It’s a rainy saturday morning so I made this and decorated a cake I made yesterday.
Things to do:
But, it’s a start.
This is something rampant and widespread in level-based games, don’t get me wrong. I’m picking on Tomb Raider specifically because I know exactly why it has to be this way, it still bothers the player’s subconscious. It happens a lot in Dues Ex: Human Revolution too, but that at least could be explained by, say, defense turrets and other devices unseen but dangerous until you deactivate them from the inside when you’re ready to leave. That’s plausible.
So the levels are generally something like this:
You start at the bottom there and grapple up some mountain or have your butler in a helicopter or yacht drop you off, then you figure out the puzzle to open the door and proceed through this gauntlet of traps and trials, killing the animals that have been sealed in the tomb for countless years waiting just for you to come. Maybe that’s why they’re so ferocious: they haven’t eaten in a long time. After dispatching all danger and overcoming all ridiculous odds, you finally come to the main room containing the crystal or amulet or key or whatever and proceed to grab it – here there’s two options: one, a secret door in the back opens up and you just run out happily. Two: the temple starts to shake and crumble and you go back through all of those traps again until you get back to the front door where some bad guy with a terrible fake accent thanks you for retrieving the goods for them, proceeds to knock you out and takes it.
Now, I’m entirely happy with this. The games are still entertaining and I quite like them. The puzzle rooms are often clever and that side of the level design is actually fantastic. If you can ignore the very obvious and conveniently placed ledges and gaps that are perfectly sized for Lara, the environments are actually very cool. The way some of the rooms fit together to allow you to do some things while certain areas are activated / switch when not are nothing short of brilliant on the designer’s part – commendable.
But then there’s the bit that bothers me.
All of these tombs, save for some of the darker corridors, are naturally lit by huge chasms in the ceiling. Looks cool, sure, sunlight streaming in. Makes for a workable game, since it isn’t completely sealed and black, which is, you know, nice. But it raises the question: if you have the helicopter there, why don’t you just drop in, grab the crystal amulet of cosmic power and activate the winch to pull you back out. It’d be so much easier!
The better question is why the bad guys don’t do that. They thank Lara for retrieving it because they know the traps would kill them, so they just wait for her to come back out – I would too – but they have helicopters and winches – go for the huge skylights.
Now, it’s a petty nit to be picked but I’d argue that it’s this sort of subconscious disconnect that hurts video games’ realism without you even ever fully knowing it.
Image sources via clickthrough.
This place was open and running when I was a kid. I wouldn’t say thriving, but busy enough.
The slides were horrid, the fiberglass worn thin from however many years of summer riders and Canadian winters. I remember sitting in the hot tub and with a raw back, not quite bleeding but probably close, shredded by a long day sliding. I’m not sure, in hindsight, if it was really as dubious as I remember or if, being a kid and all, over the years my imagination has made it that much worse. I do remember the milkshakes were fantastic.
Fast forward to me as a teenager. The park closed after some property deal or other went sour. In truth, I suspect they simply weren’t getting the paying traffic anymore. A few years after that there was a big thing in the news papers that it had been vandalized by some punks. Windows smashed, the empty pool filled with remnants of beer bottles. I remember wondering why anyone cared; it’s not like it’d ever open again without a pretty major overhaul anyway.
A few years after that I found photography and in the following summers we found ghost towns and toured all the neat old places we could find. This was, admittedly, the first and only place we ever ‘trespassed’ into to get photos. I say trespass in the sense that we hopped a small fence to get inside, but I doubt anyone would have raised any big deal about our being there; it had been abandoned for a long time by the time we came up.
They demolished the whole thing the summer of 2011, some years after these photos were taken. Other than those my friend took while exploring beside me, I’m not sure if many others exist out there. So that’s sort of cool. A surviving record, and a good memory of warm days spent with awesome people and then-brand new cameras.
You can see more here
As I continue learning speed painting I continue to be humbled by the masters.
Painting in colour, as I’ve now found out, is much more difficult than originally thought. So even more respect for works like those above.
Some things that I’ve been playing around with. May or may not ever finish them, but the ideas are there and people keep telling me to share the intermediate things.
I feel like the loft is off to a good start, but that back wall needs some love. Not sure yet. The external scene is, well, I’m terrible at them. I mean, that’s the point of practice, but still. I started a speed paint of almost that exact idea but realized half way through that doing the shading for each of those chimney stones is an ugly process.
The MK2 Stealth Chairs are the design we were originally going to make after we did the cardboard versions, but we got distracted and it never fully materialized. Someday, perhaps.
Funnily enough, not counting the render times themselves, making these takes about the same amount of time as my “speed” painting does. I’m both a pretty fast modeler and a pretty slow drawer, it seems. It is getting faster though. I was painting this morning and went to take a break only to realize it wasn’t as late as I thought it should have been. So that’s good. Improvement!
So. Cool.
I do think it’d almost be better without the bird chirp soundtrack though, because the visual metaphor is so strong by itself. The absence of sound would allow you to add your own but also contemplate that what you’re seeing isn’t a mere illusion trying to fool you; it’s that your brain is so easily manipulated.
What would be awesome is this sort of thing in like, 2cm square glass pieces that drizzle down like rain falling against the glass. I would totally use that for all the exterior windows in my house. Perpetual sunny rain, with perpetual shadows falling across the walls opposite.
I remember when they announced these and I watched the first few (because that’s all there were at the time) and was really inspired and excited.
Jump forward a few years and I’d all but completely forgotten about them, stumbling back on the path just recently.
With my recent forays into speed painting and concept art this seems like the perfect refresher course. Feng Zhu is, and I say this without hesitation, the master at so many different aspects of this medium. Characters and landscapes and robots and the subtleties of emotion and scene drama. It’s more than just drawing something, he knows and has a mind for creating an impacting image, which is that bridge between marks on a page and art.
Definitely inspiring and definitely a lot to learn. Exciting!
Met up with local photographers and cool dudes @MorganGarvin and @VernTheBunny the other week to shoot Calgary’s new Peace Bridge.
It’s nice to have spring again, but I haven’t picked up my camera in a long while and just wasn’t feeling it. Also: I think I take better shots when I’m alone. More shooting from the hip as I walk though an broad area as opposed to going to a specific area with friends and then staying in the same place trying to find things to capture. It’s just a different style, I guess.
That bug tried to kill me, I swear. I have no idea what it is but it’s much bigger than I thought anything that lived around here was supposed to be. Ever since those nuclear powered taxis started showing up…
Despite having had a Wacom tablet for many years I’ve never really been able to speed paint with any remarkable talent, so I’ve embarked on a quest to change that.
I present humble beginnings, which I’m fast learning are exactly the best kind.
I was in the crowd earlier today attending the grand poo-bah kickoff of Calgary’s own Peace Bridge, shown above. Unlike the concept art it was an overcast day and just on the brink of snowing, so most were in line for the warm drink and minidoughnut trucks which, let’s be honest, is the reason most of us went. Guilty deep fried pleasures.
Still somewhat surprised at the rehashing of those opposed. Like, there was the group who were against it in the beginning because it was so expensive (and it was) which makes sense, that voice could influence them to maybe stop the plan or work on something cheaper, but to show up on the day of the grand opening with signs doesn’t really make much sense. What do you want them to do? Tearing it down would cost even more money. So. That was sort of weird to see.
Overall it’s a lovely design and yeah, it was a wee bit pricey, but it’s too late now and since the trigger has been pulled we might as well admit it really is a gorgeous thing. So far we’ve dubbed it the finger trap bridge for it’s obvious parallels to the toy. I’m excited for the spring / summer because it’s the perfect location between my path through Kensington (the neighborhood to it’s north) and Prince’s Island Park, which is primo longboarding path.