Adam Gleeson

Highlights video

2010-07-24 21:29:16

Posted in: Finished animations

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

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=402

Silverstone 2010

2010-07-12 22:16:39

Posted in: Random blog posts

I went to Silverstone this weekend for the Formula 1. Spent FP1 at Luffield, FP2 at Copse, FP3 and Qualifying at various points in the new Arena stand, and at Vale for the race, so a nice selection of vantage points.

Took my new camera with me for one or two or 1586 photos (half of which were hilarious amounts of random blur), here's are a selection...

McLaren
Button:

Hamilton:

Obligatory picture of the show McLaren:

Red Bull
Vettel, before he stole a front wing:

Red Bull's number two driver:

Alguersuari peeking through the fencing:

Chandhok recovering from an off:

The drivers waving at me before the race:

Ferrari, including Alonso deciding to drive within the race circuit instead of cheating to overtake:

Hulkenberg, for no reason other than the photo came out nice:

Kubica (who gets my approval for having a hand in destroying Alonso's race):

Schumacher on his failing way to 10th place while his team mate was fighting McLarens for a podium:

GP2
A random car (no idea who since I can't follow it as BBC decided not to use their rights to show it):

A different random car doing it wrong:

Red Arrows, impressive as always:

Lots of photos came out like this because I failed at photography most of the time:

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=396

Dragon model rig test

2010-07-03 13:34:06

Posted in: Work In progress

A UVW unwrapped, skinned, rigged and textured character model. Work in progress, the animation is rubbish at the moment, just testing the skinning and rigging.

Need to fix the weird shine glitches but it's getting there...

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=380

I have a robotic ball in my kitchen

2010-06-26 00:28:49

Posted in: Work In progress

A test of some camera matching. My main focus was on the motion of the camera rather than the animation or rendering of the ball - that's to come later, now that I know I can match up the camera! Time to come up with some ideas...

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=379

Use Javascript to interact with Flash

2010-06-17 16:54:57

Posted in: Tutorials
[ View article to see tutorial ]

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=377

Multiplayer Blackjack in PHP, Javascript, MySQL

2010-06-13 21:02:58

Posted in: Featured work
I've been working on this extension to my website for the last few days, and it's ready to be viewed and played around with. It's an online version of Blackjack, created with PHP, Javascript and MySQL, and can be played as single or multiplayer - to test out the multiplayer, just open another browser window and be another player. The aim is to get a hand as close to 21 without going over, and to beat the dealer (not the other players - each individual player just plays against the dealer).

Aces count as one or eleven, whichever is better for you - this is taken account of in the game and adds the higher value as long as it won't make you go over 21. A 2 is worth 2, 3 worth 3, etc, and face cards are worth ten.

It requires cookies and obviously Javascript to be enabled. The Javascript is the main workings of the game, calling a PHP function to check the SQL database when updates have been made, then refreshing section of the screen in an Ajax style way, allowing other sections (such as the chat) to continue independently without interruption. An auto kick function is added, so that if any player leaves without clicking the leave button, the game doesn't just cripple to an indefinite halt - players can then return when they're back.

One of the most difficult challenges was working out how to accommodate new players, and also those that leave without destroying the game. I decided to add a value to the database when a new player joins, and have them wait until the next deal, then update them into the game. A player leaving caused more problems, but I resolved this by first adding the timer so they have to leave if they don't actually click the leave button, then if they do click to leave, it takes the player's cards with them. Initially, it meant that a leaving player transferred their cards onto the next player, which would be a bit harsh if they were a bad hand. So this player is still 'in' the game even after leaving, even though their cards and score aren't visible, a message is noted that a player has left, and they are then removed at the next round.

I then added a chat function, since the server was already calling a PHP script every couple of seconds, it may as well check the file size of the saved chat, then update if it's larger. A javascript function to then force the div to automatically scroll to the bottom (and so the updated messages) is also called when loading new data. The line required, for anyone that may find this useful (it took me quite a bit of Googling, hopefully you'll fare better), was:

$("#chat_div").attr({ scrollTop: $("#chat_div").attr("scrollHeight") });

Where chat_div is your div ID.

It doesn't include all of the rules of Blackjack just yet - but enough to form a functioning game. Features such as splitting a hand, betting and keeping track of high scores will come in the future.

Try it out, and let me know what you think, and if you find any errors. I'm aware of quite a few ways to cheat, but I left some of the ways I thought of in there as they were handy debuggers - I'll remove them when I come to finish everything off.

www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blackjack

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=375

My favourite Firefox plugins

2010-06-03 22:59:56

Posted in: Random blog posts
Adblock Plus
Adverts in general annoy me (if I want something, I'd research a type of product then buy the best one, not one that was shoved in my face), but adverts on the internet annoy me in particular. My internet connection is shockingly bad, so every kB saved is a bonus, plus Flash adverts are the spawn of Satan, especially when my PC is rendering an animation in the background.

Grab and Drag
Excellent for my Asus T91 touch screen tablet netbook. Makes scrolling similar to the iPhone or a PDF, grabbing the screen to scroll. Although my netbook doesn't work as well as the iPhone since it's a capacitive screen (and not a particularly good one at that). But it's still better than the iPad - it's running Windows 7. So I can really push the processor to its absolute limits and have IM and a web browser open at the same time. Even Flash. Sometimes applications side by side. Good lord.

Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper
An extension for Adblock - pressing ctrl+shift+k allows any element to be added to the block list. Handy for sections that the Adblock subscriptions fail to block on sites I regularly visit, but more usefully it highlights each div or block, making debugging easier to get things pixel perfect. There are probably many other plugins that will do this just as well, such as Web Developer.... but keeping the extensions down help with the startup time, I guess.

Auto Pager
Automatically appends the next page of search results or forums so as you're scrolling it'll be loading the next page, and you can just keep scrolling down forever without having to click 'next'. Very handy.

Glasser
Extends the Windows 7/Vista aero theme into Firefox to make it pretty.

HTML Validator
Helps find errors to make sure pages are following W3C standards. Although judging by the amount of errors Google have on their pages yet the site still display perfectly fine, I wonder what the point of W3C actually is. Although following standards does help greatly for cross browser compatibility.

Yet Another Smooth Scrolling
I love that Firefox has smooth scrolling in its options by default, but while playing with Chrome extensions (maybe that's another post some day), I discovered the Chrome version of Yet Another Smooth Scrolling and noted that it was a Firefox port, so I promptly added it to Firefox too. Makes scrolling.... smoother. With options. And a wobble when you reach the top or bottom of a page, like the iPhone.

As you may have guessed, Firefox is my browser of choice. Chrome is quickly catching up though - the main features lacking in Chrome for now are the RSS reader integrated as well as Firefox and for the adblock plugin to work as well as its Firefox counterpart. And the ability to change default colour and decoration of links - I don't like them underlined unless the designer has decided they should be underlined. Once (if) that happens, I'll probably jump over to Chrome, it's faster, both on startup and page rendering. By then though, Firefox may well have pulled something out of its sleeve too.

And there you have it. I'm not sure why I did this either... probably so I can quickly grab the links for when I next reinstall my OS or buy a new PC. Next post: my bookmarks and saved passwords.

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=374

CSS Theme Switcher

2010-05-29 22:20:04

Posted in: Site news and updates
I've just created a few style sheets and tidied things up a little, one day this site will be finished. Maybe.

The script I used can be found here, along with instructions so not a great deal for me to talk about really.

The important thing to remember is that you don't need to define each style within the secondary stylesheets - they just act as additions to the base CSS and override anything found in there, which means the additional stylesheets can be smaller in size, which helps with the more instantaneous switch. Also very handy that it creates a cookie to remember settings that can obviously then be accessed in PHP, it's pretty much got everything sorted.

Choose from 3 colours of one theme (because I was lazy and just Photoshop hue changed a few graphics), and an orange carbon theme. Might make more, but the concept is kind of done now so not sure I'll feel the need to.

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=352

Template websites version 0.5

2010-05-03 22:20:45

Posted in: Site news and updates
Added what I have so far of the template website, allowing Mr Random with no web experience to create his own website.

Many things still to add, including image backgrounds (will most likely be disabled in demo), custom stylesheets and sample settings to choose from.

All features that are visible at the moment are working, however it needs a colour picker - at the moment you have to put in either the basic colour in words (eg 'black'), or the hex colour coding, which Mr Random obviously won't know.

Feel free to have a play around.

www.adamgleeson.co.uk/template

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=351

Web design price list

2010-05-02 23:51:42

Posted in: Site news and updates
I've updated the home page, creating a small animation of the robot powering the slide transitions. Also, on the web design section, I've made a link to a price list, to make it easier for quotes. The prices are perhaps a bit off, but it's generally working as I'd hoped. View its location on the home page here, complete with said animation or at the link below.

Click here for an interactive quote

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=350

Robotic Ball Animation

2010-04-24 22:58:14

Posted in: Work In progress

A robotic transforming ball initially to be used for the home page of my website but possibly for more in future.

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=349

Black Hawk Crash

2010-04-17 23:52:19

Posted in: Finished animations

A special effects animation of a crashing helicopter.

Click here for some of the work in progress videos

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=345

Website introduction video - April 2010

2010-04-16 12:06:50

Posted in: Finished animations

This is the website intro video I used in April 2010.

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=348

Animation cycles

2010-03-20 14:36:17

Posted in: Finished animations

Character animation loops.

Other cycles:
Walk
Monkey walk
Polar bear walk

More...

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=338

Motorsports Calendar

2010-03-19 12:14:51

Posted in: Site news and updates
Just about finished my motorsports calendar. I've added options for links, mostly aimed at the BBC website, which have highlights of previous races, but no logical way of finding them, so this should keep them all together. I opened the ability to post links to anyone, but left them invisible until I approve them, so the page doesn't get abused by dirty spammers.

Other than adding links, the whole thing is automated, after the initial entering into the database of the various events. This also means it's very easy to include another series I may decide to watch, or if one is requested by anyone. The calendar counts down to the next event, and automatically produces iPlayer links when available, and removes them after 7 days, when they are deleted.

It needs tidying up, especially on the style front, both visually and code (I added inline styles rather than using up the main stylesheet, when I should have really added a unique stylesheet for it but realised too late as I expanded it), but for now it does its job.

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=337

Lego BBC F1 Intro

2010-03-07 13:28:35

Posted in: Finished animations

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

Click here for a raw render version without additional effects for comparison.

The actual 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 unreserved praise, and after it was spotted by one particular user, it has spread across 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 it makes sense to finish it off now.

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=335

HTML5 Video and Stuff!

2010-02-26 18:32:49

Posted in: Site news and updates

The video is completely unrelated to this post other than the fact that HTML5 browsers will play it.

I've been playing with the delights of HTML5, and added videos to hopefully replace Flash. Not that I had a problem with Flash, but YouTube/Google are doing it, so that means everyone else has to because they're obviously correct - Google wins at the internet.

But the immediate advantages are the performance and quality, and it just feels nicer that it's embedded better into the page, although it has broken W3C complicances... for now.

The problem is that not all browsers support HTML5 - yes, you again, Internet Explorer. I hate you so much and never miss an opportunity to tell everyone how irritating you are. But even then, the browsers that do support HTML5 don't all support the same filetypes. Webkit (Chrome/Safari) play nice MP4/M4V file types, which means they play well on the iPhone and support an image to display that invites you to click to play.

Screenshot of the iPhone version of my site displaying the graphic that predictably leads to the video when tapped.

Firefox has done an IE and done things differently by not supporting MP4/M4V, and supporting OGG/OGV instead. The quality of the Firefox video is slightly inferior since I've had to put the video through two lots of compression (AVI > M4V > OGG), but hopefully in a future update Firefox will support MP4s so everything can be uniform. Or a good OGG converter appears - my attempts at finding one have resulted in me discovering SUPER, which does a good enough job at the actual converting, but takes far longer to start up than it does to convert. And I have to put an M4V through rather than the original AVI, because it adds a random green bar to the bottom of AVIs. Incidentally, I'm using Handbrake for the M4Vs.

The videos then fall back to Flash in Internet Explorer (playing the MP4 file rather than FLV to save another convert and upload). I doubt IE will support HTML5 this decade, so I guess Flash will be around a while yet. Not that that's a bad thing - Flash is great. But not so good for video, even though it has been the standard for so long.

I plan on creating a custom interface for the videos but for now I've allowed the default browser interface to be displayed, with a simple 'play' graphic over the top.

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=333

Toy car F1 project update

2010-02-20 21:59:40

Posted in: Work In progress

A quick video to show progress on the project I'm currently working on, along with a model of the real life car I created a while back for comparison.

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=331

My next project

2010-02-16 21:58:23

Posted in: Work In progress

Has an engine...

... and is going to involve lots of these blocks.

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=330

How to Build a Car Rig in 3ds Max

2010-02-06 00:43:01

Posted in: Featured work

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:

((pathpercent*(distance*100)*pi)/(pi*rad))/100

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

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=327

iPhone site

2010-02-04 09:34:08

Posted in: Site news and updates
I've created an iPhone version of the website, mostly to take advantage of the automatic rotation after seeing an article on Engage Interactive. If you're using an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you should be sent there as soon as you visit my site. If you don't have an Apple product (and normally I wouldn't blame you, I make an exception for the iPhone though), you can view the site here, although it'll not make much sense since it doesn't know which direction you're facing to be able to display the appropriate content.

So instead, here are some screenshots - taken with the phone's built in screen capture, by pressing the home and power buttons simultaneously.

The home page:

Phone rotated to the left:

Phone rotated to the right:

After touching a video, it will play in the iPhone's default player, although for blog content videos, as they are uploaded in FLV format (as opposed to M4V that I used for the dedicated video page), they won't play [although I've now gone through and converted some of the videos and added links when visiting on the iPhone page]. When the video has finished or you click done, it then throws you back to the page you came from.

I'm going to continue working on things like the missing videos, and allow comments to be added to blog posts (not that I get - or expect - many comments; it's just for my own concepts more than anything else) to make it as close as I can to the main site, and allow devices without accelerometers to be able to use it too.

One thing I really like is that if it looks correct on one iPhone, it'll look correct on them all. Saves a lot of time testing and then fixing all the issues Internet Explorer inevitably brings up, which also means it doesn't matter so much about complying to W3C standards (assuming they matter to you). And Safari supports CSS3 styling, so easy shadows and rounded corners without having to use graphics, which obviously helps with speeding up the download of pages on poor connections.

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=323

Site refresh

2010-02-03 16:23:42

Posted in: Site news and updates

Updated the site properly this time rather than the half-hearted attempt I did a couple of weeks back, much happier with this one now.

Added the intro video to this post for future reference because I'm bound to change it later, especially when each piece of work I do is in theory better than the last (otherwise what's the point?), so needs to go on display. The video as it appears on the home page should randomly alternate between displaying the 3D tech artist and web designer parts first, before moving on to the remaining section.

Altered the old 'features' section and renamed it to 'blog', so now the plan is for me to be forced into writing many words. Mostly as search engine experiments rather than anything else but hopefully there'll be some benefit from it.

I ~~also plan on creating~~ have created an iPhone version of the site, because I just bought one and it's brilliant.

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=322

Site update

2010-01-10 07:53:15

Posted in: Site news and updates
Finished updating the site. Split content into technical and design to be able to include web design work as well as 3D and more graphical projects, to demonstrate more of my skills. Even if one person may not be necessarily interested in the other half of the site, it allows me to show that I can do more than I was previously showing.

Also included a jQuery tab system to quickly slide between tabs within sections. The background and main video as well as many of the graphics and buttons have been altered too, to give a cleaner look.

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=303

New intro sequence

2009-10-20 14:54:41

Posted in: Site news and updates

This is the intro sequence on the home page at the moment, I'm just including it here as well in case I redesign my site at some point and replace it.

It was made in After Effects and demonstrates some of my animated work, and was a silly idea to have it loop on the home page because I've just spent the last 15 minutes watching it repeatedly.

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=298

Demo Video 2009

2009-10-04 05:40:58

Posted in: Finished animations

A compilation of some of the videos on the site.

http://www.adamgleeson.co.uk/blog?article=302