GeneralPosted by Nic Mon, April 13, 2009 12:17:21Well, ,the scene from a movie contest is over, and I managed to get a submission in.
It's a shame I had to solo the project, as the people I was hoping to
get in on it weren't interested in the end. I quickly noticed (again - I think I have starry eyes ambitioun syndrome) that for
all my ambition for this competition, there was only so much that could
be done by one person part timing. This resulted in a lot of modelling from the early stage getting cut when it came down to texturing, a shame but inevitable.
Biggest lesson learned
though - don't use try to use CryEngine2 in combination with Vista.
Unfortunately, by the time I found that out, it was too late to install
XP on a second partition or attempt to switch to another engine, and
got stuck with a crashtastic performance and some vital features like
the Time of Day settings inaccessible to me.
All in all though, while I don't expect to win anything, it was a great fun contest and I hope another turns up soon. Check out more submissions from other teams and individuals
here (some of them are really worth seeing, I pale in comparison. Soon, soon...)
GeneralPosted by Nic Thu, February 05, 2009 15:24:14A freelance project in, nda says you won't know any more about it until it's complete and handed in. Suffice it to say I'm back to rigging, with bits of modelling and support work for the rest of the team - just as I like it.
I'm really getting a taste for rigging, in hindsight something I should've pushed a bit more. It was never my focus, but it always seems to be the first thing alotted to me in any project ;]
Besides that, I'm filling the gaps with little bits of speed modelling and such, and it looks like gameartist.net will be putting up another low-poly modeling contest next week -
[link]. Don't miss it, goodies to be had from what I read!
GeneralPosted by Nic Thu, January 15, 2009 16:19:28New site is up, minus the blog. Wordpress is giving some trouble - getting it to fit in snugly with the rest of the site is a bit more difficult than expected, so until that gets sorted out, I'm sticking with the old.
GeneralPosted by Nic Fri, December 12, 2008 14:38:41The gang behind Path to War is banding together again for a new project despite being spread wide across Europe. Codenamed Croc, it brings plenty of organisational challenges - pipeline being the big one. Jo has managed to get an ftp server up, which should have plenty of space to keep us going for awhile, while I just rounded off an XSI ftp upload plugin, and am working on a download equivalent.
Meanwhile, I'm also prototyping a quadriped (crocodile)rig for the same project, I have a little environment modelling and texturing for myself in the works, and gameartist.net keeps throwing up new speed challenges with which to distract me. I need to update my site with a little scrapbook for them.
Actually, I need to redo the site, clean up the workings, put in a less dumbed down blog... but that's for another day :]
edit: scrap that, new website design is done, just waiting on my web-codemonkey to find some time to implement it. Man I can't wait to get rid of this piece of mess, it's way too confusing
Scripts and ToolsPosted by Nic Mon, October 13, 2008 14:01:57ngbLightLister is a little tool for XSI written in Python, in the spirit of 3ds Max's light lister. It gives the user and easy overview of all the lights in a scene for more comfortable comparison and tweaking of the main feature.
The user can choose to view either all or a selection of the lights in the scene. Currently, the editable parameters are the
render visibility (On),
name,
intensity,
color,
shadow on/off,
umbra,
falloff on/off,
falloff mode,
falloff exponent and the
falloff start and
end. I decided to keep top the basic functions for now to keep the window width within reasonable limits. Some time in the future I may make a new release with further parameters accessible using a tabbed interface.
Note that expanding the window further reveals more precise color controls, but at the expense of vertical space. I would recommend against using this with a large number of lights inpected, or thing might start getting cluttered real quick, but I guess that's personal preference.
To use it, just
download the plugin, place it in a workgroup, such as the default user folder (on Windows-
username\Softimage\XSI_
versionnumber\Application\Plugins) and you will find the tool snugly nested under the
View menu inside XSI. Enjoy, and any comments and suggestions are welcome :]
-Nic
GeneralPosted by Nic Sun, September 28, 2008 23:03:46The site seems to be shaping up nicely, and the majority of it is now up. Tweaks and secondary content will now slowly be filing in as I find the time for it. This blog may disappear soon, to be replaced with another which offers a bit more customizability. I don't like how the current one allows me to do exactly zero to make it fit in with the rest of the site. Mind, the alternative seems to allow me to do too much, so it might be a while before I figure that one out and implement it ;)
Back to doing some scripting for XSI now, man does it feel good to be using my brain again after months of mindless pixelpushing...
Ayo
