18/07/2012

DayZ Meanz Beanz

Stay tuned. This weekend I plan to release a short animation about Arma 2's hit mod - DayZ, made by Rocket from Bohemia Interactive. 










It involves beans, bandits, and possibly friendlies in Cherno. 

15/07/2012

Minecraft Dirt Block Poof

For a couple of weeks I've been working on this gradually, and only today have I reached the final stages of  touching up my nice big poof. Foot rest poof, that is. Or poofie, as I was brought up to call it. (?)

My house now requires its own 'terrain.png'. Zipped, of course.

For all the Minecraft people out there, you'll recognise this straight away, as it's based on the unmistakable ordinary dirt block.
I took the opportunity to use the same high-pile rug material from Ikea as I already have as my carpet, so they blend together very nicely. You can buy it in 1M squared for only £10, and this only used half of it.

It did of course involve cutting the rug carefully into various pixel-edged shapes.

Cutting rugs gives me...grass

The poofie itself started as some sort of dull, black square bean bag. In fact, it still is - I simply glued all my materials on top of it. I started by covering the bean bag in big sheets of felt as the base, then cutting out an annoyingly large quantity of 1-inch felt squares in every shade of brown I could find (amazingly, each side of the bean bag measured exactly 16 inches; 16x16 also being the resolution of all Minecraft textures). 


I then got to work gluing the darn little things onto the cube.

In Arnie accent: "GLUE IT! GLUE IT NOW!!'
I used about 8 glue sticks in total fixing the whole thing together. EIGHT!! That's nearly ten!
I should imagine that's about half a pint of glue.

It wasn't as easy as it sounds, however, as often my rows seemed to go astray and I ended up having to trim some of the squares down, or use bigger ones. And the glue guns were super gunged up and faulty by the end, I was basically having to double-wield them. 
This is quite possibly the only Minecraft-related art project in the world ever that has required the use of two glue guns at once. Unbelievable.  

TOP NOTCH


But overall, I'm quite happy with the result. I can sit in my rocking chair like a proper old granny and put my feet up on a Minecraft dirt block.

BAD.

ASS.