And the title says it all really, the other day Valve put up a plushie hunter from half life 2 episode two on the store, so I had to buy it, and he has already found a home which is overlooking my work.

I must say even though he was a little pricey, he is very nicely made and I'm happy to have him join my collection of game related items.

Now this little hunter isn't going to sell out as fast as the likes of a headcrab or companion cube, but he's just as cute and cuddly.

Ongoing work: Edits to the gameplay map

Work Assigned: Make the cat usable for the engine (re-model if needed) and if that gets sorted then orthographic images for the other cuddlies (good npcs)

Ok well after hours and hours of trying to figure out what was wrong with the cat, and after starting to model it again I realised what the problem was...I had left the flat planes which had the orthographic images in maya's scene.

So it was trying to export two planes which weren't triangulated which is why it was being mean to me.

So once I sorted that out I handed over the .dts file of the cat over to our lovely AI peoples, who I'm hoping have gotten it in ok.

So I went onto my other work that was set which was doing orthographic images for the other characters.

I decided to create a bear, as what's a toy related thing without a teddy bear, with of course horrible teddy bear looking feet.

Then I made a bird character from Debbie's dynamic bird image.

A bunny who is very different to the dynamic images, but I wanted to make it easy to model for whoever gets the job.

And then the lion who I only hope can look as good as Debbie's lion

And that's my work for week 3, I also wrote up a guide on getting Maya models into Torque which I hope is easier to understand than the confusing ones on the net, also if anyone else is wanting to know how to get Maya stuff into Torque just ask and I can post up the guide on here as well.

Ongoing work: Edits to the gameplay map

Work Assigned: Model the cat - the avatar of the game

Ok well my "gameplay map" from last week proved successful, I have made a couple of changes which will be at the bottom of this weeks work at some point.

I found it quite fun presenting my work this week, as I laid it all out on the table and went through it all, first time I haven't minded presenting something, and I recieved some useful comments which were the reasons for changes to a few of the pieces.

This week I was assigned the task to model the avatar of the game which is a cat, more importantly this cat

Which was drawn by Debbie, and I am modelling it from the orthographic images she also drew, and here are the finished results, well a few simple images.

My job was only to model the cat, not texture or animate, just model, and here it is

I've decided to put up images showing the development:

I must say it was fun to do, as the last actual character I modelled was Astro Boy and weird doodle things don't count as full on character as they were kinda just blobs.

Although of course even though I went by two guides on exporting for Torque it doesn't want to export it, so hopefully I'll figure out why.

Ok well a month of so back I purchased a box of 20 packs of Gregory Horror Show miniatures, as they were super cheap and just sounded awesome, a lot of waiting later I got them

And I must say they are amazing, now the only reason I bought them was for how nice they would look on my shelf, I have no idea of how the game would play as I only bought a box of the figure packs, as opposed to buying the card packs or starter decks.

But yeah I advise everyone to get them if they like Gregory horror, as they're nicely painted and very detailed, only problem I have with them is that one of my packs (they come in packs of two figures) only had one figure in it, now I must say upperdeck have done an amazing job in making them, but I'm complaining about that .

Only thing I find really annoying is I'm not too sure of how many there are of them, as from the numbers of common, uncommon and rare the boxes says adds up to 24, but one of my monsters has the number 25 on him so I'm a little confused.

I know you're waiting to see them though, here they are in all their glory.

Now this was the best picture I took, and you can't see all of them there, but they are really nice, if anyone wants to see any more images just ask

Only annoying thing like all little collectables, be it pokemon cards, trading arts of gashapons I now have doubles, which of course are looking for a new home ^__^

Work Assigned: Gameplay map – the order in which events happen in the demo.

Ok well at the meeting I was given the job to do a gameplay map, I felt a little dazed being given this as I was a little unsure of what it was exactly, even after being told what it was, so I interpreted it in my own manner, which then made it a mix of storyboards and gameplay maps (overhead maps of what is happening with everything)

I must say I feel I approached it well, it could have been refined a little in the drawing, but storyboards don't have to be detailed or amazing looking, as long as they convey what's needed is fine, I then added notes to each frame incase they weren't too clear to read.

Here is each frame from numbers 1 to 26.

I may have to change them slightly depending on what happens in the meeting, but I'll see what happens.

Well a few weeks back I was having a look about on ebay and noticed someone with some interesting looking stuff, I then noticed they were selling the Persona 3 design works book, which is an art book. So immediatley I decided I would have to win it, a few days and bids later I won it for about £11 which ain't bad.

Now a week and a bit later I finally got it (took them a while *moans*) and I must say it was well worth the money, I'd been looking into the Shin Megami series for a few months now, after hearing Persona 3 was one of the games of 2007 to get .

And of course with it not being out in the UK yet I thought I might as well get the art book to look through before I have the game, and I must say I'm really happy with it, and I can't wait for the 29th of Feburary now, as that's the date it should be coming out, although that may be quite an expensive day as also Beautiful Katamari No More Heroes and Lost Odyssey are coming out. Although I want to make sure I get Persona 3 before it disappears ^__^

Here's some photos of what the book contains

I'm really pleased with the book, although a little disappointed that Kazuma Kaneko didn't do the art for it.

Well our groups were given to us a few days after the pitch day, I have been grouped with Debbie, Duncan, Scott and Chris. And we were given the Toy Invasion project, no work had been set, so I felt I should carry out a bit of research into certain toys to get a feel for what should go into the project. I started by going to the library at the university, where I found some good examples of clockwork toys and a few robots.

From the books that I found in the Caerleon library I photocopied what I felt was approprate to the project. And stuck them up on my wall for inspiration.

I then sketched out a few rough concept ideas, although the only really finished image was of a cuddly character

I then decided to go to the library in Newport, where I found a very good book with robot images called : Yesterday's toys: 734 tin and celluloid amusements from days gone by
Author: Teruhisa Kitahara
ISBN: 1884822959

Which I must say was a lovely book, with full colour images, only annoying thing was it was in the reference library which means I had to photocopy the pictures, which was a hefty £1 per colour copy.

But even though at £1 per image they are really amazing looking robots.

So for the run up to the first group meeting I carried out visual research, my favourite image has to be this one though.