Statistics play a role for balancing. Basic knowledge in physics never hurts. I guess it can help to make more believable environments when you have a grasp of how things erode and collapse or how to put fx in a believable way in your level.
But i don't think it's necessary to study any of these unless you aim to fill a very specific niche.
That sounds more like a recipe for boredom, and it also sounds like something that will teach you to be someone who you're not. Why not getting excited when good things happen? If you're happy, fucking explode about it, let yourself be immersed in the good vibes and pour it somewhere nice, like be productive at work, be it personal or professional, or share it with someone you love.
As for the bad things, I like to believe they're there to test you in life, staying too calm about it might be easily mistaken by ignoring the issue, where the way I see it, you should control it, yes of course but should also use the anger to focus on finding a solution for the issue.
Serenity is not to be confused with apathy. For me it's a way to avoid things like emotional rollercoaster ride, depression and unhealthy anger.
What i mean with not get overexcited when good things happen is to accept that moments of luck and feeling super happy don't last forever. If you get desperate and on the constant hunt for such moments chances are that you spent more time being miserable and depressed because in most peoples lifes such moments are the exception not the rule and brain chemistry hasn't evolved in a way that it spills out luck hormones constantly anyway. In the end such a state of mind can lead to drug addiction or alcoholism.
With bad things the key is to not let them eat you up. Don't get agitated about some petty bullshit, wasting your nerves and health on it etc. For instance my parents they fight or throw tantrums over the most stupid shit like a spilled glass of water or a broken plate. Me i just clean it up and buy new plates if necessary. I don't let such things ruin my mood. Or say a random stranger on the street insults me. When i was young such an occurance had my brain spin for days. Nowadays i already have it forgotten after an hour.
Another thing is that as a matter of principle i don't envy people over status, money, material wealth, relationships etc. That also used to be different when i was younger and falls in the category of bad things that "happen to you" if you tote around such feelings.
Read a book about buddhism. Not to become a buddhist but to learn about serenity.
I always try to apply some of the philosophical aspects that i picked up from it. Not getting overexited when good things happen and staying calm when bad things happen. Makes for an overall more bearable life.
I don't like this kind of video. 25k$ to get 1k$ worth of goods into Philippines + ego wankjob for the creator and PR for fox. Smells fishy. Imagine Fox would just donate a million. It would be just a number that gets unnoticed but would actualy have a much more profound impact. Instead they donate 25k and get huge PR boost out of it and lots of people think they are the nicest company for letting this narcissist do his thing.
/rant
Back to supporting stuff with FB likes.
Seir has pretty much summed up my feelings.
For me xnormal is way quicker. Even huge maps only take a couple seconds while in max it can take forever. But might just be my hardware or my settings.
Quote from PogoPOh that sounds really cool. Do you have any example images? I'm interested in looking into this!
Quixel has a ndo2/ddo tutorial on their youtube channel where i learned about this trick. I don't get that i never heard of this before on polycount or whereever because it's an official option inside xnormal. Maybe i just read the wrong threads or didn't pay attention because there was no visual explanation.
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edit:
on another note. this is an example that i grabbed from fuzyheads bake. See how the normal warps on the left side? This is a case for which i would usualy combine the two different bakes in PS to fix it. From my understanding a better cage could avoid this but it's just something that i struggle with in some ocassions. Like sometimes i can't have the cage tighter because of some other details in the hipoly or whatever 
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You know how often you get ugly artifacts from the bake picking up wrong stuff in tight places especially when you bake meshes that are not exploded? Blockers are simple planes that you put inbetween these tight spaces of your model then export as separate mesh. In xnormal right click on your low poly and load the blocker file. It's one way to get cleaner bakes, avoiding stuff that needs to be cleaned up in photoshop otherwise and saves time because you can get away with without having to explode a mesh where this method works just fine.
Quote from kiketteI think that if you want to add geometry, make directly a bevel instead of a support loop. It'll help your final object to be a little more defined on edge.
When your object is well baked, hard edge or not, you won't be able to see any Uv seam at the distance your object is supposed to be seen =) Personaly, I do 2 baking, one with a splitted cage on hard edge to be sure that the projection is coplanar to my faces (it avoid subtle gradient that become noisy with compression) and a second one with a 1 piece smooth cage to get back my information where I had gaps with the first bake. It takes about 5 min more to do, but the result is just perfect.
You combine them in photoshop then if i understand correctly? It's pretty much what i tend to do, one bake with cage one without. The cage bake for edges and the other one for perfect finer details. I read it's a bad habbit tho, especialy bites you in the ass when you have to change things afterwards and rebake because of the extra work. So i'm trying to get better and doing my my cages and bakes without having to rely on photoshop. Not quite there yet but i'm getting better with every model. Just recently i learned about blockers. For some reason i never saw this mentioned anywhere. Made me feel like idiot.
Kikette is right. If anything should be the other way around especialy since the player will see more from the back of that gun then the front (which most likely he will never properly see ingame).
It's cool but seems quite buggy. gfx glitches in quake and the mouse is all over the place in UO 2. haven't tried other games yet.
You still need to know the basic theory to use the tools. What good is carapace tool when you don't know what a vanishing point is?
As for Feng Zhu he's uber pro so it's easy for him to just do it on the fly but he also said in one of his videos that it's not super important for concept art that perspective is 100% correct.
If you do realistic paintings for art gallery it's much more important tho. I have a 168 pages book about perspective for painters and it's mostly fart dry text with some technical drawings.
Great job, came out very nice! Can't wait to check out the package and learn some things! Any chance for some psd files to check out aswell? I learned a lot from the ones on Philip's portfolio but they are couple years old now. Wonder if you have some new tricks up your sleeves that i could learn from.
Congrats Valentin! Your work on Insurgency was outstanding. Arkane can be happy to have you on their team.
Yep looks like plenty of wonky geometry all over the place. Think i see some missing support loops aswell. Can you post wires of your hipoly? That should help to give you some pointers.
Tiling road textures and decals for special cases like the road crossings, tyre skidmarks and damage.
Maybe tiling decals for road marks in general if it works better for you.
Quote from DejavoStepphenwolf that makes sense to me but I had the same settings.
I changed system unit scale to 1 unit = 16 feet and it's 1:1 with hammer now. Maybe that helps someone else.
1 unit = 16 feet? That doesn't sound right. I would dig a little deeper there to find out what's wrong. Maybe wrong settings in your maxstart.max?
Her's a picture of my exact settings:
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1) decals or overlays are used a lot but nowadays thers also other options to individualize repeating textures via shaders or blending masks. Something like this:
2) rule of thumb is to have even pixel density across the model unless you have parts that will be more often in the face of the player (for instance rear sights on a weapon model). you don't need to organize your uv islands by size. just organize them so that you don't waste space and they are easy to texture (straighten edges horizontally and vertically for example)
3) start simple. make some boxes, barrels or chairs for starters. then work your way up to more complex stuff. then learn subdivision modeling for highpolies and normal baking, then sculpting. Same applies here start with simple props before you try cars or elaborate environments. Check the polycount Technical Talk subforum for valuable tips and tricks.
Get a wacom tablet for texturing and sculpting.
In general while you learn try to focus on one thing at a time otherwise it becomes overwhelming and you will waste a lot of time trying to fix things that you don't have the knowledge how to fix properly.
Quote from SkackyI seriously hope Obsidian picks this project, though it's most likely not gonna happen with them working on South Park and Project Eternity. I don't want another FO3, thank you very much.
I enjoyed FO3 a lot more then NV so no.
I'm sure others can give you more elaborate answers since i don't do scripting. I guess getting familiar with Unity, UDK or Cryengine and their respective scripting system would be a good starting point.
