Ben Hale is a WIZARD!!!

Not one of those showy, pointy hat style wizards like Merlin or Gandalf more of a stealthy, do wizardy things and fade into the shadows like Batman.  He is the Batman of wizards.  A quick disclaimer; this is NOT a post written by Ben cause our Bat-zard don't work that way.  Our man does the work, puts it up and moves on to crushing another crazy difficult task! 

Who else do you know illustrates....

Does animation and video production...

.....and is single handedly creating his own video game!!!!

Click here for the current game build.

It's true, we are very lucky to have Ben in the collective.  In many ways he's our secret weapon.  So be sure to keep an eye on his work here,on his blog, needyourdisease.com, twitter, tumblr, facebook, everywhere you can consume media.


I know I'll be watching.

Ben Emerges From The Shadows...with stuff.

Boy have I been neglectful.  Not because I wanted to be, but because nothing is finished.  So rather than give off the impression that I'm some lazy lump that rides on the coat tails of his fellow monsters, I thought I would share some Work In Progress stuff.  So let's get up to speed.

Post by Need Your Disease.

First up, I had grand plans for Halloween.  Namely, a quicky animated short to post on the site.  Turns out, animation takes longer than you would think (even limited animation).  So I missed my deadline.  

Luckily, it took the pressure off of me and I can toy with it more.  Even remaster the whole thing in 3D.  Apply your 3D glasses....now.

Next up: My superhero game!  Since I last showed it, I was in the process of revamping my animations and adding art.  Well, I have a couple new things to show you.  First, I was running into a problem where my stopping animations (character resets and cape falls to the side) was playing twice.  It was really bumming me out.  So after some coding wizardry and a healthy dose of luck, that has been corrected.  Now the animation plays beautifully.

Post by Need Your Disease.

The other addition...well, more of a test...is these speed trails I've developed for the game.  I wanted some kind of trails behind him when he flew and threw this together. 

Post by Need Your Disease.

And finally, I'll be on the C2 Podcast talking about my game and using Construct 2 this Friday.  More to come soon.

Ben: Character Updates

I've had so much fun doing the birthday caricatures of my friends that I thought I would try the same on myself. To up the challenge, not that my "unconventional" head shape isn't enough, I decided to 

do a model-sheet style turn around.  Boy, was that not fun.

At the same time, I've been doing a redesign on my superhero character.  I'd gotten enough comments about it resembling other superheroes and the character art being too small, that I decided that a redesign was in order.  I always knew that I wanted some kind of medieval connection to the character so I started pushing in that direction.
After I had the new design locked down.  I started to play with character color variations.  I stayed pretty close to the original Blue and Orange, but muted it and added some armor.









Next up was building the character in Toon Boom Animate Pro.  From there, I was able to play with the line weight until I found one that would look good once shrunk down.  I've always wanted that retro- arcade look, even though the character is probably way bigger in resolution than any of those other games were.

The other benefit to working in Animate Pro, is that I can use bones and symbols to simulate animation without having to redraw everything.  Hopefully, it will cut down on a lot of the time I'll spend creating the animations.  Below is a quick test (definitely not final animation).

That's all for now.  If you'd like to see more updates as I they happen, visit my blog at www.NeedYourDisease.com or follow me on twitter at NeedYourDisease

-Ben Hale

Ben: Watch Me Dance!

Guess who's back?!  I've slowly come back into the light after braving what was the most eventful year of my life.  Getting married, a ton of home renovations, and my artistic achievements all seem like a distant memory with the birth of my daughter on December 31st.  So with fatherhood added to my resume and real life coming back into the fold, I've started focusing on the areas that I want to improve.  First step, practicing character animation.  The above is a quick test created in Toon Boom Animate Pro.  This was a lot of fun and I'm hoping to dive deeper into the program soon.

As always, you can follow me at my personal blog: www.needyourdisease.com or on Twitter at NeedYourDisease

Ben

Ben Ushers In The Winds Of Change

Inspired by Jim's post last week detailing his process, I thought I would show that (despite my missing last week) I've been kind of busy.  As I've posted in the past, I have a little superhero/video game project that I work on in my spare time.  Its fun because it lets me stretch my muscles and work on animation, digital painting, and a brand of problem solving that I don't normally get to do. 

Well, I've had a rush of motivation as of late and started roughing out the character animations for the player's character.  I've done some in the past, but nothing too intensive.  A run cycle that's a few years old now, a jump animation, idle animation, and some flying.  Nothing too terrible, but the difficult work was coming shortly.

Rough Lift Animation (objects from the ground)

It was while I was working on new flight poses, that the lingering doubts about my character's design began to swell up.  I originally drew him 3 years ago.  I've evolved quite a bit from the artist I was and the older style wasn't working as well for me.  First of all, while his stocky build was working for strength, it didn't play as well when he was flying.  Particularly when he was tipped on his side with his stubby legs looking ridiculous.  All of that was annoying, but the worst of it was that I would immediately get comparisons to Superman.  It didn't used to bother me, but not it does... a lot.

My first instinct was to add gauntlets and a hair color change.  I figured that way I could keep my existing animation and just add these extra assets on top of it.  

Test Thumbnail Gestures with Arm Gauntlets

I did some variations, shrunk the character to give him that old school "sprited" look, and then placed the variations throughout the level to see how they worked.

It was then that I started to ask myself what I would do different if I could start over.  I'm a better artist now and I'm much more familiar with the software.  What were some of the older ideas that I had dis-guarded?  Well, one of them was my idea to have the characters light and shadow be effected in real time by the direction they were facing.  I would make normal maps (mainly used for CG graphics) and use them to give the effect of the shadow falling either on the front or back of the character depending on which direction they were facing.

Below Left: Doctored artwork (normal map) used to direct shadows
Below Right: Original art no longer containing shadows or highlights.

Now I can direct the light in a level and have it affect the characters.  I've never seen that in a game and am excited about it.  If you are sitting at a computer, you can actually test the effect not.  The yellow box represents the light and will follow your mouse.  Go here to try the effect out.

So I've committed to redesigning my player art slightly.  I plan on tweaking the costume, changing the colors, and adjusting the proportions.  I don't have to redo everything as the cape animations can be reused.  Below is a potential redesign idea.

Potential Redesign

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that everything works out in the end and am excited about this new direction.  I'll post more when I have it.

-Ben

www.NeedYourDisease.com

@NeedYourDisease

Original Sketch for Cover Art

First pass at Gauntlet design.  Might lose ridges.  Pretty sure they won't show up when the art is shrunk anyways.

Ben Makes 'Em Walk

It actually wasn't the most productive of weeks, but last week...well that's a different story.  Continuing off of my post from last Tuesday, I'm working on a game.  Most notably, it takes place in a city.  A city with pedestrians that go about there daily lives and stroll up and down the street until there's danger.  They flee from danger, they get hurt, and they need rescuing.

The multiple "States" that each civilian will go through.

The city wouldn't be very interesting if every single person that lived there looked the same.  So I started thinking about variations I could make to give the crowds more life.

Some quick sketches. Trying to get some different features to help each civilian stand out.

Knowing that each of these tiny, helpless civilians will possibly be placed in one of these states and that each one of those states needs to be animated puts such a strain on my mind that it makes the whole thing feel like its not worth it.  Luckily, there are corners that can be cut and things that can be streamlined.  Rather than animate each character doing each movement, I've decided to animate one male character and one female character in Adobe Flash and edit those to add variety.  Change a few facial features, hair styles, swap the color pallet and you've built a some semblance of a real town.

The character's individual parts before assembly.

I build a base character by breaking up his individual body parts and constructing them in Flash.  The parts will be animated via a skeleton.  That way, I can redraw the specific parts and have all of my animations pre-arranged for me.

Character pieces are assembled and attached to a virtual armature.

The character is animated and its frames are exported from the program.  Those frames are shrunken and their pallets limited to fit with the aesthetic of the game.  Plus, as any good artist will tell you, every piece of art looks better shrunk.  It hides all of your mistakes.

He is very determined.

I'm currently working on all of the other animations.  In time, I'm hoping to have a (virtually) living and (virtually) breathing city for players to run and fly around in.  He's citizen one.  Soon he'll be one of many.  For more updates, feel free to visit my personal blog: www.NeedYourDisease.com

-Ben

@NeedYourDisease