Ugly Baby Studios » UBS

The Learning Process: Art and Design, Part One

kelleyfrisby — Fri, 08 May 2009 07:13:44 +0000

So, hi! My name is Kelley Frisby, and I’m an unsuspecting victim in the indie game process (LOL). Truthfully, I’m a traditional artist who saw a unique and interesting challenge in front of her and jumped head first without thinking of all the obstacles I was about to come into contact with. When initially approached to join with Ugly Baby Studios and their premier game, Exhumed, I thought to myself, “Oh, no. I can’t do that. I draw cute things, girly things, things that parents read to their children before bed.” What do I know about zombies and video games? Not that much apparently, but it turns out I am a quick learner. I took my ridiculously expensive art school education and did some research.

I played House of the Dead at the arcade, I shot Rabbid bunnies with my boyfriend’s wii-mote, I remembered the secrets hidden in the pipes that I thought even Mario had forgot. I even took a few lessons from American McGee’s Alice and you know what all that did for me? Other than having a shit load of fun, it actually confused me more. I saw so many interesting concepts and styles that I truly admired.

But at the same time I was lost as to where to take the look of these zombies. So I went with what I DO know, and that’s composition and characters. I started small and reworked things. I went back to my traditional education and pulled out my art books. I took inspiration from the people who have always inspired me, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, artists like Edward Gorey and Arthur Rackham…then I started really thinking about how the games look would be influenced by my artwork and I started brainstorming ways to keep this new and unique and yet creepy and zombie-ish.

For some odd reason I kept visualizing the old movie posters of the 40′s and seeing rockabilly girls and I thought: Pin Up Zombie! She was reworked many times, but ultimately the pieces fell into place…a few pieces even fell off, but we won’t discuss that now. I initially went with the idea that if I combined the look of the old zombie films with the popularity and attractiveness of the Pin Up girl that it would make for an interesting and fun look.

All this lead me to the main character we have now. That and the fact that the game’s Man in Charge, wanted an overall hand drawn look to the game that seems to be lost in today’s video game world. Not lost completely, I’m told, but few and far between. Looking through the games I’ve been playing recently I’d have to agree. So today, in my first of a few Behind the Scenes Exhumed pieces, I will showcase not only a few of my progress shots, but point out a few of the latest and greatest art styles I’m really enjoying right now.

As mentioned above, I am not primarily a gamer, I am not an expert on these things. I am still new, still learning, still discovering some of these stories and pictures for the first time. But my artist’s eye tells me a lot. While I can admire and respect the talent it takes to create some of these 3d masterpieces out there, I get so much more enjoyment out of some of the simpler designs. The designs and art styles that don’t seem like much but are really beautiful and inspiring in their simplicity.

Games like: World of Goo and Lost Winds have such a wonderful sense of style. I think a lot of people out there miss just how hard it is to sometimes keep things clean and simple, to not overload your viewer with every tiny detail. That’s a talent not many can boast: the ability to communicate with simplicity and elegance. Line work and subtlety, finding the perfect color palette; those aren’t just simple things to discover and create. Looking at the upcoming remake of A Boy and His Blob I would much rather get lost for hours in that game, where everything was created in a specific style for a made-up world, born of the imaginary. It’s what makes us lose ourselves in these games in the first place. They are not real life. We can lose ourselves in the imaginary and forget the reality of our everyday lives for a little while, and it’s the very rare artist who can achieve this far more difficult goal.

In the next part, we’ll showcase a step by step progression of the building up of a character concept for our game!

A narrowing of focus

Jason Ward — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:20:26 +0000

Over the past few years we’ve covered a fairly broad range of topics on this site, blogging about anything even tangentially related to the Games Industry. At the same time we’ve provided period reviews of titles both big and small on all platforms. Heck, we’ve even covered Industry Events such as E3, E for All and others, with our team of…well, admittedly lazy but quite zealous geeks marauding about assorted booths taking pictures of scantily clad babes, playing stuff that hasn’t been released and generally having a good time.

But the raison d’etre of the Ugly Baby Studios team has always been the development of fun ideas, especially those relating to games and animated shorts. We’ve participated in (and actually did pretty well at!) film festivals with ridiculously short deadlines, we’ve worked on Mod projects, and generally had a good time doing all of it. Now it’s getting a little more serious, and so we’re honing in the focus of both our team and our site. As we move forward from now, we’re zooming in on Independent Games, with a special focus on XNA and Xbox Live Community Games (XBLC), which may just be the most significant turn to ever hit a games console or the Indie Developer scene. We’ll have some announcements coming a little further down the pike with regards to this topic.

As always, UBS will remain a blog, and as such we’ll do periodic reviews, though we’ll focus these on Indie Games (or their demos if we’re too cheap to buy the full game). We’ll blog about tools and techniques that you can use in your own Indie Games, and we’ll interview and have conversations with other Independent Development teams who’re working on their breakaway masterpieces as we speak. Any way you slice it, though, this narrowing of focus and reinvigoration of purpose will enable us to deliver a superior experience as we move forward, and we hope you’ll join us.

If there’s something specific you’d like to see covered, by all means let us know! We’re always open to hearing from you and believe me, we read every email we get from those who feel the need to drop us a line. If we can make your experience on the web a better one, don’t hesitate to tell us how.

A new year, a new look!

Jason Ward — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 08:32:24 +0000

I know, I know, we JUST changed the look. It’s a bit soon to be making the change, but we felt that the new look, while a pretty good improvement over the old one, just wasn’t quite popping for us. Consequently we’ve moved onward, upward, forward, and here we stand. Whaddya think?

And we’re back!

Jason Ward — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 07:49:52 +0000

So, you can probably tell that a couple of things have happened. First off, we’re back. Yay us! Second, the site’s different now…like WAY different. We’ve taken an exciting plunge and dumped our previous content management system, Joomla, in favor of the vastly superior WordPress blogging system. For our needs, WordPress is simply a better fit and offers far more features with a great deal less management hassle, and we’re excited to be joining the very large community of WordPress bloggers out there.

Obviously enough, the site’s not quite finished, yet here we are live before the world. We’ve been working through the migration process for the last several days and were very nearly complete when yesterday, unexpectedly, the Joomla database simply crashed. On the bright side, we’d already exported the entire database a couple of weeks back and so we’re in the clear as far as content goes. User accounts weren’t as lucky, but you’re always free to register with the new system, which I think you’ll find is superior to the old in countless ways.

So without further ado, welcome to the newly revised Ugly Baby Studios site. We’ll be busy from here on out, so stay tuned!

Forgive the mess…

Jason Ward — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 22:58:46 +0000

UPDATE: What you see now is close to the final new look of the site. Expect a few tweaks here and there, as well as a regular addition of new content going forward. Welcome back!

Previously on Ugly Baby Studios:

After a long hiatus this year, we’re finally preparing to rebuild, revise and relaunch the Ugly Baby Studios website. Fear not–the look you see today is not final, but lookout for our new face in the next 48 hours!

I’m heading out the door to E3–excuse me, E for All–and will have new info, new…news, and an all new look for an exciting new year!

A3F News: UBS Places in Top 20!!

Jason Ward — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 22:15:06 +0000

The Ugly Baby Studios team learned today that the hard work and dedication of every member of the team has paid off! We’re officially in the Top 20 films of the A3F film festival, screening this coming Thursday in Phoenix Arizona!

Congratulations and thanks to the whole team: Josh Jertberg, John Osgood, Juliet Flores, Adam Hetrick, Andrew Halford, Lilla Lancaster, Mike Kukuk, Rafael Flores and Jason Ward. Great work!

A3F 2006

Jason Ward — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 11:31:29 +0000

As reported previously, the Ugly Baby Studios team has been working diligently on creating artwork for use in the A3F 2006 film festival in Phoenix, Arizona. Well, this past weekend, February 17th-19th, we went
to Phoenix, learned the requirements for the competition, came up with our story to meet said requirements and we animated, rendered and built a 3 minute, 25 second movie over the course of the weekend. Read on for more on how it went and how we managed to get this thing done in just under 48 hours.

We arrived in Buckeye, just outside of Phoenix, on Friday night around 5:45PM. We had originally intended to go to the launch party for the festival, but a slightly late start on the drive from Southern California and a ton of unexpected traffic on the I-10 west made that a fairly unreasonable expectation. So we setup our equipment and went to the website for the competition, which was supposed to give the final requirements of the competition at 6:30PM Arizona time. Sure enough, they were there on time, and we got started. The requirements were pretty interesting:

Theme of story: Mistaken Identity

Line of Dialog: I don’t think this is going to work!

Prop: A Plant (Someone had to intentionally water a plant)

Our initial reaction was to try and use the requirements to drive some ideas we’d discussed en route, because they really did fit pretty well. We learned quickly that fitting the plant and the line of dialog into our version of the Mistaken Identity concept was a bit harder than we initially thought, so we struggled on the story for awhile. The more we tried to make those two elements fit, the more complicated the story became until it was either too unwieldy or resulted in contradictions that we couldn’t resolve. Finally our Animation God, Josh Jertberg, said something brilliant: “What would Ed do?”, referring, of course, to our own Ed Knight, who’s currently in Florida attending the Digital Animation and Visual Effects school at Universal Studios. For the past 3 years Ed’s really been our “Idea man” any time we’ve worked on projects, and without him we were kind of lost. However, the invocation of Ed’s name and method of thinking kicked our brains a bit, and before long we had a working plan that was sweet, simple, used all the requirements of the festival in a creative way and would let us get away with roughly 3 minutes worth of animation and relatively little dialog.

So we went to work; Josh began to animate, I started working on prepping the workspace (our environment, designed by Adam Hetrick, the newest addition to our team and one hell of a level designer) for our animation, and Juliet started working on the texture for the two Plant props that we now had to model, texture and animate. Josh finished a brief sequence with one of our characters and we imported it into Unreal Editor, where it appeared to work great in the Animation Browser. So far, so good. Recalling the lessons of my recent 3DBuzz training videos in the Matinee system, I setup the list of scripted actions and pressed the “Play” button in the editor, expecting the animation to render in all it’s beauty before my very eyes. The Unreal logo played as expected, the gray box telling me that assets were being loaded…and then CRASH! it all came down in flames. Unreal Engine collapsed and with it all our hopes.

Back to the Editor and the UnrealScript AI. What did I do wrong? I couldn’t find a specific error, so I consulted our programmer over MSN messenger, Andrew Halford. He wasn’t sure, but the error sounded to him like some kind of loop in the programming, so I went back to the Buzz tutorials. Had I missed something? Step by step for over an hour I plodded, then went back into the editor, cleared my list of scripted actions and started again. WAITFOREVENT–>Check. PLAYANIM–>Check. And then, of course, my *new* friend, WAITFORANIMEND. Check. I crossed my fingers, and I think Josh and Juliet held their breath. I hit the Play button in the editor again and waited. Unreal logo, so far so good…gray box describing the assets being loaded, getting nervous. Black screen and then…Success! Our world materialized, the character sprang to life and all our hearts started beating again. Josh dove back into his animation software, Juliet went back to building textures for our new props and I dove into setting up the next scenes.

This continued for the next day and change, punctuated only by 2 roughly 4 hour sessions of collapse where we all had to sleep awhile. On the final day we raced to render our final scenes (part of which was made difficult by some pathing issues in the engine, thanks to the tight confines of our cave environment) and convert them to AVI’s for editing. We had recorded our dialog the day before, with help from our now two-time Sound Engineer Rafael Flores, which went very well. The process of rendering the video, however, was a little time consuming as we stumbled over a few technical hurdles, one of which included the UT2004 “Dumpframes” methodology, which worked excellently once we figured out that UT2004, for whatever reason, removes modifications to the INI files after each render. I finally resigned myself to keeping copies of the modified UT2004.ini and user.ini in a separate folder so I could overwrite UT2004′s “corrected” versions in a hurry.

The process wasn’t overly lengthy once we worked out the bugs, but it did entail a lot of rendering. First we had to render from UT2004, which drops all frames to BMP format on the hard disk. Then we had to load those BMP’s in VirtualDub, a freeware video application, and render them to AVI’s. Then we had to load them in our editing package and, after doing the arrangement, render those frames as well. For a short film it’s actually an OK process, but I have to say that without the dual-core AMD processor I’d ordered a few days before, we might not have rendered quickly enough to make the deadline. Next time we’ll do dual-core AND we’ll do RAID0 across 4 SATA drives to really improve the rendering performance, because waiting for a movie to render while a deadline approaches is not as much fun as it sounds (and it doesn’t sound fun to begin with, does it?).

As the deadline approached we all became more nervous, more tense. We hadn’t eaten all day because our stomachs were too much in knots, and it was only getting worse as the the clock ticked away the minutes. Finally the last renders were done, and with a trembling hand Josh raced through the editing. A quick preview showed that the movie was mostly in order except that one clip and one special effect hadn’t rendered properly, meaning that while one of our characters was clearly watering the plant prop, the water itself hadn’t rendered. Time was too short to correct the problem, so we had to rely on the audience to see that he was, in fact, watering the plant. We burned the DVD and with barely 30 minutes to go we raced out the door, into the car and down the freeway, sometimes at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour. We were horrified to find that when we turned where our directions said to turn, the road was closed off for construction. With minutes to go, we raced through the maze of streets where tons of construction seemed hell-bent on stopping us from turning in our movie on time. Downtown areas are bad enough with their “one way only” streets, but toss in some major construction and a near-complete unfamiliarity with the area and you’re looking at certain confusion for out-of-staters like us.

We arrived and turned in the DVD, with the beautiful words “you guys are OK, you’re in” settling our fears of disqualification. A couple of quick snapshots from Jae Staats, the organizer of the event, and we were ready for alcohol. Into Majerle’s Sports Bar we went, where we celebrated with drinks and dinner for the next hour. All at once the unwinding hit, and we all realized just how hungry we were. Fortunately Majerle’s has excellent food, so our celebration dinner went off spectacularly. In the course of discussion we realized just how much we had done and how much we had accomplished in that 48 hours. Morever, we realized just how much we were really dependent on the whole team–those who went to the competition and those who didn’t but who contributed models, designs (John Osgood), coding and logic–to pull off the massive effort of a 3 minute animated film in just 48 hours. It’s no small wonder that out of 60 teams registered we were alone in creating an animated movie. I’ve said and felt that there must be a fine line between great courage and insanity, but whichever is the proper designation for the Ugly Baby Studios team, it’s clear that we are firmly on that one side of the line, and with talks already begun about next year’s festival and the animated film that we’ll create for it, there’s no chance of turning back.

Now if we can just place in the top 20, all will be well in the world!

Just a little update…

Jason Ward — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 07:03:23 +0000

For those who occasionally pop in and wonder, “why the hell haven’t they updated the site in a dog’s age?!”, I figured it was time to make a statement.

For the past couple of months the UBS team has been working diligently on developing artwork for use in a new animated short we’ll be “shooting” (virtually, anyway) for the A3F (Almost Famous Film Festival) later this month. The screening for the festival’s top 20 films (and we have every expectation of being one of those films!) will occur on March 2nd, 2006, so we’ll release the movie publicly a day or two following that event.

In the meantime you can head over to the gallery of our texture artist, Juliet Flores, to check out some of the work she’s done on some of our assets. Models shown there were created by our lead modeler, John Osgood. Expect more to show up as we near the release date of the film. Things around here should pick up a bit once we have some more free time.

Jason

Welcome to Ugly Baby Studios

Jason Ward — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 05:00:42 +0000

After somewhat of an extended “hiatus”, the UBS team is returning to the web. In the coming weeks you’ll see our new site evolve into a busy community with news, updates on our projects, artwork and tons of
discussion on all aspects of game and animation development.

New to the site, we’ll be talking about and promoting our Film Projects, which is a new passion that’s taken root in the UBS Team. We can’t wait to share some of our ideas and creations with you, so be sure to check

back regularly! See you soon!

The UBS Team