Konnichi wa Eddie Bins, I've been learning Maya today!

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I've been doing these hokey video tutorials hosted by a guy who prefixes almost everything he says with 'I'm just gonna go ahead and', as in 'I'm just gonna go ahead and create a NURBS cylinder' or 'I'm just gonna go ahead and delete that and, ahhhh... I'mjusgonnagoaheadn select a new object'. Yeah, you do that! They've been very helpful though. Today I did nothing but learn Maya for 6 hours straight, in fact.

"Oh dear, your brain is very tired!"

Yeah, but you know what, Prof. Kawashima? It's worth it. The first thing they teach you how to make is a wine glass, which I turned upside down and decided it looked a bit like a German helmet, so I used that as a jumping-off point and worked my way down. So that screen shot you see above is techinically the first thing I ever built in MAYA*. It's a robot German with a SARS mask. Tomorrow I might make a tiger, I think. I feel like a whole new world has been opened up to me!

*Unless you count the perpetually urinating cock I made using a particle generator, but that was just a piss-about!!!!!!! <------This is the famous British sense of humour.

So yeah anyway, I hope to be finishing this tomorrow, and then once I've learned how to animate the sucker I'll have something actually useful to put on my showreel, as opposed to the reels and reels of 2D animation I've done which may as well be a video of me in my pants singing 'Abracadabra' by the Steve Miller Band for it's worth these days.

Apparently Ubisoft are looking for 'international' applicants who are passionate about games. Since Ubisoft is about the only European games company I can think of whose games I have even halfway liked in the past 5 years or so, and it also means relocating to France, this makes this option double-plus good.

By means of contrast, I'd like to point out Codemasters in Leamington Spa who are also looking for animators. They make Motor Rally games for the PS2. Their recuitment website makes me feel like I'm about to join the BNP. And a friend of mine warns me their development building is 'like a garden shed'. So yeah, Ubisoft are looking mighty attractive right now. We'll see what happens.

UPDATE: So in addition to all the other amazing stuff Nintendo have announced this E3, they've just revealed a new version of Super Smash Brothers which has Kid Icarus, Wario, Solid Snake and a whole bunch of other pleasant surprises; The thing that got my attention, though, was Fuck About, how much better is HAL Laboratory's version of Samus than Retro Studio's?



Samus is the main protagonist of the Metroid series of video games. In each installment of the series, she wears full body armour which obscures her face, which is only ever revealed at the end of the game, sort of as a reward for completing it, I guess. She's never really looked quite right, though, whenever this has happened in any of the earlier games.

That's what makes this design such an achievement. Somehow, they've perfectly captured the essence of the character. It's how she always looked in my head, and it conveniently ignores (as I always have) the established image of Samus as perpetuated by the slutty manga pin-ups you got at the end of Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission, not to mention the version of her at the end of Metroid Prime, where she looks like some dopey moo off of Desperate Housewives or something. So yeah, *****/*****.