Monday, 25 March 2013

CGI Combat


Thirteen years ago, in 2000, I self-published a one-off Combat Colin Limited Edition Special, featuring reprints of a few of my Combat Colin strips from the 1980s. I chose to create a CGI version of the character for the cover and back cover strip. The only software I had that might accomplish this over-ambitious idea was a copy of Bryce that had been given away in Macworld magazine. Bryce is primarily software for designing realistic-looking landscapes and hardware rather than people, so the limitations of that, combined with my lack of experience of working in CGI, meant the results were never going to be spectacular. Nevertheless, I thought you might like to see it. 
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6 comments:

  1. Manic Man26 March 2013 at 12:56

    I've seen far worse, often in movies with big budgets and the idea that Anything created on computer is better then doing it for real ^_^

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  2. ian0160426 March 2013 at 22:49

    Half expecting the Warbury first team squad to show up here..

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  3. Anonymous27 March 2013 at 00:29

    You did that with a free give away from a magazine, to say I am impressed is an understatement - looks amazing - good to see your back on line enjoying seeing oyur work again. McScotty

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  4. Anonymous27 March 2013 at 00:31

    Hi, the work doesn't look 13 years old. It looks quite good actually, your characters still show personality and movement.
    This brings back memories. I remember getting the free Bryce too, but I got it from MacFormat magazine (i think it still had oversized pages in those days). I never used it to generate landscapes, I also saw the potential to build cartoon characters, but I had the same problem with object joining, such as the fingers you did, but I took the rendered image into photoshop and blended/smoothed the shapes together to make a smoother finish.

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  5. Lew Stringer27 March 2013 at 00:41

    Thanks. Yes, it may have been MacFormat, not Macworld. I used to buy both of those mags.

    I also used Bryce to create a few basic monsters for CiTV Tellytots magazine when I was a writer on that. I'll see if I can find them and post them on my blog sometime.

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  6. Tiniebras29 March 2013 at 23:14

    Oof. Those visuals bring back memories from the late 90s. The low poly-count CGI was everywhere. Computer games. Cartoons. Comics. I loathed them. They replaced all the beautiful artwork in all three of those mediums with some truely terrible models. It was clever, it was a neccessary step to todays amazing graphics. But boy was it ugly! Funnily enough though, it kinda suits Colin. It gives him a claymation look as if he'd just come from a visit to wallace and grommit land. I can't find any love for the robot though. Claymation Colin would be great though :)

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