AuthorTopic: Official Off-Topic Thread 2014  (Read 168993 times)

Offline PixelPiledriver

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2014

Reply #290 on: November 29, 2013, 06:52:16 am
Happy Turkey Day!!!!!
And knowing that it is, we seek what it is... ~ Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, Chapter 1

Offline Charlieton

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2014

Reply #291 on: December 03, 2013, 09:54:08 pm
Working on that Secret Santa gift...

You know, the greatest gift to the community overall would be a proper theme for the forum :angel:

I hope cyber Santa reads this!
Det skulle vara lätt för mig att säga att jag inte gillar dig, men det gör jag; tror jag

Offline Crow

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2014

Reply #292 on: December 03, 2013, 11:07:15 pm
Working on that Secret Santa gift...

You know, the greatest gift to the community overall would be a proper theme for the forum :angel:

I hope cyber Santa reads this!

Sorry, but.. :-[
Discord: Ennea#9999

Offline Vagrant

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2014

Reply #293 on: December 03, 2013, 11:11:21 pm
Someday



 :'(
« Last Edit: December 03, 2013, 11:13:46 pm by Vagrant »

Offline Mathias

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2014

Reply #294 on: December 16, 2013, 11:59:17 am
Long live The Blue Bomber.



(lines by a friend, shadin' by yours true)

Offline Ai

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2014

Reply #295 on: December 22, 2013, 06:54:08 am
I finally discovered and learnt Blender shape keys:


(actual render 320x240, too big to upload. Underlying shape being animated is a simple box with a subsurf modifier on it)

This is.. ASTONISHINGLY easy, not to mention really fun.

* Select the object you want to animate.
* Go to the object data panel (looks like a wireframe triangle with highlighted vertices) and hit the 'plus' button to add the 'basis' key
* And hit it again (with the 'basis' key selected) to add a key relative to the basis key (this will be called 'Key 1' for now).
* Turn up the 'Value' slider on Key 1 to 1.0 (so that you can see the changes you're making)
* Enter Edit mode (Tab key).
* Move/rotate/etc vertices til you arrive at a shape you like. Exit edit mode.
Then:
* You can adjust the 'Value' slider for any key to interpolate between it and the base object
* This works for all keys at once, so you can mix amounts of different shapes in (this is how I got the range of sproings and twitches-- mixing 2 or more keys)
* You can animate these shape changes by inserting keyframes for the Value slider on the relevant Shape keys.

That's my recap of what I learnt.
I also just discovered that you can apply keys inversely (set Min to a negative value, then adjust Value below zero) and/or at a greater magnitude than 100% of the change (set Max/Min to a higher/lower value, then adjust Value).  That's neat for crazy effects.

If you insist on being pessimistic about your own abilities, consider also being pessimistic about the accuracy of that pessimistic judgement.

Offline Ultimaodin

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2014

Reply #296 on: December 24, 2013, 08:41:35 pm
I'm officially the worst person ever. Couldn't even get my Secret Santa piece near complete.  :'(

@Ai - Looks quite fluid. I'm curious as to what you plan on using 3D for. if you are going to try it for games art I recommend not using anything like subsurf etc... as it adds a tonne of polygons The same goes for turbosmooth in 3DS max, so on and so forth.

@Mathias - that is awesome.

So, tomorrow (aka later today) I get a day of work. I miss my 4 hour shifts a night. These 10 hour days I've been doing this month have been rather taxing. Retail sucks to work in around December. That said I'll probably be spending this Christmas doing pixel art to try and finish this secret santa gift which is currently a disgrace. :(

Offline Lanarky

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2014

Reply #297 on: December 24, 2013, 09:22:10 pm
@Ai
That looks pretty cool! I used to use blender quite a bit, I taught myself mostly everything (I used to have dial-up, for like 30 mins a day) I never got good at animation, but I did make a script on BlenderArtists for faster navigation which is apparently built-in for 3D Max Studio or something. It's was mostly done, since it didn't get much attention. I couldn't figure out how to turn it into an extension, so it's just a script. It mainly sets the viewport to bounding box mode when using the middle mouse button, of scaling an object or moving it.

Made it cause laptops suck with blender.  :P

Offline Ai

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2014

Reply #298 on: December 24, 2013, 10:08:07 pm
I'm officially the worst person ever. Couldn't even get my Secret Santa piece near complete.  :'(

@Ai - Looks quite fluid. I'm curious as to what you plan on using 3D for. if you are going to try it for games art I recommend not using anything like subsurf etc... as it adds a tonne of polygons The same goes for turbosmooth in 3DS max, so on and so forth.
Mockups and animation tests. Never just guess if you can check. Since camera matching is a thing (see the BLAM addon, for static-image camera matching), results can be quite accurate to your drawn image setup, and for regular structures like buildings, you can put together useful frameworks with Array modifiers in no time at all
When I was doing this test I was thinking of body proportions. using shape key animation to test different values.

Sculpting is also amazing. CSG (via 'boolean' modifier) is terribly useful too.

Yeah, subsurf at least triples polygon count per level of subdivision on most meshes, but I don't care about realtime rendering, so I just keep the 'view' subdivision level low and let the 'render' one be as high as needed.

Quote
@Ai
That looks pretty cool! I used to use blender quite a bit, I taught myself mostly everything (I used to have dial-up, for like 30 mins a day) I never got good at animation, but I did make a script on BlenderArtists for faster navigation which is apparently built-in for 3D Max Studio or something. It's was mostly done, since it didn't get much attention. I couldn't figure out how to turn it into an extension, so it's just a script. It mainly sets the viewport to bounding box mode when using the middle mouse button, of scaling an object or moving it.
Wow, that sounds like Hard Mode.
In Blender you can animate basically everything that you can edit a value for.. After rendering this, I tried animating the texture opacity, specularity, and diffuse, as well as making the room jiggle. It looked spectacularly crappy (somehow making the texture 'flatten out' so that the room no longer looked 3d but more like a crazy illusion), but was a fun exercise.
« Last Edit: December 24, 2013, 10:22:03 pm by Ai »
If you insist on being pessimistic about your own abilities, consider also being pessimistic about the accuracy of that pessimistic judgement.

Offline Lanarky

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Re: Official Off-Topic Thread 2014

Reply #299 on: December 24, 2013, 10:24:50 pm
@Ai
Heh, I mess with a lot of thing. Blender and Python being on the far end, so It's not that I know a lot, it's more like I use google and API references.  :) I'm more of a noob when it comes to 3D.  :crazy: