FX Wars #14, First Previz!

Awright! Here's my first previz for my fx wars sequence. It's gonna be in the open category. Not going to have much time for modelling, so I'm gonna try to do as much as possible in post.

www.alvinvfx.com/temp/fxWarsPreviz01.zip

=)

Oldie Cameras!

I came across this site called Junk Store Cameras, the owner reviews and used a whole chunk of old cameras, it's both interesting and entertaining! You have to check out the Gala Section!

http://junkstorecameras.com/

And the gala section @ http://merrillphoto.com/galacollection.htm

3D Scanner from ya webcam!

Got this hit whilst searching for stuff at work, it looks extremely interesting. All you need is a webcam (I think my DV Cam may work better? Not sure if it has wdm drivers...) and a little time to set up a calibrated platform for the object to work with.

http://www.cs.tu-bs.de/rob/david.html

I'm not a hardcore modeler, and for solo projects, it may be a great time saver. The mesh would probably need TONS of cleanup, but I'd just use it as a reference to get my proportions correct and re-model a new mesh over it.

Check this out!

Kaki left me a link to this cool clip on youtube!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTi4zOdz09I

HK Post house and FX Wars!

http://www.digitalmagic.com.hk/galleries.html

And oh, FX Wars is starting up again @ CGTalk, the topic this time is Disintegration!

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=139&t=452203

Still haven't figured out which effects to do. I definitely have forgotten the effects from Indiana Jones, Mummy Returns and a few others. Don't have those on dvd, time to rent or buy?

Random Links

Funnies! http://www.dinoignacio.com/movies.html

Spent the weekend battling minor PC problems (-urge-to-format-strong-), but otherwise it's still rainy, and not much chance to bring my bike out and stretch my legs :(

I spend awhile today playing the flute again, it is simply a delight to be able to play along (or best as I could) with Scott August's New Fire album. The few songs I played along to were in G and F#, perfect for the new flute. I used to "play" parts of "Heart Of the Sky" (which is in the key of G) on my A flute, and it's a simple pleasure to be able to finally play in key. It's kinda like Karaoke, only with a musical instrument :)

"Mockingbird Canyon" was in F#, could keep up for the slower parts, but I'm still not used to the reach of the F# flute. I guess my paws aren't as big as I thought :P

I need to knock my head

The flute sound better now. Why? 'cause I was using a wrong fingering for the hi notes! Duh! I simply played my usual tunes exactly as my Sparrow Hawk on the new flute, but evidently, the fingering is slightly differnt.

Time for more practice :)

Flute Pics!

Here's a pic of my new AO PF Flute along side my training flute, a Sparrow Hawk from High Spirits. I've only spent about an hour on the new PF Flute, and am loving it. The finish is frankly, quite bad. Plus it doesn't look like the picture on the Amon Olorin Flutes website. It sound great, and as mentioned I can now play along with some of my favourite tracks. I think it is a great buy for two keys, and won't hesitate to recommend it. I'm going to be looking for leather strips of sorts to decorate this new flute :)

The key of G has a finger spacing quite larger than my Sparrow Hawk, so I'm still unable to perfectly cover all the holes, F# is quite a bit larger (check the pic!), and I am going to take a looong while before I can play on F# properly :) As mentioned before, the higher notes are quite easy to overblow, hope it's just my flute :)

Will post more pictures of the bird (or block) tomorrow :)

Yay, let's gripe.

Awright, haven't updated in months... what's new on my side? Nothing much, busy with work and all. If anything, I'm gonna be posting stuff here 'cause lots of guys in my office are posting stuff on their blogs too, so gonna join in the fun :)

Today's gripe: RAM. Took me about half an hour to figure out the post codes and all, seems like one of the pieces of ram in my main pc died. Yep. Was halfway through the Win2k (YES IT IS SO OLD) bootup, when it dropped to dos, and refused to boot. Spending some time on my dad's PC I figured the beeps then set things right. Now, i'm only on 1gb of ram, thankfully I'm not doing any heavy projects. Well that should change with the next VFX Wars on cgtalk :)

I just got my "belated" christmas present today! Yipee! It's a plastic NA Flute. I'll post pics, maybe even a YouTube test. For the NA Flute players, it's a two in one plastic flute with G and F# keys (woo!). G is totally lovely, I can now play along with some of Scott August's New Fire tracks... Love that CD. The G and F# are quite a different beast from my High Spirits A flute, for the first time, breath control became very important. I have to control my breathing significantly so as not to overblow the higher notes. The first few minutes of practice, I thought something was wrong with the flute, even took out my tuner, but it seems it's just operator error :)

Check back soon :)

Air Ball!

The final excercise in the Game Institute's C++ introductory program is to write an Air Ball game. The original demo for us to follow along uses bitmap graphics has a scoring system, but I decided to cut down the graphics to plain old GDI elipses :) Minor changes to the code, but I'm more interested in the algorithms, plus I'm not going into the gaming industry.

If you're interested to see what it looks like, click here!

Ping? Pong!

Yep took me a few days to get around to do it, but I got my variant of Pong working! It's simple stuff, just bouncing off the paddles and keeping track of the score. Next up is the final chapter :)

PONG!

Bouncing Balls anyone?

This is an exercise from the 2nd last chapter in my Game Institute C++ programming course. We have to do a bouncing ball simulation, basically just get the balls to bounce all over the screen.

In my implementation, I'm just using an Ellipse to represent my bouncing ball. For each ball though, I have class containing two vectors classes, the first to represent the X and Y position on screen, and the second vector a direction vector. Thus, per frame step, I look at the direction vector and add a certain amount into the position vector.

If you want to see the exe, click here. As I'm using some Game Institute code for the backbuffer and vector operations, I don't think I can post the source code up here. The next exercise before the next chapter will be a Pong implementation! Wee.... shouldn't be too difficult.

New Maxscript

Ok this is a very simple script I was working on to fix gimbal lock issues for lowmax rigs. The word "fix" isn't really very correct, it's more like a hack. The script basically adds another Euler XYZ controller into the rotation list (thus re-setting the rotation axes), and the animator continues work on that.

Hence the name, the GW Gimbal Hack/Fix. You can get it from my gallery page.

Also, been playing around with Maya Paint Effects, this is an awesome tool, I wish max had something similar. This is my test shot: http://www.alvinvfx.com/temp/bambooEnvironment.zip

Apart from the few bamboo meshes in the foreground, the ground cover and distant bamboo are all paint effects.

The objective of this shot was to understand some basic multipass maya rendering. I think Max's multipass controls are easier to understand, but heck I think I can whip up some mel once I get that mel scripting book :)

I will probably re-do the whole shot to include some perspective change (it's a pure nodal pan now), make it more of a daylight shot and see what kinda elements I can add. Right now, I didn't enable the PFX turbulence, perhaps I should try that my next time round.

Signing off...

Hmmm what's new on the horizon

I've been quite busy over the past few months, first up I've signed up for several courses over at the Game Institute (http://www.gameinstitute.com). I took up the Game Maths, as well as the C++ for game programmers I and II. I think Game Institute is an awesome online learning service - the coursework is straight and focused, but since I do have quite a bit of programming background, taking it up wasn't _too_ difficult... until at least the Windows API portions :)

Am I switching over to the game industry? Heck no! Basically I was going through the Max and Maya APIs, and didn't know what was all these windows programming stuff, so heck I thought this course would be a good pick me up. And yes it is. I would suggest if you are a pure newbie to C++, check out Ivor Horton's Learning Visual C++ 6. Yes, it's old, software wise, but the contents, such as the basics of programming, inheritance etc are not. Having switched to Java programming after my graduation, I kinda lost touch with pointers and all those memory management stuff. Just FYI, I'm using Visual Studio 2005 (standard edition btw), all the code works great.

Speaking of which, I was introduced to Maya about 3 months ago, and man, it's a blast! Sure, I hated the interface at first, but I got over it in about a fortnight, and I'm able to work on Max and Maya without getting confused over the keys. Well, most of the time :) Maya's simply huge, and thankfully, I had a whole chunk of Gnomon DVDs to learn off. Check with your local library, they may stock a good part of Gnomon's Maya range. Alex Alverez is simply one of the better DVD teachers I've had the chance to learn from. Apart from that, I'm still waiting for my copy of Complete Maya Programming: An Extensive Guide to MEL and C++ API to arrive from Amazon. Sheesh, they're taking like 2 weeks to get the stuff together to be shipped. Perhaps some of the audio cds I got were too obscure lol.

Ah well, will write more soon. I'm on the last two chapters of my Game Institute coursework for Win32 programming, after which I'll be heading into the Maya API :) Since the Max API doesn't have any recent books at all, I thought i'd go with something more current.

Let's start er up!

Hey I'm Alvin and I'll be your host to this "What's New" page for my site. Yep, it ain't a blog mate! I'll be posting bits and pieces of my latest work here, and to see how lazy I am :)