mooncaine
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Posts posted by mooncaine
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Milk the goat. Make yogurt in the tub. Amaze your friends. Stupefy your enemies [with the smell of sour milk in your tub].
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IIRC, Tribes 2 was made with Torque -- that was one of my favorite online games.
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D.S. Walker, your stuff looks great. Do you use DarkTree? I am knocked out by the surfaces on your models. I was also wondering how you made that A:M tire: did you model the treads [i'm guessing you did]?
Oops, never mind. I just saw the rest of your images [hadn't noticed how many there were to see at first]. Thanks for the wireframe views!
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I've said it before, but I'll say it again: that lute is gorgeous.
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Thanks for that great explanation, Dearmad. I'm glad I asked, because at first, I thought you might have meant that a "practical" light was a real world light, and I was puzzled. Thanks!
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I don't know about the shadows debate -- my ignorance is blissful, for the time being. Anyway, just wanted to add: don't forget the pickup selector switch...
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I like the cat, too. Um, what do you mean by "practical"?
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I must admit, William, that you left yourself open for that one. If you stand under a bucket of ping pong balls, one of us just HAS to tip it over!
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Um, it might actually be better if you edited that message and removed your email address, and instead invited people to contact you via the Private Message feature of this fine forum. That way, spam trollers won't snag your email address, and we can all still contact you directly and privately without having to know your email address. You can set forum options to notify you via email of any private messages, and, once you've established private contact with someone, you can then exchange email addresses without having to post them here for all the world to see. Paranoid, I know, but believe me, you will get tired of deleting and managing all that "Make Money Fast!" and "\/i4gr4" spam....
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Excellent news. My congratulations go out to the happy parents, AND possible grandparents, too!
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Simply amazing. As a happy TSM user, I look forward to the opportunity to purchase the upgrade, or new version, from you when it becomes available. Please continue the excellent work.
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One thing that might help the white plastic bits: make sure that no colours you specify are "pure" [as in 255/255/255, or 100% of R,G or B]. That's yet another tip I picked up from Bill Young's Mastering Materials series, and again I recommend it highly because, whether you want to master materials or not, you'll encounter dozens of such juicy tips while watching them.
Bill says we should never use a completely pure colour in our 3D because there are no such completely pure colours in life. This leads us to subconsciously assess a 3D image with a pure colour in it as somehow unrealistic without our realizing what's bothering us about the image.
If the Strat you're modeling has any age to it at all, the white will have probably yellowed, or maybe even greened a tiny bit.
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BTW, I'm glad you mentioned On Writing, because I'd forgotten all about it. I mean to read that some day; I'm a fan of Stephen King and I'm interested, so I'm glad you mentioned that. Thanks!
Also I was glad to learn about Sophocles; I'm going to give that one a try [downloading now] and see how it feels.
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As a side note, I am a big fan of Stephen King novels and stories. I read his "On Writing" and apparently he is against creating plots etc. He claims it is a perfect way to kill a good story. He just lets the story come to him as he writes it.
Dude, writers have enjoyed saying this for the past 200 years or so ... and I really, really doubt it. The most I'll allow is that King doesn't need to make notes because he's thought these things through, in advance, in his head ... but for some of his novels, I just ain't buying the Romantic notion that his art springs fully formed from his head like divine inspiration. I just ain't believing it. Sure, Christine or Monkeyshines might be simple enough to write "straight ahead" instead of "pose to pose", so to speak, but I really, really doubt that's possible for lots of other work of his.
Poets and songwriters like to say this too. It's almost as if they are ashamed to admit that they wrote drafts, revised them, got second opinions, etc. Please.
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Ok, it's on the way. If you'd like to edit your previous post and remove your email address, go right ahead -- I've sent the ZIP file. I wouldn't want my email address out on the web any more than necessary -- there's already so much spam, spam, spam and more spam out there, so why invite more spam, spam and more spam?
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Fascinating discussion. I find myself coming down on the same side as Vern [if I understand correctly], thinking that since I'm not building for a game engine, I wouldn't want the extra work. I'd rather wait a long time for renders, in general, than do a lot of work that takes *my* time, instead of the computer's time.
I would dearly love to see displacement maps refined in A:M, but normal mapping doesn't excite me at all. [No offense to any who do find it exciting (ed) ... after all, what the heck do I know?]
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Even with this as the standard, it's amazing how many pathetic movies get made!
I bet those are all cases of "a thriving screenwriter with multiple successful films under your belt or you luck into someone in a power position just loving your style".... or at least the John Badham approach to action films, which goes something like "I don't care what your character says in this scene as long as it has sh*t, f*ck, p*ss or d*mn in it." coupled with car crashes, giant fireball explosions, and the occasional glistening female breast or two.
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I'd pose Standing FuFu so that it leans a little farther forward -- in fact, I'd flex its body forward a bit at the hips. Even without the plume, Standing FuFu looks like s/he's leaning backwards, defying gravity a bit.
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Yes, the term is "waldo". Any machine that is controlled [remotely or not] by a person is a "waldo", in the largest sense of the word, but it was coined to differantiate among robots, which are not controlled, and waldos, which are. Nothing that is controlled by a human can properly be termed a 'robot'.
Notable waldos include the arm on the Space Shuttle, R2D2 in Star Wars [the first movie], and those tracked machines that bomb squads send in to grab suspicious packages.
This means that "Bot Wars", "Robot Wars", etc. are actually all waldo wars.... I've yet to see a televised war among actual robots, though I've heard about a cross-country robot challenge. It'd be interesting to me to see some kind of "Bot Wars" sport where the robots were totally independent, free of human interference.
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Nope, but I have a few photos of fighter jet cockpits you can have, if you think that'd help you....
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Hmm, that sounds so counter-intuitive, the notion that I have to take steps to stop an environment map from translating or rotating. I guess I never noticed that because I haven't used environment maps on animated models before. What a drag -- if it's not a bug, it's a design bug, and I think you should report it. Environment maps are not supposed to move with the objects. Up to you.
Since the scene is so simple, I'd map the environment image to a plane, and use raytraced reflections to catch it reflecting in the rotating gears.
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An idea to make it look scarier: put it in a Chor, and adjust the camera so it's looking slightly UP at the beast. Adjust the Focal Length to a small number [experiment with this]. As you adjust the focal length, watch how the image changes. You're changing the lens of your virtual camera into a wide angle lens, as wide angle as the number you're setting. A wide-angle shot looking up at it will likely make it look larger and scarier.
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I think this might help: you can put a lock icon in your menu bar [i assume you're running a Mac now; if not, hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE to lock the screen in Win2K or XP].
From a tips site:
"Open the Keychain Access application in the Utilities folder.
Next, under the View menu select Show Status in Menu Bar.
The previous step will make a lock icon appear in the menu bar on the right side of the screen. From here you can lock and unlock your keychain, and more interestingly your screen. Selecting the option to lock your screen will make whatever screen effect you have selected in System Preferences display. To unlock the screen you can simply press any key and you will be prompted for your login and password. While the screen effect is running, all the open applications continue to run unhindered in the background, even network applications such as IRC clients should remain connected.
This is a great way to gain reasonable security and privacy while maintaining uptime."
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What might be more generally useful:
A way to copy the view settings of any window, and paste them to any other.
There are a handful of numbers associated with any view, and you can reproduce a view, yourself, by going to the original, clicking on the numbers in the bottom right corner of the window [as if you were going to change them], and using your computer's Copy command to copy the number .... then switching to the new view and repeating the process, til you can Paste the new number in. 6 or 8 pastes later, your view will match the original. If there were a way to, say, right-click this bottom right corner numerical area, and choose "Copy View Settings", then, on the new view window, right-click again down there and choose "Paste View Settings", it might be more generally useful, and probably easier to add to the program.
Speaking of generally useful, I'd like to see a copy/paste paradigm throughout the software that allows copying of any item's properties to any item that has [some or all of] the same properties, with a dialog box to let you "filter" out the properties you don't want to paste ... as in Final Cut Pro's "Paste Attributes" feature [other software have similar features; that's just one example]. This would allow, for example, you to copy the attributes from a model shortcut and paste them to a light shortcut, pasting only the Translate, Rotate and Scale attributes because you've unchecked the rest.... or pasting [some or all] properties from one Material's attribute or combiner to another. Paste Surface attributes from a Group, in a model, into a Material Attribute. Paste any number of attributes from one Bone to another.
Such a copy/paste paradigm would usefully adapt to your need to match view settings among different windows, it seems to me. What do you think of that?
*** A:M to Torque for game makers ***
in TWO Game
Posted
I'm fascinated, but totally ignorant of game engines. Torque interested me because a game I loved was made with it [i think], but I never got past downloading some docs and realizing I didn't really want to make a game after all.
Anyway, I'm watching this with interest, and I hope you'll excuse my probably-naive question: can the game engine use instances as part of your character model's geometry? For example, re-use the same cylindrical body part that makes the forearm, scaled and instanced to make the other arm, and two calves for the legs? Wouldn't that save you lots of polys?
I'm guessing it's not possible because you have to do the animations in A:M. I dunno. Anyway, it's fascinating. I just came in and saw this topic.