Today I discovered lightbox, which is a simple level for Sandbox 2 featuring a 3 point lights setup akin to one you would use to render your assets in a neutral “studio” environment. Except of course that there’s no need to render anything, because it’s all happening in real-time! Lightbox was created by George Piskas.
I just dropped in a model I’m working on, tweaked a bit the lights and added wind dynamics for the hair. With MayaCGF, I can model in Maya, click on a button to export the model, then switch seamlessly to Sandbox 2 and click “Reload” to instantly check the result. I’m loving it! 😀
Recently I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed 2 for PC, and I have to say I enjoy it. The artistic direction is excellent, and sometimes (especially during some of the cut-scenes) the facial animation actually conveys some pretty good acting.
But the worst thing about the game is its protection against pirating. Ubisoft has effectively put itself in a position where they turned us (their customers) into little children and themselves into a parental authority figure. Think the analogy’s far-fetched?
1) They demand to know at any moment if we are playing or not. And they check on us every couple of minutes.
2) They make us ask for their consent before we are even allowed to play. Not just once, but each and every time.
3) They can turn off the game (and I mean that literally) at any instant, for whatever reason (out of our control), be it technical or temperamental.
I still can’t fathom how some people in charge at Ubisoft thought this could be a good idea. I’m sorry for stating the obvious, but blatantly invading your customers’ privacy is NOT a step in the right direction from treating them like thieves.
Over the week-end I’ve been working on some textures and I also played a bit with Sandbox2’s particles and lights. This is just a wall from the WIP dungeon I use to test stuff. As you can see, polygon density is rather low… 😛 What you can’t see on the picture though is that the torch is spewing little cinders which fly in the air before dying off, as well as smoke and subtle heat distortion. Coupled with flickering lights, the effect is surprisingly immersive!
One method to get a speech bubble in Photoshop is to draw an elliptic selection, add a tail to the bubble by using the polygonal lasso tool, then fill the selection with white. Finally, you add a black stroke effect around it all and hop, you’re done! Well, it actually becomes tedious after the third one… So I wrote this script for Photoshop; all you need to do is draw the ellipse and run the script (as an action). And voila! Instant speech bubble! 
While digging on my hard drive I found an early development test for “Astroboy” (done quickly, mostly to try the arm rig). Now this particular test was done in pre-production and I haven’t seen the movie yet, but the model has obviously evolved; the proportions ended-up less child-like. Also, the hands don’t seem as huge anymore. I’ll try to post another test later on. By the way, the animation on the movie was directed by a friend of mine, Jakob Jensen. Anyway, enjoy!
I’ve just added a page about exporting static models from Maya to Crysis. The documentation page for animated models has also been updated. The MayaCGF beta keeps on evolving nicely, and now supports all the physics shaders from Crysis. There’s a bunch of new features and bug fixes too.
Every time you change a shader’s type in Maya’s attribute editor, Maya discards the name of your shader. So if you had a shader called “my_carefully_named_shader” that happened to be a Lambert, and you changed it to a Blinn, your shader would be automatically renamed “blinn1”. Great, no? No. So if like me you’re tired of Maya renaming your shaders when it shouldn’t, just go to C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Mayaxxxx\scripts\AETemplates and open AEshaderTypeNew.mel. In the last proc (called AEshaderTypeCB(…)) find this line (usually at the very bottom):
delete $shaderNode;
And add this line just after:
rename $replaceNode $shaderNode;
And Maya will keep the name of your existing shader! Yay!
