Category Archives: Uncategorized

Captain Antelope and the Keratin Invasion

For one of my Modules this semester i had to produce a 3d game in Unity, and it ended up turning out pretty good.

It’s a 3rd person space sim where you have to complete various missions: Delivery, Mining, Fighting space whales, etc. to earn credits to buy upgrades to install on your ship. Oddly enough no trading though, pretty unusual for a space sim. The combat’s a bit weak but i didn’t really have the time to expand on it much further. It’s serviceable though.

If you’re stuck pressing F1 will bring up the manual and there’s an instructions tab on that. Also after you’ve started the game you have to undock (u) and re-dock (t, Enter) to the starting station to get the station GUI to show up. I don’t think i ever explained that anywhere. Oh and there are cheats listed in the text file in the zip if you just want to muck about.

Enjoy! DOWNLOAD

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

 

Assignment 2 Log – Intro to 3D Animation [Part 1]

Paper 2 involves me improving on the model that last paper’s model was one, with textures and shtuff.

–model_1

Here is my modification of the original desing. i’ve added banding around the hull areas, engine bells and ullage motors.

model_2

And here it is with naccele banding. For some reason WordPress makes things orange…

TO BE CONTINUED!

 

Assignment 1 Log – Intro to 3D Animation [Part 2]

Last Time on Assignment 1 Log: i detailed the majority of the modelling process and ran into an issue with file saving. And now the conclusion.

After going over to the university’s labs i was relieved to find that saving worked. the lighting i had set up in Arnold didn’t work so well in MentalRay:

Shadows? we don't need no stinking shadows!

Shadows? we don’t want no stinking shadows!

but with some re-jigging and changing the camera angle/Fstop i managed to get this to look like this:

Next Gen(TM) Graphics.

Next Gen(TM) Graphics.

and after setting everything up i produced the two images requested, after which i added in a gradient background in GIMP to make them look like the target images.

Front View

Front View

 

3/4 View

3/4 View

 

 

Assignment 1 Log – Intro to 3D Animation [Part 1]

Working on the 1st assignment of my Introduction to 3D Animation course and i’m required to write a blog post detailing “key stages in production”, which is usually a problem for me because i tend to neglect screenshotting things as i make them, mainly because there’s no practical reason for doing that and it eats into the time i could spend actually making the thing but i digress.

The brief says i have to  produce a tintin/thunderbird 3 looking rocket on a rounded reflective ground (which i think is a sphere/planet) with a gradient background and… somewhat confusing lighting.

End result should look like this

End result should look like this

From what i can tell the bell of the rocket and the nacelles are all slightly reflective so decided to use a Phong shader for them, while the antennae, window and pylons and possibly the ring at the bottom seem to not be so (i’d have thought that there’d be an antonym for reflective in the context of light, but apparently no, there is not) so i planned to just leave them as lamberts. i set to work modelling: creating the hull by drawing a CV curve and rotating it, the rings out of maya primitive pipes, the pylons out of lattice deformed cubes and the nacelles by simply squashing and scaling the hull nurbs thing, i then made the antennae out of a cylinder, ball and two scaled down toruses and set up the sphere/planet, made and applied the materials and placed various lights around the rocket. Then maya crashed and i had to remake everything, this time remembering to save, and this was the result:

As you can see i still have some hierarchy organising to do.

As you can see i still have some housecleaning to do.

unfortunately i’m rendering in arnold so this is what a render looks like on maximum intensity/exposure:

figure_3

It looks slightly better before i export it

i think this is because i’m operating on a larger scale than i usually do. however i realised i could crank up the exposure on the point lights even more so after some tweaking to get the best balance between visible and covered in fireflies i… realised that the render export setting on my copy of maya do nothing and it’s stuck exporting .png files at a reduced gamma value. and turning it off and on again does nothing.

as such i’ve resolved to find a spare computer in one of the labs and render it out there. Continued in Part 2…

Letters from Pegasus, a Stargate Atlantis text review: Phantoms

Rodney is mistaken for a terrorist, seeing as he’s the guy who told the next door neighbours how to build nukes, blew up the functional part of a solar system and almost ripped a hole in the fabric of two universii I can’t see where anyone would get that impression.

Teaser:

Major Leonard (y’know, major Leonard. he’s been here the whole time) and his team have gone missing on a radioactive planet, sheppard jumps at the chance to irradiate his nuts even more (my working theory is that he really doesn’t like nor want kids) and brings a squad of redshits to help him search for them. then: gate graphic, because we’re running short. then they find some desiccated genii who committed ritualistic, and by ritualistic I mean anarchic, suicide.

The Episode:

ronan starts getting twitchy, seeing imaginary wraith horse illusions but they make it to the cave set without incident. in it is a bad juju wraith device and more dead genii. rodney decides to poke at it because it’s probably why the radiation is blocking radio and unless there’s another one to find probably the suicide syndrome as well. then they find some of major Leonard’s redshirts dead. shep decides to go back to the gate and bring a bigger army, because a whole regiment of crazy is way better than 12 looney men, but the DHD’s booby trapped and Leonard the sane shows up to kill off redshits. he’s driven off but… pegasus gates have no moving parts so the lanteans yet again screw over our heroes. seeing as the gateships are in the wash (and so are the earclip radios) they have to turn off the thing in the cave, apparently… y’know the “if we don’t we’ll go insane and kill each other” point was never brought up, sheppard is doing some really stupid shit this episode and I can’t help but think this wasn’t a deliberate action on the writer’s part.

so shepsquad holes up and rodney sets to work sciencing the thing while carson sets the work patching up the redshirts. then ronan runs of into the woods to shoot at Leonard, shep and teylaa run off after him, ronan fails to hit him and runs around shooting at trees while sheppard stats thinking that teylaa is a man and teylaa starts thinking that that massive pain in her leg may be because leonard shot her. carson starts hallucinating about whether the two remaining redshirts are alive or dead (for the record the dead guy was alive and the living guy dead all along) and rodney starts thinking that he’s saner than he is. meanwhile sisko builds a clock, crighton shoots the crackers, sulu runs around shirtless with a rapier, weir thinks that UAVs will work on a radio-blocked planet, data gets pussy (and it’s not spot) and Hercules kills his wife and kids. shep finds leonard’s magic castle of log tent and holes up with teylaa, then leonard shows up and kamikazes on invisible stormtroopers and sheppard starts thinking he’s back in the war saving man!teylaa from the taliban. he shoots ronan in the arm and rodney in the chest but teylaa convinces him to pull the plug on the cave thing by using generic enough terms to get through his perception filter. the day is saved and the deadalus will come along to pick them up I guess, also shep didn’t save man!teylaa when he was real.

Sora’s Log:

thanks to the recent loss of the ancestor power supply I’ve just spent the last moon reorganizing the earthan ‘nakwada generator’ grid and hooking it into this that and the other, I plug in the long range scanners and the transport booth network goes offline, I get that back in and the lights go out, it’s a delicate and frustrating balancing act that has lead to me learning many earthan curse words from the techs with me and having the chance to try them out. just this morning we lost the gateroom hangar doors to the fire suppressant cooling system while Colonel John’s team was on a mission. you’d think that with so many people that we’ve exhausted the earthan ear communicator supply working on this it’d be easy but no. that earthan stargate bridge thing project back to their homeworld and more supplies can’t be completed soon enough if you ask me.

Final thoughts:

it’s ok i guess, but it could be easily recreated by watching Crackers don’t Matter, or Naked Time, or SG-1 Legacey, or irresistible. the point being that there are much better insane people stories than this.

Cracker’s don’t Matter is where ben browder’s hamminess is. it is Glorious! a must watch even.

now why wasn’t this where CamMitchel learned how to swordfight?

Thunderbirds Are Go Review Type Thing: Well That Escalated Spider

Hey, wanted a character based episode? Well this one’s ok at that.

The Teaser:
The tracey boys have spent the last week doing exciting adventures, sadly we don’t get to see those. We do however get to see everyone land which is neat, if pointless.

The Episode:
And now there’s another adventure, yay, the aroura generator, a generator that uses the aroura borealis to generate energy (I suspect that it’s also pretty useless), is ‘splode. Scott and virgil fly out so save it with MAX (brains’ robot spider buddy/surrogate son) in tank treads. They can’t land near it because though the thunderbirds have mechanical controls their guidance systems aren’t EM shielded. So they try to ice-pod vehicle to it. also scott is feeling reckless today, why? Well apparently meeting Captain Lee “callback joke” Taylor reminded him that jeff’s gone, and apparently scott failed to save jeff so now he’s trying to hardcore parkour rescue people. Several hours later MAX saves the day by spidermanning a doofer onto a thing and then ‘splodeing. But it’s ok as his computer box is EM shielded and they make him a new body.

Final Thoughts:
Look It’s nice that we get a character episode addressing how they deal with jeff MIA but can it be more than just the tracey boys yelling quickly at each other in a tent and have longer lasting effects than in one episode?

Often Wrong could never tell Max and Kayo apart, although it's pretty clear which one he gave the emotion chip.

Often Wrong could never tell Max and Kayo apart, although it’s pretty clear which one he gave the emotion chip.