Alright. After a downright streak of misery in rendering crashes and misconfigurations, I’ve finally gone through compositing & made a”final” image. Thus, Project finished.
Here it is. All presentable-like and all, 1920×1200.
Latest
BlenderProject update, May 23rd
Right. Materials have been made and applied! Big party time.
Thoughts on the material editor: it is very powerful, and complicated as hell. Also, it seems that it is very very easy to get a material that’s a shiney metal with high glossiness. Any other type of materials, that are not flat one-shades but don’t turn into silver-untensil-material, those are hard to make. And, of course, sometimes things just fall flat.
BlenderProject update, May 22nd
I think the mesh is, on the whole, pretty much done. What’s next in line? Materials. I have to figure out what colours I want, then how to get them in blender, then the arduous task of mapping the materials to the spacecraft mesh. That may be… disturbingly timeconsuming. Not yet sure. First, however – must find some tutorials that actually explain material-working properly, so I have an idea what I’m doing. If we split the entire process of [nothing] -> [finished render], then there are three or four parts to it: Modelling, texturing/materialmapping, scene setup (camera angles, lighting, additional objects), and compositing (making stuff in the render look better. Basically, applying vfx). I’m done with stage 1 out of 4. YAY so far.
Blenderproject update, May 21st
At this point, safe to say that mostly this model will have materials instead of textures.
Starting to get the feel of active falloff modifiers.. Still feels odd, and I’d like it if the faloff travelled through connections and took that distance as ‘range’ instead of pure distance between verts. Oh well. Random pictures of work progress below:
Current BlenderProject, 20th May. ‘Solar clipper’
Right. Slowly finding time to make the next project that’s finally not by-the-book tutorial followthrough. Keeping with the space theme because that’s the kind of stuff I like. Right now, it’s two ‘big’ engine modules that will pull something via wires. That idea generally appeals to me, as usually spacecraft has a) engines at the back, and b) engines mounted on/at the main hull. I feel there’s room for differences there, so I’m making one.
Getting into Blender, day 2
When we last left off, the mesh was completed, rendering was still a mystery, and I hated the control scheme.
Things have changed since then.
For one, I no longer hate the control scheme. Well.. there’s still things that nag at me, to be sure, but I can get by. Another thing heavily in favour of blender is.. well, everything that comes after mesh-creation. I really like the material editor(s), I really like the composition window, and I absolutely love the uniform node-manipulation graph/interface. What follows will mostly be pictures, with minor comments as needed.
Getting into Blender, day 1
Purely on a whim, yesterday I decided to get back into making 3D stuff for fun. Up till now, I’ve made a few spaceship models for a mod (XTC mod for X3: Terran Conflict). They weren’t bad. They were also made in 3dsMax, which his a crazily expensive program for something that’s an extremely amateurish hobby for me. The student edition is not bad by any means, but if I’d ever plan to use those models in any meaningful way… I’d be screwed, to put it short.
Thus, enter blender. Fully open-source, allegedly a complete alternative to Autodesk’s products.
How bad could it be, right?
I’m Not Dead, but this blog sure was
Got an annual payment-fee for the domain name of this thing. So, it’s a year old already! And, my, most of that year has been nothing but silence. That *may* change again, but things won’t be as they were. For one, I just plain don’t have a never-ending stream of new games that I could talk about each week. I’m not into indies, AAA’s are selective issues, and when I get a game, I like to play it through a ton of times.. which still gives enough material for 2 articles, tops. So, I can’t afford to try and force the past rates it will only end in me burning out (again) and this place going silent (again). So, what to do?
Well. Here’s a quick enumeration of the changes coming:
1) I’ve taken up modelling again. This may last for half the summer, it may last longer. I will post stuff I make, and maybe some posts about stuff I find out whilst doing that. But It won’t be regular, and it won’t be any kind of guides/tutorials/etc. This is my personal alias-place dot com, so I’ll just use it to dump my stuff in here.
2) If I find somethign worth writing about, wrt games, I might write about. But again, don’t expect a larger frequency, or any sort of stability. I won’t chase out stories for writing’s sake (Alas, I have to face it – I’m not a writer at heart, and the raw act of writing, whilst satisfying, is not sufficient for me to do all the time as a main hobby).
3) I might post random posts about.. well, anything I find interesting enough to waste 2-3 hours by making a post about it.
Tl:dr – This place will become more lively again, but no schedules, no obligations, and no guarantees. PSA Over.
Little Inferno: Three-Hour Journo Test
Unless it is virtual fire. Then it is completely okay to play with it for ever and ever and everer and evererer…
Little Inferno is now obtainable on steam. You might want to keep that fact in mind (free tips brought to you by Tomorrow Corporation). It’s a short, charming game about burning things – all kinds of things, from toys and plushies and bricks to trophies and planets and chainsaws and squirrels. It’s made by the creators behind World Of Goo, and if anything’s certain, it’s that the artstyle, sense of humour and narrative methods have all carried over.
If this doesn’t remind you of World Of Goo, then… then you should also play World Of Goo.
Little Inferno is a trifle of a game – it is very short, it is made as a mimicry of modern iOS games with their infinite unlock-by-money and wait-to-play mechanics. It has a list of catalogues containing stuff to burn, and you unlock said catalogues by burning stuff you have access to. You get money by burning stuff, and you spend slightly less money on buying more stuff to burn. While unlocking things, you get brief letters from your neighbour and the “Weather Man” telling you brief snippets about the world of Little Inferno. The meat of the game, however, is in the combinations of things that you burn – burning the right things together is a “combo” that gives you.. well, extra stuff so you can burn the next batch of things bettererer. “And that’s pretty much it.” – Jim Rossignol, of RockPaperShotgun. Read the rest of this page »
Dishonored: Good For (up to) Two Playthroughs of Fun!
By now, I assume most of the people who are following the gaming industry ‘big news’ have at the very least formed some kind of an opinion of Dishonored. Maybe that it sucks. Maybe that it rocks. Maybe that they hate all the world for spoiling the tutorial. Maybe that they got as far as X and they think that Y is a superb innovation, but P is not. Why P? WHO CARES. At any rate, this game is big, this game has been gushed over so hard that its code has drowned in an Olympic pool of gushjuice, and I’ve had the time to play it through three times, step back, let it settle a bit, and reflect. And all that reflection has sprouted the following thought: Dishonored is a game you don’t want to replay more than exactly twice.
ART. How’s that for a source of argument?
