Wow, I’ve been utterly busy (physically) because I have been moving all my stuff from my room to a new house nearby! No internet for a moment but that doesn’t matter because I have flew back to my parent’s house muahahaha. Free internet, free foods/drinks, free everything. T_T

Anyway I realized that in the new Blender, you can actually switch interaction mode to Maya! It means that most of the shortcut keys that are related to scene interaction (grab, rotate, scale, etc.) will be changed to just like Maya (W, E, R, and so on). I think they are trying to convert Maya users…

I will start to program again while enjoying my holiday muahahahahaha~

Another new feature in Blender 2.5 Beta is… Indirect Lighting!! Doesn’t the name sound cool?

It looks cool, too!

But unfortunately, ray-tracing method is not yet implemented. For now, the only working solution is through approximation

Although it won’t be as physically accurate as ray-tracing, but the result is still looking pretty good!

And by the way, I’m using Blender’s Internal Renderer (software renderer) and YES, it supports indirect lighting, which, other softwares like Maya and 3D Studio Max don’t have this thing in their software renderers and they have to depend on an external renderer (such as MentalRay) to do the job.

This is how to make the object to sort of glowing and emitting light. Just set the “emit” value higher than zero and see the magic happen.

Interesting!!

Well, one of the latest features in Blender 2.5 is volumetric material. So I quickly did some tests on that particular feature:

Maybe I’m not too farmiliar with the settings yet, it looks kinda cartoony lol.

Cloud formation in Blender and Maya are both different (at least I haven’t found the way to do it the Maya way).

In Maya you would use a 3d container and set some settings to get the cloud, but I did that manually in Blender, using several procedural cloud textures to deform the mesh into cloud-like shapes and apply a volumetric material onto it to form the clouds.

That’s all for today.

This is one of my college assignments. I’m not very good at animating stuffs.

Background music taken from Elephant Dreams.

Still remember this piece of work I did previously?

Yes I know there are glitches that aren’t fixed but anyway… I’m trying to create different types of environments for experimental and educational purposes. I like natural environment more (and its hard) so I decided to go along and create a few for fun.

The one above is a lake within a thick forest; water gives a much interesting subject to the image, rather than just trees everywhere. So I wanna focus on making an environment that has a huge volume of water, and that’s sea.

So I started yesterday night, spending few hours to crack up the new version of Blender (2.5 beta) which totally changed (both UI and shortcut key) but I got used to it very quickly because in-fact the newer version is much easier to navigate through.

I did looked at several references of how a tropical sea looks like. It has a more vibrant tint of blue and some subtle white color as if the sea isn’t very deep and your sight can reach to the bottom of the sea. White sand is always sexy isn’t it.

Other than that I also realized the specular of the water is quite sharp as well. Otherwise it will look more like plastic than fluid.

I also did a long shot to see how it look like. I put a cube on top of the water to see the shadow and reflection and it both look kinda ok to me!

More fun stuff coming up.

Classes ended! Holidays!!

A lot of things to do during this holidays. Keep going!

Hmm the previous post gone. Something wrong my my blog. @.@”

Anyway I’m not dead lol, just a little busy lately. I’ll post some updates here very soon. Meanwhile, enjoy these songs:

I found some photos on flickr! It’s taken by a guy from lowyat.net.

Yeah that’s me, hahahaha. I was showing off our game demo.

The one below is me showing off my kick-ass (not really) level editor.

This game has highest chance to win, will be available on facebook soon I think:

This guy uses Unity Engine, kind of surprise:

This guy even more ‘geng’, he uses… Unreal Dev Kit… I’m not very sure whether it’s worth to sacrifice hardware power for simple game like this or not:

One of the members of this team is my facebook friend. Their idea is quite interesting as well:

This game is very fun, I would certainly play it when release:

Some other miscellaneous games that were presented that day:

This is the place we did our presentation. Cool place huh?

Finally the presentation is over. It was organized at a beautiful holiday villa located in Cyber Jaya:

Quite a lot of people went there, not only for Casual Games but also Animation, Comic, and Mobile Games categories.

That’s how it looked like in the ballroom:

That’s exactly the place that I stood and presented my idea.

This year, the competition was quite tough and different from previous years. There are many 3D games and facebook games ideas that popped into the competition, and like what I’d expected, people started to throw in UDK and Unity engine into the competition. I don’t mean it but not every game is suitable to use those 2 engines especially the first one because it require a high-end gaming PC to run it. I’ve tested UDK on my intel laptop and it wouldn’t even launch.

Panel of judges, very experienced people from the industry:

In my opinion our team has strong technical background, what we lack is actually a strong mind to come out with very interesting, innovative new ideas to generate game values for our game. We will definitely look into that. Got to read more on game design stuff than the technical ones.

These are screenshots taken from our demo that had been shown during the presentation:

With our own level editor, it’s quite easy to create the whole playable level in rapid speed. I did 70% of the demo level in 1 night!

The screenshots that you see here is around 25% of the whole level.

I’d rushed for this demo reel so it has several problems (and of course I have avoided some the problems during demonstration):

• no lightmap is applied
• no real-time shadow on characters
• broken collision system on protagonist
• no particle system
• far-from-perfect AI

however it has:

• animated textures (by scrolling texture coordinate in real-time)
• octree optimization
• simple path finding system
• triangle-based collision detection
• simple game logic and event system
• simple XML scripting system

I’ll have to concentrate on my college projects for a moment because I have missed some of it so I have to keep it back to track. The results will be announced 2 weeks later. Good luck to everyone!

Been there, did that, and met the people. Great experience indeed!

Below are some team mates who went for the presentation with me.

Kong CC aka JayZEE who helped me to navigate slides, and also did several 3D models for the demo:

Left: Chong CH who did a lot of concept art, 3d models and he also did animation for the protagonist; Right: Goh YS who is an insanely patient person in rigging characters and animating them:

GREAT JOB PEOPLE!!!

Yesterday we went to Cyber Jaya for briefing session regarding the competition.

We departed from Sunway at 1pm.

After half an hour or so we finally arrived at this beautiful city.

There are many nice buildings and bridges like this:

MSC’s MDec office is just in-front:

Most of their offices look like this?! Wow I wanna work there!

Because we arrived a bit too early so we decided to drive around the city.

Then, we found this…

Cyber police station:

Astronaut’s car:

o_O”

Anyway we also went to LKW University and spying around

Don’t get deceived by its outlook. Their classrooms and toilets look pretty much like a factory.

We also went to their gallery. VERY HUGE gallery, and it has several storey in total but what we can see mostly are large prints that tell you how great their university is, and how great is their headmaster, but nothing to show their students’ capability.  You basically can only see their headmaster’s face all alonggggg the corridoor and almost 80% of the gallery is fill up with his pictures, wow. We don’t buy those bullshit don’t we?

After that we realize its time to go for the briefing session so we quickly went back to MSC office.

Then we realized we went to the wrong one lol. It supposed to be at the MSC Innovation Centre, which is opposite the office lol~~

Anyway we still managed to make it on time:

It’s good! Next week we are gonna be pitching our idea at this wonderful place:

Sweet!