I've been helping a friend out with a render he needs to get done real quick. He's in the middle of purchasing a real computer so I offered to render it for him with my collection of networked friends/machines. Currently totaling around 70ghz on a good day.
Heres the original scene he handed me, It's pretty rough, most of it supplied by the client and with all sorts of inverted normals and light leaking issues which I fixed for him:
I played for a while with the lighting and render settings to get to render faster and more realistically:
Here the Movie below:
It's still very rough, especially in some places. And H264 Codec conversion seemed to screw up the color balance making it a but yuck and desaturated, oh well.
Some other shots from the animation:
Heres the original scene he handed me, It's pretty rough, most of it supplied by the client and with all sorts of inverted normals and light leaking issues which I fixed for him:
I played for a while with the lighting and render settings to get to render faster and more realistically:
Here the Movie below:
It's still very rough, especially in some places. And H264 Codec conversion seemed to screw up the color balance making it a but yuck and desaturated, oh well.
Some other shots from the animation:
Helped tweak a render for a friend, the model is not finished and it was just a quick play to make it look more photographic:
Heres the original render before tweaks:
Heres the original render before tweaks:
Starcraft
The best Real Time Strategy game ever made
I'm eagerly anticipating the next iteration of the game 11 years after the first one! It's been long overdue
It's really taken a decade for computers to get to the point where they can recreate the graphics of the original 2D game but in full 3D. So I'm glad they waited till now to do it, and I hope they do it properly!
The original required all but a 90mhz processor and 16mb of ram! And is still updated to this day, and despite first requiring the now ancient Mac OS 7.6 and Windows 95 it still runs today on the latest Intel Macs running os 10.5 (a full 8 OS cycles later)
It's a bit low poly still as it has to work on a full range of computers, the game is'nt meant to be on the bleeding edge, It's not a FPS, it needs to be accessible and run at a high FPS with thousands of units on the screen.
I just noticed how the units and building for Terran have changed in Starcraft 2 as they are working on it still.
On the left are the new units, on the right the old ones, which appear more cartoony and less defined/low poly looking.
Thank god they fixed that, it looked awful before. Looking at it still though some units/buildings in the other races look like they need a rehaul too, hopefully they are still working on that in the same manner... hangon.. yup looks like they are indeed loking at screenshots stuff is changed every screenshot almost:
Starcraft 1 of course went through massive changes as it was being built, starting all the way back in 1996. I've managed to dig up some old alpha screenshots of that below.
Ooh just found a website with some more information on units changes:
Link: www.starcraftwire.net --- P1
The above unit has been removed entirely.. thankfully!
yay looks like the zerg are also getting up-ressed:
Not bad considering these units are about 40 pixels wide when displayed in game
:-P
And now for some really really old screenshots below:
The Zerg race was originally known as the "Nightmarish Invaders".... lol
Link: www.sclegacy.com --- starcraft-evolution-12
Link: home.planet.nl
1996:
A rather curious video of the beta version:
Link: uk.youtube.com
And then the final version of Starcraft as we know it:
Man I just found my old games:
Yah I'm a nerd, and yes that's 3 copies of Starcraft:
And yes that one is still in It's wrapping-ish
I bought one copy and the cd key did'nt work online, so they sent me another copy, by mistake they sent me 2 new copies, only one of which I think worked online I think? I really can't remember
Ah and six or 7 years later I'm still playing the damn thing
:-D
zim
Ok where have I been and what have I been upto!
... not much ...
Working on this and that, but mostly... I hate to admit it... I've been lost in playing Fallout 3 and now GTAIV
Major productivity boosting stuff, both games easily have a 100 hours of play time in them before completion.
Both amazing games, if you can look past a few bugs and your machine is high spec.
I have finally solved my light math/ auto exposure problem thanks to Wesley Bourne, I'll be posting more on that when I get some good examples of it together...
But really, nothing much to report other than lots of game playing and mince pie eating really.. tis the season to get fat and sleep loads.
Oh and I moved ISP to O2 and right now I can highly recommend them especially if your already a O2 mobile customer as you get money off. i've downloaded 70gb and Uploaded 60gb already and I've only been on a few weeks. Nice and fast!
I realized something rather profoundly obvious the other day, how when I need to or have to do something I offload it onto the future so... I'll do it tomorrow, or later.. as if the me doing it later is another person.. offloading work to someone else, but of course.. that other person is me. So it really does nothing but delay the inevitable. Your going to be just as 'you' later as you are now, and the work is going to be just as boring then and your going to want to offload it onto someone else or your future self just as much then too.
I just found it rather funny, how internally I felt or had this idea that doing something later was like another person or something, hard to describe. It's hard living and dealing with the NOW all the time we build up all these concepts of the future and life as a line and progression when really all there is is 'now', so offloading into the future is just a way of pissing off my future 'now'.
I was thinking how if I had done something hard or important every day for the last year.. 5 years or so on.. how id be rewarding myself now, all the hard work would have been done by someone else, a past me and id be enjoying it now. That's another interesting way of looking at it, give your future 'now' a gift instead of offloading work onto it, think how your future 'now' will feel if you go and get that work out the way right now.
I know what I mean
:-)