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JISCR
2001-11-11 00:42:52
It was 10:30 PM and I realized... I hadn't eaten yet. No, not just dinner, not just lunch, but breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I hadn't eaten all day, not even a snack. You see what happens when I get too involved in a project? It wasn't like I was starving either, I had to make a conscious effort to eat. I tell ya, lord help my opponents if I ever am possessed to take up a hunger strike.
Hmm... since everyone is talking about Atari's and the like I have something that is older than even that. Actually, I have two things that beat those advanced game systems :) The first is an old Intellevision thingy from Sears. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's basically a big box. On this box you have a button on either side and a big knob in the middle. You also have a collection of six buttons where you can choose what game you want to play. Do you want to play Breakout? How about Breakaway? Pong? Pong Basketball? Pinball? There's another one there but it's another derivation of Pinball. The second thing I have is MUCH older. We're talking 1950's. No, it's not a pinball machine. Actually, it's right up the alley of anime lovers... it's a Pochinko Machine! If you've seen Roujin Z you know what I'm talking about. The robot rampages into this crowded arcade with this flat, verticle games. It rips into the cieling and a whole mess of metal balls come falling out. That's Pochinko. It's kinda like pinball, only there are no paddles, a bunch of nails which bumb the ball around, and a collection of what look to be lotus/cherry blossoms that you need to land the balls in. Let me tell you, there are a LOT of little metal balls with this thing. I find those things in the darndest places. Even found one in the innards of my computer... now how the hell did it get in there?
The model is coming along, although I bet I know what the extra $2000 is for when you get 3DStudio Max instead of Rhino, and it's not the rendering engine. Rhino lets you make whatever you want, but you're going to have to work for it. It's got a load of neat little tools designed to help automat the tasks, the problem is that most of the time they don't work, or they work poorly. Try a simple boolean operation "cut this cube out of that sphere." Apparently it may not be that simple. Instead, you will have to explode that cube into it's component surfaces, then split each of those surfaces individually with the surface of the sphere, then split the sphere's surface with the cube's surfaces, and then, one by one, join them together. Now, take 18 different objects each with ten times the complexity and you have an idea as to what I have to do for a single ship part. It took me an hour to do what I should have been able to do in twenty seconds if everything worked.
So, I'm in the "adding detail" stage. I've tested what I have in Bryce, so the model is "structurally sound" with no gaping holes or stray polygons. I put the grapler arms on. Well, they're more like cylinders as I have no intention of animating the things. That has got to be the most poorly defined part of the whole ship. The artwork shows them in about three different sizes and the model has them affecting the hull in ways that are not hinted at in the show and would be a pain to model. So I said "screw it" and just made something that looked right :) Overall I'm pleased with how it's turning out. -
CJDAO...
2001-11-08 20:26:43
Nice to read that you're back pyro... I was begining to think you fell off the face of the earth :)
The basic main body of the Outlaw Star is done. Everything else looks to be rather easy in comparison. Of course, there's a lot of "everything else" still to do. I need to make the engines, the cockpit, not to mention cutting apart that main body in order to add all the neat little details, and this is where the next problem comes in. Just how much detail do I add? Allow me to explain the software I'm dealing with so you understand my delema. First I use a NURBS modeler (Rhino, if you've been paying attention) to build the Outlaw Star. This means nothing to most of you, but it's basically how you probably imagine people modeling something. You have four viewpoints, one for each plane and one for a perspective view, and you basically draw what you want with the hundreds upon hundreds of tools. Then, I take this model and I turn it into a mesh, which basically turns the thing into a bunch of polygons. So, sphere stops being a sphere and instead looks more like those geodesic domes made up of a bunch of traingles. It looks like a sphere, but the flat edge in your vision as well as lighting can give it away for what it is. So I take this mesh, which has just lost all of it's nice curves, into Bryce 3D, which isn't a very good modeler (I can only build stuff out of spheres, cubes, and tori, but it has a damn good terrain generator) but can animate objects. Bryce gives me the option of smoothing out those polygons, to the point where you can't even see them anymore. So what's my problem? Well, three things with this. First, Bryce doesn't like models with large amounts of polygons. It tends to give up importing them somewhere down the line. So my model will need to be broken up into X amount of parts depending on how complicated it is and on how many polygons I want to make the mesh out of. Again, cut back the number of polygons and smooth it out, right? Wrong. A low amount of polygons will make the model look VERY facited, so I would need to tell Bryce to do a LOT of smoothing, which doesn't discriminate between the objects that are supposed to be curved and those I want to be straight. In the end it would look like I made a plastic model and exposed it to extream heat, melting the thing. So that's not good. So, I need to cut back on the detail some. No problem again, as generally I could add a texturemap that would do most of the work very efficiently, right? Wrong again, as Bryce's ability to texture objects is crap. I mean, I could if I had a year, but it's not practicle to. So, this is where I get sneaky. The OS has all these little seams in it. If I break the model where these seams are supposed to be and import them into Bryce, I can use the smoothing obtion to "melt" those edges, thus making the seams visible and I have the detail I want without the huge increase in polygons. However, I have to be careful with this. If the edges are at too extream and angle, the seams won't appear unless I really up the smoothing, which could make the object look bad again. So, this get's complicated really quick. Building is the easy part :) -
WNYX3D!
2001-11-07 02:24:49
Tonight I sat down and played with Rhino some more. However, this time I decided to attempt the OTHER half of the main body of the Outlaw Star. Let me tell you something, there WILL be a good OS model in my next vid! Yes, it was a success! Of course, this was just a rough attempt with little though to scale. I just wanted the concept to work. The bad news is that I had to manipulate Rhino ten times more than I wanted to in order to get the meshes to join correctly, so this part of the body is going at the top of my list when I actually get to building the thing.
Now, more bad news. Aparently cladMdec wasn't as good as I thought. It still has problems reading one of the episodes on that first disc. Unlike smartripper, it still allowed me to rip the others off. It's ashame to, as I really wanted footage from here. I have acess to another computer with a newer DVD-ROM drive that I'll try it on, otherwise I'll need to be really creative in how I get this footage, or drop it completely (sniff).
I've been listening to the song over and over and over and over again trying to plan this video out. It's going to be REALLY tough to pull this off creatively. I can understand now why no one has made the pairing. Don't get me wrong, the lyrics and the music match perfectly with the characters of the series... it's just that the animation doesn't lend itself to the song in many parts. So this means I'm going to be doing a lot of photoshoping and relying a little more on the 3D. I gauruntee you this video will look and feel good, but this is not going to be a good "hey, look at this series, it's cool" vid as practically none of the footage will exist as-is. I'm actually kind of hoping that it will confuse those who've seen the series and get them asking "where the hell was that scene?" While getting thos who haven't seen OS to think that it actually uses a mentionable amount of CGI (not just that cylindrical thing in the third to last episode). So, in summary, the footage that will be in this video will in no way represent the actual footage of Outlaw Star, so don't judge the series from this :) -
Roadblocks and Detours
2001-11-03 19:50:08
I came upon an interesting problem with the first disc of OS. It seems Smartripper didn't want to unlock the disc, but did enjoy locking up my system. So, after doing a little more research and ten Blue Screens of Death latter, I found a decent replacement in the form of cladMdec. Although it doesn't offer much in terms of flexibility, it did unlock the DVD correctly without any fuss. So, if anyone else out there is having similar problems, check this program out as a backup (I still like SR better, but it's always nice to have a good plan B). Anyway, that seems to be the only problem so far. The second disc works fine, and everything in the second volume checks out as well. I haven't tried the third discs yet except in my stand-alone player. I don't think I'll have a problem with it though as they played perfectly fine (the first disc was acting a bit screwy and needed to be wiped off).
Someone else has reviewed MIMH! I'm so happy! Thank you Machine, and you gave me high numbers to, which is always appreciated. Although the vast majority of your comments seem aimed at the series itself... I had a good laugh though. Hey, everyone needs to pad their usefullness rating at some point :) Anyway, I'll make your review visible. It'll be useful for those who haven't seen the series yet and are wondering if it'd be worth the look. And everyone else, if you've seen SMJ, by all means, download my vid (and review). TR's server got a huge boost in bandwidth when a bootleg site got shut down. It still caps the number of connections, so using a program like Go!Zilla is your best bet. - UJNBV 2001-11-01 17:40:55 Finally, the OS DVDs have arrived! Now I can get more than 10 seconds of footage! Woohoo! Since my site was shut down I haven't really felt like working on the OS model. I don't quite get the connection, but it's there. Anyway, I played around with it a little more and I'm pretty confident I can sit down and accurately model half of the basic structure. I haven't even attempted the other half. Originally I thought the main body of the ship was just a long cylinder with an elongated semi-sphere capping off the front end. It's a bit more complicated than that. Instead, the main body is more of a squished cylinder, while the end is this wierd combination between an elongated sphere and a rectangular cube. It only seems easy to model, but getting the proportions correct is the killer. However, I think I've got it pretty much down. More difficult is the thicker portion of the body which gives it that spade-like look. All the curves seem to start at a point that's just plain inconvinient. However, once I get that done, the rest of the modeling will be a piece of cake, although there will still be a lot to do. The other hurdle will be importing the model into Bryce. It likes to put restrictions on the complexity of the models I can import, and sometimes it likes to add stray polygons to the mesh, or subtact a few. It could get very messy.
JOURNAL: alternatefutures (Jim Schuler)
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