Lately, I spend some time watching the experiments of some blokes making pixel art with the very own palette of the original NES. This palette is quite limited, thus it forbid absolutely the nice & soft gradients our eyes are accustomed to ...

Therefore, I noticed some nice contrasts of blue / orange, in such experiments, nothing revolutionnary, but it reminded me two things :

• The shades of blue one can see in the work of Impressionists (Monet, Degas, Sisley...)
• The blue shadows in that brilliant Animatrix by Koji Morimoto : "Beyond"

I checked the facts, and indeed, there IS a violent and gorgeous contrast of blue and orange, especially in that Morimoto's anime. Then I decided to conjugate these visuals with the so-called "NES Palette".

The result was beyond my expectations, 'looks like it was made for it :


And Yet, no tweak at all !!!


Then I tried this palette on my 3D. It required some tweaks, but looks nice :



I have to work with this palette. Period.

I finally put the [Finished] stamp on this thing I had started for the "Bootlet Demake" TIGSource contest, on tigsource.com

It's all but finished, anyway, I mainly wanted to emulate the very original rendering of a Vectrex, and make a small and playable game. I think I more or less succeeded, so let's settle on something else.

To download that thing, click on the link below :
VipeUt-install.zip


Tech Notes:
It should run on a PC, WinXP or Vista, with a rather recent 3D card. Vista users : make sure the UAC is disabled, the engine won't like it.

During the install, u'll be prompted to deploy OpenAL. Please install it, unless you already have it, otherwise, the game won't probably start.

The installer creates two shortcuts on the desktop, one using the full featured renderer (OpenGL 2.0), the other one using a more consusual rendering method, not as pretty but fairly ok.

Controls : use the arrow keys. Up = accelerate, Left & Right to strafe, Down = brake. The paddle is not handled.

The ship have a certain amount of energy, that decreases when colliding against enemies. Then it blows up.
Catch some bonus, that will drive the ship for you (autopilot), or increase your energy (power up). Just drive till the end, for 6 laps, and you're done

Press ESC to quit the game.

ENJOY!

At long last, I finally managed to get something with this scene. After having almost re-modeled everything, and UV-unfolded the meshes properly, I found how much it was easy to paint the textures in Modo.

Here is it, realtime screenshot, directly from Barr's nEngine :



Thanks to Jibifaak for the helping hand on Modo.

"Coin Locker Babies" contains some of the strongest visual evocations I came to read in a novel. Probably because I'm from that generation who experience a morbid fascination for urban ruins and waste lands. Is it the Island where Kiku and Hashi are raised, its abandoned mine and deserted town ? Is it this flat in Tokyo where a crocodile is locked in ? Or probably this solid and wildly dyed vision of Toxitown ? Wikipedia mentions some interesting side facts : "Coin Locker Babies" was the original name of this grand group "The Pillows". The authors of "Silent Hill 4" might have found they inspiration is the novel. God Bless Wikipedia (that was the lamest though of the week).

Related links :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_Locker_Babies
http://www.urban-exploration.com/
David Ghodsi photography

Yop, nothing to add. That's all I wanted to say, in rememberance of the nice hours we spent with some friends, dueling in Stunt Car' with two Amigas linked by a serial cable ...



Subsequently, I quickly made a 3D track, remotely inspired by STR's tracks.
Here's how it looks like, screenshot in nEngine :





Ain't it cool ?

Wouldn't it be nice to make a simple Gravity Force clone, in 3D, with the latest & top-notch 3D/Physic engine ?

The main ship would look like that :

Just made a prop for Panzer Planet : a Steam Mainframe, ie a steam operated large scale computer.
Where's the steam ? Where's the computer ? No idea :)



Screenshots directly from the 3D engine, btw.

our.sun.is.dying
we.shall.escape.to.survive
please.lead.and.protect.us
to.the.exodus


Thinking of a boss, at the end of level #0, I started to doodle.
I had the idea a kind of armoured bell, that would come in and out from a pit. Gotta define the sequence, with weak point and attack position.

Should not be too difficult ...

In my valiant attempt to create a video game I came to design some levels, of course, and some enemies. Here is one of them, not looking specially mean. It's a steam robot.



Edit : 'refined it, the front wheel is smaller, 'like it better :)

Thanks to the precious info given by Lernie Ang I was finally able to convert the eyeballs. Now, I there's just the eyelids left and the character will be completely translated from Maya to LW.

Sneak Peak Here

For some reasons, I had the opportunity to test the LUA language. I spent one evening on it, then switched to Squirrel (which is very close). What I appreciate the most with scripted languages is that the classic C++ turnaround loop (Stop -- Debug -- Compile -- Link -- Start) is made a lot easier.

I took a moment to see how basic scripting turns out in LUA, then practicing things like tables, list, sort, file IO, it ended up in this :

Table / Linked list test : put values in a table, then in a list, display them. Sort table of values : put randomized values in a table, sort it, and display it. Bitmap output : throw RGB pixels in a binary file. This creates a RAW file, that you can open in Photoshop as long as you know its size & depth. The purpose of this was to be able to render a Mandelbrot figure to a file. Mandelbrot fractal : using the previous routine, this sample simply computes the famous Mandelbrot figure. Left is the result.

Here's a quick snapshot of the texturing work in progress.

The eyes are still missing, here is how it turns out so far :

While trying to export a Maya scene to Lightwave with "MAYA2LW[2]" I experienced some issues with animated nurbs surfaces. So I decided to send an email to Lernie Ang, one of the authors (it's an open-source solution) of MAYA2LW.
The answer was very interesting, here it is :

Maya2LW2 was developed during a project that also used
NURBS surfaces. this wasnt ideal at that time because
i only introduced the idea of
Maya2LW2-Poly-Only-Please to the modeler guy. it
should have been done in poly. however, it DID work; i
have had no problems with NURBS-to-Polygon conversion
(with history, of course) at all.

if it starts fine and then goes screwy after a few
frames, i'm thinking of two things: 1.) OBJ *after*
conversion must be reexported to make sure point order
is correct, and 2.) ascertain that the poly mesh node
was selected and not any other. this may or may not
solve the problem.

the reason why Maya2LW2 is a bit difficult to use
regarding exportation is that it is hard (for me) to
make assumptions about the complexity of a given
scene. maya scenes can be super complex. if i had made
assumptions about which mesh node to export it may not
work 100 percent of the time. sometimes transforms
share two or more shape nodes (e.g. two mesh nodes),
which can be a bummer since Maya2LW2 will have to
*figure* out which of them is really intended for
export.

Lernie kindly sent me a link of another MAYA to LW solution : www.zdavu.com/dev/a2a

All this sounds like music to my hears, 'got to test asap !!!!

I started a collaboration with the animator Tim Linklater (who is running the excellent website www.strutyourreel.com).
I was in a desperate need of good animated characters and this guy had a lot of stunning animated stuff that deserved to be lighted & rendered, so we decided to join our forces. He sent me some of his pieces of work done in Maya, but I almost never worked with Maya. I had to solutions :

1. Learn lighting & rendering in Maya
2. Test the infamous Maya To Lightwave pipeline

I choose #2. I found 3 existing software solutions regarding this specific pipeline, then tried one :

• Point Oven, an amazing cross-software baking system by Mark Wilson. It supports Max, Maya, Messiah, LW, XSI and even A:M to a certain extent
• The Beaver Project, a Maya <-> LW pipeline used on many productions
• Maya2LW[2], an open-source project. I took this one because it's free and was recent enough to run with Maya6/7 & LW 7/8

Using Maya2LW[2] is very simple :

• From Maya exporting datas goes into two steps :
  
  1. Save the mesh in Alias|Wavefront format (.obj) so that LW will be able to load them. There is no particular issue there, except if you have to export NURBS. Maya2Lw doesn't handle NURBS, nor does LW. The solution should be to convert NURBS to Polygons, but it didn't work for me so far
  2. Bake & export the animations. Maya2LW export 'almost MDD compatible' files, that just need to be converted to MDD format in order to be understood by LW. I had no problem here, except I had to select the relevant nodes in Maya, it can sometimes be tricky to find the right item.
  
  
• Back to LW, I did it manually 'cause I couldn't get the scripts working properly (version mismatch). It is rather straightforward, though :
  
  1. When imported, the .obj files sometimes comes without material/surface assigned. That's a necessary step to reassign surfaces, so that you will be able to see your meshes in the layout. In this precise case, I had to refine the mesh a bit to comply the LW limits : no n-gons subdivision
  2. Apply MDD : I converted all the mesh transformations from Maya to LW with the MDD format, despite it is generally dedicated to mesh deformations (blendshapes, skinning ...). LW uses the Motion Designer displacement plug-in to apply MDD files to any mesh. The settings are straightforward :
     
     

Conclusion (so far) :

I've got roughly the same mesh & deformations in LW as in Maya. Roughly : it seems there are some slight differences regarding the animations, and the bug lost its eyeballs, guess why, they were in NURBS.
Got' to find a workarround :)

'Tried a "before the rain" render last night. Clouds are made of huge torus floating in the sky, with a simple "fallof" plugged in the transparency channel.

A wet "after the rain" rendering with lot of reflexions should be funny...