In my quest to find an author whose books I can devour in the same way that I do Terry Pratchetts (his books are quite good, especially with ketchup), I have started Peter F. Hamiltons Reality Disfunction. His other two books that I have read, Pandoras Star and Judas Unchained, were fairly good and pulled off a few really cool sequences, so I was hoping for something similar.
I am a little over halfway through now and it is finally starting to get interesting. 600 pages in. It needs to pull of a seriously spectacular ending if I am to be convinced to buy the sequel.
Another thing: one of the main characters in the book is having sex with, and I am almost not kidding here, every single hot woman he comes into contact with. And the ones he doesn’t have sex with (so far as I have read) either wants to have sex with him or at least finds him really attractive. Now, this could possibly work, but usually it is just too easy. I will now paraphrase his latest encounter to demonstrate:
He was laying on his bed in the guest-room watching boring TV. Suddenly the door unlocks and the landlords hot young wife that, by the way, he met earlier, enters his room entirely uninvited.
Hot young wife: “I want to have sex with you”
Him: “why?”
Hot young wife: “Because I am hot and you are hot and I want to prevent you from having sex with my hot daughter”
Him: “OK”
Fade suggestively to black.
Usually I don’t mind sex in books but in this is getting a little ridiculous.
God of War 3 demo is out for the PlayStation 3 and here is my first impression: It took longer to download and install than it took to complete!
Apart from that I am sure GoW fans will be pleased. Me, not so much, but I never liked button mashing games and this seems to be just that. Also, I think I spilled something on my X button so it has become all annoyingly sticky, which helps the situation in no way whatsoever.
So this would probably be something more relevant for Twitter, but since I don’t actually post there and also because then I wouldn’t be able to make this small-but-still-larger-than-140-characters stab at Twitter I am posting it here.
A fun site I tumbled u-pun (times 2, intended but failed). Name speaks for itself: Clients From Hell
Because they are one and the same, sort of. My mailman, who is now my second favorite person in the world, delivered it to me yesterday. First impression: Sweet. Second impression: Sweet. Third impression? I will wait with that until I have played it a bit more, but I suspect that it might begin with the letter “S”.
Not that I actually have any of that this time. I had just forgotten about my latest post and was actually kind of surprised, because, really, it’s not that good.
No, what I wanted to say was that I had been super swamped with work and that is why I haven’t written anything in waaay to long. Unfortunately, I can’t even say that because that would be a lie, and lying is wrong. Especially on the internet, where everything is right and proper.
As is customary in these cases, I give you some old drawings. These are a couple of character design tests that I did for a Nintendo DS game that I wanted to make. It was supposed to be an old school adventure-game not entirely unlike The Fate of Atlantis, except with a young female archeology student and also possibly the fountain of youth. Or something.
Game Girl
It also bears mentioning that I have now unlocked, from the deepest recesses of racial memory, the secret knowledge of baking carrot-cake (my mom gave me the recipe) which means that I am now doomed to become brown, oblong and delicious, if the saying is to be believed.
Not even when I die. It’s true. But it might need some CPR from time to time. CPR, by the way, is short for Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation so don’t pretend I never tell you anything useful…
Today’s anecdote is about me. I recently found out that I am actually spending more money than I am making. Ignoring for at moment the fact that I am only procuring spending capital and not actually making money, this came as quite a disappointment to me.
The anecdotal part of this story and the part that is very telling to my way of dealing with money, is that my reaction to the said discovery was to immediately buy a butt-load of books on Bamazo, I mean Amazon…
I am so looking forward to getting them!
It’s note like I really need and excuse, but I have been wanting to play with doing something a little less clean than what I usually do. Something with rough lines and textures and stuff*. I think I will go back to drawing Guild Wars™ girls again soon.
This is not a Jedi in her underpants
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* and no, said stuff is not “boobs” or “light sabers. Those are just bonuses.
So, It turns out that either I am a lot more stupid than I had previously given myself credit for, or someone suddenly made it a lot more difficult to make corrective blend-shapes in Maya than it ought to be. That, or Autodesk introduced some fancy new tool in Maya 2009 that no one has told me about.
If you, like me, find yourself with a strong desire to make corrective blend-shapes but without the corresponding desire to do so fumbling blind and pulling random vetices, you would usually find some script or plug-in that would allow you to do it in the deformed pose you wanted to correct (Note to Google: This might also be called Pose Space Deformation). If you then, like me, find yourself unable to find said script or plug-in it would seem that you have only the following Fahrenheit-rigging-DVD-non-approved technique to rely on.
- Model, rig and skin your character. If you are like me you have already done this.
- Pose you character in the pose you want to correct
- Duplicate your deformed mesh twice, calling one positive and one negative. Move them a little away from your model
- Model your corrected shape on the mesh called positive.
- Make a new blend-shape node on your character containing the two duplicate meshes. This blend shape must use the parallel blending mode.
- Move your character back to bind-pose and in the parallel blend-node, set the positive mesh to 1 and the negative to -1. This should blend your mesh so that you only have the deformations you made to the positive mesh, but now in a neutral pose.
- Duplicate this new mesh and call it something with the letters BS is the name because this is infinitely funny. This mesh can now be used as a corrective blend-shape
- Delete the parallel blend-node and repeat these steps for all your shapes. Yes, really.
- When done, add all your new shapes into a new blend shape node called corrective-something-or-another, making sure to use front of chain blending. I think.
- Set up your shapes with driven keys or whatever works for you.
Congratulations, you are done, possibly. Please note that this worked for me on my very simple character but as mentioned, the Fahrenheit rigging DVD says that the method is flawed and will probably cause problems. Buy the DVD if you want to know what kind of problem (Hint: it could involve explosions).
Please let me know if you know anything better.
PS. I was kidding about that explosion part. Most likely.
Watched your movie. It was not very good. Hope you make something better next time.
Yours
- Kennet
PS. Please don’t kill me.
