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.

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!!!

I found something very interesting from my old backup CD dated back to 2005.

In the CD I have some screenshots that show the modding works that I did during my secondary school period.

Well, it’s kind of illegal to do this thing but still pretty fun to work on.

Modified monster:

I see ghost!!

You need minions to concur the planet!

I also had several custom-made items, weapons, NPC and characters but I just couldn’t find it in the CD.

I also tried to edit a little on the 3D map. The first thing that I discovered was I am able to remove some of the 3d models like so…

first time get to know what the heck is a lightmap

…and then replace it with another model, like so

Another model that I had it replaced:

Actually after that I did a map entirely from scratch, except using their own 3D models. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any screenshot in the CD.

Good ‘ol moment indeed, haha!

Last week after our submission of the design doc, we didn’t do anything at all because we have to continue to work on our graduation project and some other assignments.

Finally, yesterday I started to work on the protagonist. Based entirely on the original concept art, I changed the style a bit, did an orthographic plan and started to work on the 3D model. The process went much faster by refering to the orthographic plan. Okay cool.

More to come.

Did some doodling again.

Gotta use this one for my portfolio site’s banner! Oh yeah my portfolio site will be up very soon.

Transferring mesh object from one modelling software to another is a mess. Recently I tried to export a million-poly mesh from Blender to the lead artist for normal map baking and he’s using 3D Studio Max. I tried several well-known formats: .OBJ and .3DS but none if  ‘em work.

I tried to use Maya to export to .FBX and .DAE also and didn’t work as well.

Tons of vertices all over the screen:

Then I suddenly had a stupid idea.

I exported an .OBJ file from Blender. Imported it to Maya, no problem occured. Then exported again to .OBJ from Maya. Yeap, exported to .OBJ twice. But you know what, it works!! o_O” It can now be imported to 3D Studio Max without any problem… wow.

I can see the file size of the second .OBJ increased slightly, probably some information that required by 3D Studio Max in order to import correctly (but is optional for Maya). Anyway 3D Studio Max is well-known in poor import/exporting foreign file formats so… well…

Maybe I should install 3D Studio Max to test out those stuff by myself.

I did some doodlings on architectures, like these:

and one of my friends made ‘em into 3D models. Both the models look very similar to the concept art, which is good.

But I realize there are sooooo many hidden surfaces and double vertices, which took me some time to clean it all up.

However it took less time than building the whole thing up from scratch, and the results are pretty amazing:

350 poly –> 175 poly…

1750 poly –> 680 poly…

I’m sure it will look pretty good with textures.