You work with Arnold Schwarzenegger? 
He sounds so like Arnie.
The video is amazing. I especially liked the light blooming around the tree and then it updates nicely when he shoots the tree trunk and it topples down.
Posts by Defrag
-
-
tut, tut, tut!
-
Shoot us a quick email and stuff then (or send me a pm if you want to discuss anything).
-
Quote
general media needs more Chris Morris!
lol, if only you knew about the other Chris Morris.
He doesn't write about games but I agree we need more Morris in the general media!
-
Quote from JynxDaddy
Relief maps didn't work for me, nothing visible when in that mode.I have a 9800xt, is this normal?
If it's a technique that involves using vertex texture fetching to perturb the actual geometry, it probably isn't supported on pre shader-model 3.0 cards. Traditionally, cards can use textures for effects (normal mapping etc) in pixel shaders only. Allowing vertex shaders to access textures was a new addition with shader model 3.0.
-
Quote
[Blocked Image: http://www.joeyadey.com/era_brick_wip3.jpg]
Looks good to me. Two suggestions:
1: Back off on the sharpness filter as the other dudes said
2: Even out the colour of the blocks. At the moment there's a few blocks with big colour differences so it'll really stick out when it tiles.
-
-
Max has a "Preserve UVs" checkbox now
-
I had some good head modeling tutorials saved, but I can't remember the URLs now
Here's a not-very-detailed one. http://ambient-whisper.cgcommunity.com/ ... age-3.html
-
If you check out job listings these days you'll see that Maya is taking over
I've tried max, maya, XSI and wings.
I find max to be very powerful but it has a lot of flaws and inconsistencies (many a time I've accidentially hit a hotkey and then had to spend hours going through menus trying to find the feature I had just enabled/disabled. Usually it won't be where you think it should). I think this is because it has been constantly evolving since day one and has just kinda grown at will. If they take it apart and rebuild everything it'd probably be a lot better / more intuitive, but it'd also piss off a lot of people that are used to it. Max costs ten million quid. It's just as well everyone in the modding scene is so rich.
Maya is a bit clunky for poly modeling at times, but its interface and stuff flows a lot better. I'm used to max now, otherwise I'd use Maya. Snapping, pivot stuff, alligning and lots of other stuff is so much simpler in Maya compared to max. I don't much care for their hotbox menu, though. Maya has a Personal Learning Edition you can download for free
XSI .. I just found to be clunky. I didn't spend enough time on it to form a decent opinion. XSI has the advantage of being able to import .vmf files directly, as it is valve's tool of choice these days. There's a HL2 mod tool version available if you want to give it a go.
The workflow of wings3d is awesome (everything is context sensitive.. no more 10,000 icons) but the app itself is limited in some respects (the viewport renderer is inherently slow, so it chokes a bit at times when you do something complicated).
You can't really go wrong with what you choose I guess. Each package has its charms and excels at something.
-
Procedural generation is great for some materials, but I don't think it will ever come close to replacing traditional texture artists for more than a fraction of stuff. Each procedural texture is generally a combination of known techniques (perlin noise, turbulence) that are tweaked heavily to give it a certain material's properties (such as wood, marble etc). You can certainly achieve some amazing effects with procedural texturing, but I don't think the control is there to create general purpose textures. How would you account for things like wear & tear, dirt, damage and so forth?
-
tre(e)s gut!
-
Quote from Polaris
When did he say that?
QuoteI do think unique texturing is the key for the coming generation.There are lots and lots of graphics technologies that we can look at. And maybe you add five or six up and they wind up being something that really gives it a next generation wow. But just by itself, even with no newer presentation technologies, allowing unique texturing on lots and lots of surfaces, I think, is the key enabler for this generation.
-
It's not just for terrain. In the article, Carmack states that in the latest revisions, he has extended the system for general purpose use. It sounds really interesting to me; it gives artists the flexibility to have basically unlimited unique resources (if they so choose) without RAM hogging. I'm unsure as to whether it'll have a huge impact like Carmack claims, but he does make some interesting points (namely that, for all our technological advances, we're still using heavily 'compressed' schemes for our data [small, tiling textures]). As long as this fits into the game asset creation pipeline(s) in an elegant fashion, it could prove to be very cool.
-
Looking very cool. One website suggestion: Either make all of your screenshots open a new browser window or just load in the current browser. Right now it seems half open a new browser and half don't, so I keep closing my only browser when browsing your site (which is really irritating!) Either go with one or the other for consistency's sakes
-
Quote
Do you guys think 18 sides is too much for a pillar?
It's all about context, really. Where is the model being used? How big is it? How many of them will be visible at once? Is it a centrepiece of a room or the map? Is it a high or low traffic area? etc. etc.
If it's just an average (as in general/generic) prop, I tend to eyeball it while creating the cylinder and remove sides until I start to really notice it.
-
From what I've read, it very much depends on where you work and the kind of team you're part of.
-
This thread gives me a bit of hope
QuoteThen you have me with that one map for Source
Which map was it, out of interest? Not trying to pick on you (well done for getting the job!)
Also what ReNo said is correct. There are quite a lot of people on the course I'm doing who don't have a drive or passion for games; they are content to coast and see out the degree while failing to improve themselves. Fair enough, some of them have now realised that games aren't for them (I've realised myself that I don't see myself as a C++ programmer), but quite a few are ignorant and think they can go and get a job at a top company just by getting a degree. One of the people in my year (3rd year) didn't even know what a global variable was (he had used global variables but didn't know that's what they're called [i.e. he's an idiot]) and who has basically copied half of every coursework submission from the Internet, yet he thinks he has a chance of getting a job at Blizzard. One of my friends said to him "I'd fucking kill myself if you got a job there" and the guy took that to mean he'd be jealous, haha (my friend obviously meant there's no justice in the world if people like him got a good job). Yeah. Some people are clueless and have no talent. The sad thing is people like him will get a degree and don't know shit / have any intention of improving themselves. Good fucking luck if you get saddled with him in a company.
The only good thing is that some companies will actually make you take a programming test. My mate was hired by Rare and he knows his stuff inside out; every time I see a coursework it blows me away. At the interview he had a programming test, a debugging test and an optimisation test amongst other things. Every company should do something similar to separate the wheat from the spacks.
-
Love the colours (of both sets of screens).
-
Most of the time it's just best to try and remain calm and, if it's not yet physical, don't give an inch if you can. I've had a few run-ins with scummers because any time I stay late at friends' houses and travel home, the last train is at 11pm. Before they started a building project near the trainstation, the only route was through the overpass (a haven for homeless people... yay). Fortunately the majority of chavs/neds are just pussies and like to mouth off as opposed to actually doing anything. The worst that has happened to me in the last couple of years was a couple of guys knocking the bag off my shoulder as I walked in front of them.
Assholes are everywhere. When I was 16 (almost 8 years ago now) I was walking home via the high street street (good lighting, CCTV nearby) and some guy walking past suddenly punched me in the face. No warning, no mouthing off, no indication of his intention. Lesson learned: Always be aware of people around you regardless of whether they look like they're about to punch you. Luckily the guy punched like a girl so I was left with a very slight bruise and nothing worse.
If it gets physical and you don't think you are guaranteed to win, then run
I think the best defence is always going to be awareness; you don't have to get out of a situation that you avoided in the first place. You can spot the majority of fights before they start (people generally mouth off at you, push you or try to grab you to psyche themselves up before they start flailing). The most common assaults in Scotland (I'm talking statistics here, not just pulled out of my ass) are the haymaker (big hook), grab & headbutt, grab & punch or choke variants (grabbing the throat). If you do a bit of self-defence training then you can learn to deal with these fairly well. Murphy's law is always a good rule of the thumb, though: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong on some days . If you have a chance to avoid a fight, do so.
