would also be good, with the movement and recoil of a gun also in slow motion, then the camera follow the bullet to impact, which is something I will continue to work on.

A physics simulation, generated in one pass. The idea was to test the collision detection and ensure that the objects behaved convincingly. Effects and camera movement were then added - the camera is partly scripted, part key framed. The camera contains the only key frames done by hand.

The UT3 City "mod" is available to download here. View the original report here. If you download it, please let me know, and tell me what you think in the comments.

No longer available to download - sorry.


It is a cross between a map and a mod, and could serve to become the base of a game with some tweaking. It is a basic city environment with options for global events such as weather and time of day, and is full configurable. A gameplay element could easily be added on top to form part of a mod and retain all the options.

A GUI is included from which to alter the settings, and was made with Windows Forms/C++ so requires all the required elements for that to run. Alternatively, the .txt file that it creates can be edited manually, and the commands can be found below.

Installation
For installation, copy the CTF-City.ut3 and CTF-City.ini files into the folder

and copy City.upk into

I haven't tested the file location for a Steam installation of the game, but the structure should be fairly similar.

For the external application to have any effect, the event.txt file that the .exe creates needs to go into where the game is installed:

The CityConfig.exe should ideally be in this same place as the .txt file that is created goes into the same location as the .exe for now, so perhaps a shortcut made to the .exe would be worthwhile.

Loading the mod
Load UT3, select instant action then capture the flag. "City" should appear at the bottom of the list. Select it, click next, and set the bots slider to 0 (this will be overridden by game elements so having more than 0 will produce different results) and then start the game.

Console commands
To execute a console command, open up the console and type "causeevent" followed by one of the commands below. The variables are self explanatory so I won't go into any detail except where necessary. Some of these commands can also be manually put into the event.txt file if you don't have the correct framework installed to run the GUI.

A vehicle animation using my scripted rig, and smoke effects. The plan was to enhance the explosions afterwards, but I decided to move on to do other things instead, although I may return to this if I find time or a need to.

[Download link at bottom of this post]

This is a Far Cry 2 map I made a while ago, and is intended for the "Uprising" gameplay style, where each team has to capture three points in the map.

There is a capture point within the base of each team, which means it will be difficult to capture one of these alone, so relying on teamwork and coordination. The final capture point is in the middle of the map at the top of a tower, with three vantage points to provide long-ranged cover, or from which to attack the opposing team.





The image on the right is of the UFLL's base, and contains a tower, which the APR team doesn't have. However, there is a lot of cover, so the advantage of having a high point from which to attack is reduced by the fact that the opposition can sneak through all the cover. There is also a lot of tall grass in the map, giving the tower an opportunity to pick out people crouching and sneaking through the grass.

There are barricades to help prevent enemy vehicles from driving into the base and spawnraping everyone, although the players also spawn in elevated positions where vehicles are unable to reach, so irritations like this should be impossible.

At each spawn point there is a choice of a boat or a 4x4 to drive, both with mounted guns, so a team of two or more is ideal to make an attack, especially if the two vehicles coordinate and allow those on foot to advance first to time their runs to meet at the same time.

This image shows the other team's base, which as mentioned earlier doesn't have a tower, but the run towards the base is in the open so should be more easily defended, as you can see in the image directly below.

I set the weather to be slightly stormy to allow the foliage to move, although not excessively. After testing the motion at this setting, it provides ample cover in the long grass for players to crouch through and remain relatively undetected, meaning players should hopefully stay and defend their capture point where they are safer and able to try to pick out long range attack attempts.

An image of one of the high places that give a line of sight to the central capture point. There are many different methods to achieve the targets in the map, with multiple routes and vantage points leaving the players to explore, but the map isn't too open that anyone will become lost. A road also highlights the route to help prevent the feeling of not knowing where to go, which is often a problem with custom maps, especially with players new to a game or gametype. Where a player would gain an advantage from sneaking through the grass, another player could gain an advantage by using a high place to spot them, but at the disadvantage of being easily spotted. The positioning of vehicles and pickups and scenery is intended to make the game balanced not only between opposing teams, but also between individuals in a team - taking a vehicle has advantages and disadvantages, whereas typically the game favours players with a vehicle and can be frustrating for players without one.

I have tried to alleviate as many of the problems that I have found with maps in the past, although as with all game content. more testing with many players will be required to find out how successful the map really is.

Download (4MB).
This file then needs to go into the "/user maps" folder either in your "Documents/My Games" folder, or within the main game directory.

If you download it, please let me know, and tell me what you think in the comments.

Character animation to demonstrate a sense of weight, anticipation and reaction.

Here's one of the monkey animations I've been working on.

It's intended to go on the home page as an introduction, and hopefully demonstrates some character emotion and interaction, as well as some cinematic effects.

A demonstration of my car rig using a WRC car that I modelled and textured.

A demonstration of my car rig using an F1 car model I made, which clearly has very wobbly suspension. At some point I'll go back and redo this using my advanced rig, and also improve/redo the track environment.

Vehicle animation with smoke effects, created in the old city environment that I developed while learning 3dsmax a while back.

This was a project on my postgraduate degree, and tested my problem solving skills. The end result is a city that can be used as the base of a game or a mod, and has controllable events such as weather and time of day. These events can be set to automatic, so the weather and time of day change appropriately, or manually set to be permanently raining and at night, for example.

The environment and effects themselves were created in 3D Studio Max and imported into the Unreal Editor. This meant learning how the engine and its editor worked, and to research methods of improving performance so that it didn't need to be run by an unaffordable computer. A large performance increase was by using texture effects, particularly with lighting, so that lots of calculations weren't required by adding a large number of lights. Normal mapping was heavily used to simulate detail to limit the number of polygons being rendered on screen. Transparent textures were also put to good use, particularly in areas where players wouldn't be able to move through, such as wire mesh fences - which meant only having a basic plane with a transparent texture map applied, rather than modelling each individual strand of the fence.

An external program in Windows Forms using C++ was created to control these events, which output the user's selections to a text file from which the game reads from on startup to pass through the relevant information. Custom console commands were created to receive the variables and perform the necessary actions depending upon the selections made in the external application.

The main options available are the time of day and weather, with rain, snow, fog and clear weather effects created. The rain and snow effects are done in a similar way to in the Unreal game, with billboarded textures displaying a panning texture. To control their visibility, a multiplier is added to the texture flow (with anything above zero being visible), and this is animated in a maintee event, with a slider from 0 to 1 set to play over a few seconds, so the rain or snow slowly fades in or out when needed rather simply appearing and disappearing. A ground fog also appears at the same time so the rain and snow droplets don't vanish into the ground. The main fog is controlled in a similar manner.

For time of day, it can be set to dawn, dusk, midday and night, or leave it on its default setting, which is to have a dynamic time of day. The day length in this instance is possible to be altered, from 10 seconds (which was a setting mainly for me to use to demonstrate the passage of time in my videos) to 30 minutes. In this setting, the lights on the buildings will turn on at appropriate times, a sun moves across the sky displaying dynamic shadows, and the sky texture changes - the main difference being day and night, but the colour tints also change at dawn and dusk, and during weather transitions. The sky texture also has layers, so clouds can be moving independently to the main day/night effects.

A further option available is to enable pedestrians. They use a modified version of the Unreal bot AI, and randomly roam around the city, constrained to the pavements to allow vehicles to be implemented at a later date. As an additional option, these pedestrians can be made to be armed in the external application I created, in order to create a simple game, with the player needing to eliminate them before being targeted himself.

The files can be made available to download on request.

A quick video to show the monkey character model, and that it is low poly and scalable with some turbosmoothing.

It also aims to show a grasp of face morph targets, and some quick ragdoll applied to the end of it to hopefully demonstrate the skinning and rigging of the mesh.

The car rig project is intended for anyone wanting to create a vehicular animation in 3D Studio Max, and formed a module on my postgraduate degree. The project has since been updated to include oversteer, wheelspin and the option for a driver, as can be seen in the Motorway F1 video on the videos page.

A scripted rig is set up to allow for any four wheeled vehicle to be applied to it, which is manipulated using the sliders as you can see in the image below. All that is required is a model of a car, to edit the ground plane for any bumps if needed, and to draw the desired path the vehicle needs to take.

Speeds can be set to automatic or manual, allowing more control. The relevant forces that need to be applied to the car are automatically calculated, and the user then defines how much impact these forces will have. So a very heavy car with comparatively light suspension can be set to lean more in corners, while a lighter car, such as an F1 car with its stiffer chassis and suspension, will tend to bank less.

Similarly, forces applies upon acceleration and braking can be applied. This is accounted for by referencing frames in advance and behind to judge whether the car is accelerating, braking, or remaining at a constant speed. The faster the speed change, the greater the angle the vehicle will dip or raise. So under extreme braking, the front of the car will be pushed onto the front wheels, while the opposite will happen under heavy acceleration. A multiplier slider function is added to allow the user control over the amount that these forces should be applied - a cartoon dragster for example may have exaggerated effects and do a wheelie on acceleration, while a more conservative and realistic road car would react more gently.

Some of the features are automatic - such as the wheel rotation. This is calculated by working out the distance travelled in relation to the diameter of the wheel. A future development would be to allow wheel spin. On a similar theme, tweaks to manually control the steering may be beneficial, to give the impression of over or understeer. Oversteer in particular would be useful for rally cars. A change in grip levels could also be a future addition, to show the effects of driving on ice for example.


To control the steering and path, a spline is drawn. There is a look-ahead function to control the direction in which the wheels are pointing, so the vehicle begins to turn fractionally before the actual cornering effect begins, as in real life. As with everything else about this rig, this is also controllable how far ahead the function views to fine tune depending on the vehicle applied.

One thing that perhaps needs some work is the reaction over bumps, which seems a little forced. This obviously isn't a problem over flat ground, but over very harsh hills, the car should give the option to bounce a little more than it does, and this is something I shall continue to work on.

To demonstrate the rig, here are links to two further videos using a rally car and an F1 car. The F1 car has skinned suspension, as it is more of an unusual vehicle, with protruding wheels, and you will see it has an over-exaggerated effect to demonstrate the vertical movement, particularly as it bounces over the curbs.

Finally, a larger version of the video above can be found here. Other video sizes of all the clips here are on the videos page.

Just because I wish this game would be made.

Part of a university assignment that took place in character animation, sound design and games design modules.