Sunday 7th September 2003
Wow. I was gone a long time. Neat.
Funny story about the numberplate. It's technically faked--it's part of an .lwo file, after all. But it actually began as a scan of my personalised plates which expired in 1993. Then I just altered the colours to fit the Floriduh scheme and replaced the numbers on the jpeg I found through images.google.com.
Funny story about the DeLorean. It's faked. Although, just to be weird, I actually bought this thing at renderosity.com. Of course, it was thirty-five bucks when I bought it. Now it's down to thirty. And it lacks an interior. I'll probably build that into it someday....
The beginnings of Witherford Manor. Which is in no way a direct ripoff of the mansion from Resident Evil. Seriously. They're not really very alike. For example, the mansion in Res is finished. Also, the layout's a lot different. You'll get that later....
Don't laugh at the trees. They're less than a hundred polygons each. Also, they scream Nintendo64, don't they? We're faking a videogame here; this is important.
This is kinda funny, in a way. I'm rendering this stuff at 320*180, without any shadows, or reflexions, or refractions, or raytracing in general. It's all singlepass production without any antialiasing at all. Short of dropping down to shaded solids or wireframes, it's impossible to get LightWave7.5 to render any faster or simpler than this. And still: the car looks pretty good. The windows are reflecting the 'sky' [which is just a gradient scale in the background] and the mirrors are reflecting the 'ground' [the bottom half of the gradient scale]. Not bad for an image that took a fifth of a second to render....
Did I mention that this isn't done yet? Eventually, this amazingly impressive holographic representation of a solid wall will be replaced with a more common garage door.
I'm actually beginning to wonder why I bothered dropping a Countach and a Viper into this thing at all. They show up in the animation for all of fifteen frames. And, even then, they're not real obvious. Which would be fine if their existences didn't happen to triple the rendering times. Oh well....
Of course, I was going to add an AH64 Apache, too. And have it kinda fly along near the DeLorean the whole time. But the file got kinda broken on me somehow and the rotors got fused inside the fusilage. I can fix it; I just have to UVMap the thing, figure out which little bits are which, unweld those little bits, cutpaste them out of the main file into a secondary layer, and reassemble them back into something useful. Which is kinda like building a normal Monogram Apache model, if that involved starting with a big lump all melted together, excavating the little pieces from the amalgammated mess, identifying the things the slivers belong to now that they're just 63,523 little triangles, and gluing them all together the right way without being off by a whole millimetre. The only real difference is that working with a model IRL doesn't run into your RAM ceiling and cause you to pass out for five minutes every time you move one of the 63,523 slivers.
I'll fix it. Just...not right now.
If it helps, there's some news.
Most of what I've been doing lately involves videogames. Playing them, mostly. But also taking them apart and seeing how they're made in the first place. Which kinda takes the fun out of things, of course. Videogames are basically just little collisionmapped bounding boxes with prerendered images stuck to them. Things looked a lot cooler back when I was assuming that these games were rendering in realtime.
At least now I know why I can't get the same thing to happen in LightWave.
On the other hand, now that I get how these things happen, I can get the same thing to happen in LightWave. Or something a lot like it. Or, really, something slightly better at nearly the same speed. Something like that.
So. I've been working on that all this time.
Naturally, the stuff I've got done so far is A) not really done yet, and B) not really small. I've got a bunch of testrun DivX files averaging five megs each and containing a bunch of polygons with really minimal texturing. If you really wanna see an example, this one's about a megabyte.
Of course, there's something laughably ironic about FLORIDA; GREMLIN; SUNSHINE STATE. I can't stand Floriduh. Which is one of the reasons I'm creating a fictional town there.
More later....
--Gremlin