stupidhappy.com

3d Modeling for Active Worlds

2008-09-10T21:32:20Z

This is a tutorial intended to show you the steps involved in converting a polygonal 3d model into a Renderware model compatible with the Active Worlds virtual world platform.... This is a tutorial intended to show you the steps involved in converting a polygonal 3d model into a Renderware model compatible with the Active Worlds virtual world platform.

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Please place the weighted storage cube on the 1500-Megawatt Aperture Science Heavy-Duty Large Hadron Colliding Superbutton

2008-09-05T18:43:28Z

A new report provides the most comprehensive evidence available to confirm that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)'s switch-on, due on Wednesday next week, poses no threat to mankind. . . The LHC Safety Assessment Group have reviewed and updated a... A new report provides the most comprehensive evidence available to confirm that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)'s switch-on, due on Wednesday next week, poses no threat to mankind. . . The LHC Safety Assessment Group have reviewed and updated a study first completed in 2003, which dispels fears of universe-gobbling black holes and of other possibly dangerous new forms of matter, and confirms that the switch-on will be completely safe. I really feel like it is correct and necessary to have some kind of party to mark Large Hadron Collider day, or at least have like a half-life marathon or something in honor of the dimensional gateway-opening resonance cascade that this thing is definitely not going to set off. Also I want to put the Large Hadron Collider and the Large Helical Device together in mayonnaise jar and shake it up to see if they fight.]]>

Tools

2008-08-29T15:33:22Z

For the last several years I've done all of my ink work using brush pens that I'd found at Japanese stationary stores in San Jose or San Francisco (in the Kinokuniya mall on Geary). Prior to that I tried using... vastly preferable to a felt tipped impostor. I like to use it for quick studies and life drawing - I can make very thin delicate lines with it, and very bold heavy expressive strokes as well, depending on how I hold the pen and how I move my hand. The ink that it uses is water-soluble, so I can start with linework, go over it with a wet watercolor brush and create controlled-bleed ink wash effects with it easily. I drew the paper tiger with this pen. I also use a pen that has a similar brush nib to the FD-502, this one Mitsubishi's PFK-301N model, which I could only find one reference to with Google, and the page is entirely in Japanese. The brush is functionally identical to the Zebra FD-502, but it's three dollars cheaper and it doesn't have the little felt-tip nip on the opposite end that I never use anyway. I don't know how useful this information will be to anyone but at least now you know what I use, and if you're interested in trying them, what to look for should you happen to have a Japanese-imports stationary store near you. If you search J-List for "fude pen" you'll find some similar items. I have two of the Pentel refillable fude pens, but the only one I use is the fine line one with the light blue cap (which J-List doesn't even appear to offer), and that one only rarely. It's because these things are so hard to find online (for anything approaching reasonable prices, anyway) that I'm always so evangelical about dragging artist friends to Mai-Do whenever the opportunity presents itself.]]>

Sporenography

2008-06-18T05:36:44Z

The internet's gone completely apeshit with images of abominations created with the Spore creature editor, an incomplete version of which was "leaked" a few days ago, spread all the hell all over the internet on Bittorrent, and is now being... Spore being viral, the collection of specific words and phrases required to frame the discussion would no doubt put me on a short list for government monitoring re: biological weapons terrorism. Thus, EA, Maxis, Will Wright, Serpentor, et. al, have effectively pre-emptively silenced any questions of chumming the waters on their part. Well played, gentlemen. Well played. And it's not, you know, hard to guess what kind of sophomoric nonsense dudes are going to be creating with this thing pretty much immediately. In point of fact, this territory's been so thoroughly covered that I'm not even going to dare to weigh in with any creations of my own; I am a rare and delicate snowflake and I will not have my beauty lost in the blizzard. No, my contribution to this conversation is the neologism that is this entry's title, one that I am surprised (and relieved!) to have not heard anybody else use yet, and so that will be my claim to fame. I will be the one to give a name to this daring new medium of expression, which has enabled every man and woman and child to boldly explore the depths of their frustrated sexual neuroses and to each become their own personal Cronenberg nightmare factories. Yes, Sporenography. Sometimes I am just so clever I amaze even myself. Edit: Well, drat, it looks like Kotaku had me beat by 48 hours.]]>

How Mario Kart makes men murder

2008-06-16T05:39:28Z

You know, I've kind of grown deaf to the news articles that get published every other week trying to scare grandma about how the next Grand Theft Auto game is going to turn everyone under the age of 16 into... We have this essay in the Escapist from a gentleman named Robert Marks, a student at the Royal Military College of Canada, and who from his tone and style of writing we can infer probably has a ponytail, at least one trenchcoat, and a collection of replica Japanese swords. Some of the peculiar ideas he puts forward as truisms are very familiar from this class of individual: for instance, if the debate of an issue becomes 'polarized' then any further discussion is useless. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that he is also the sort of dude that would say that if you are 'emotionally involved' in an issue than for some reason your opinion on the subject is without merit. And that only autistic people, Vulcans, and Objectivists can weigh in on the subject and have their voices heard. Anyway. The whole language of his opening paragraphs is constructed in such a way as to diminish the value and credibility of the minds that have previously (and vigorously) threshed out the question of the connection between violent behavior in kids and violent videogames, dismissing the years of conversation and study as 'heated rhetoric,' this haze of anger and confusion that he is here to save us all from, with these entirely new ideas and discoveries presented in this sacred text he's discovered: Dave Grossman's On Combat, which for Marks is the One True Voice of clarity that will finally deliver us from years of all this useless, confusingly nuanced discussion and scientific rigor. I mean, who the fuck needs rigor anyway? Lietenant Col. Grossman is in the military, dude knows a few things about what it takes to kill people, right? Marks' prize source is a self-described expert in the comically-named field of Killology, a pseudo-psychological discipline that he himself coined. With this in mind, it is probably easy for most of us to keep from mistaking his book for science. Most of us except Mr. Marks, anyway. The essay is stocked with bubbly, gee-whiz sophistry, ideas that might look like Science! at first blush, but don't stand up to scrutiny: For instance, Marks repeatedly makes reference to the 'fight-or-flight' instinct as being part of the 'mammalian brain,' or 'middle brain,' which suggests that he may have a passing familiarity of the Triune brain model, like maybe he heard about it on discovery channel or something, but had he done his homework he probably would have called it the Reptilian brain, and understood the distinctions between the lower, or reptilian brain, and the higher brain functions that are unique to mammals, rather than repeatedly calling the lower brain functions as being part of the "mammal brain." It is with this kind of sloppiness that Marks pads out his work, brachiating from one softheaded, impossible conclusion to the next. Marks takes us on a meandering exposition of how videogames are supposed to be psychologically conditioning us to become killing machines - by repetitive actions of seeing violent activity on a tv screen, and playing out that action via a controller, I'm somehow more likely to be willing to throw a blue turtle shell at the driver ahead of me in real life. I haven't seen anybody do this yet, so, you know, I just don't know. But if he's to be believed, videogames are an appropriate substitute for time spent in a shooting range or the rigorous training given to military recruits and police officers. He's very careful to stress that 'context is everything' and there are a few small pebbles of interesting substance in his article, but then he follows it up with this extraordinary line:

While we haven't been conditioned to be murderers, however, the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings prove that some of us are capable of committing heinous acts of violence under ostensibly mundane conditions.

After some very sensible talk about how important 'context' is for determining what makes it possible for somebody to kill somebody else, whoosh! Here we are, in a stunning lateral leap of logic, arriving at this proof that -- well, something, we can't be totally sure what -- made these school shootings possible, having given us no context at all for this conclusion. Maybe it was videogames? Who knows. I'm tempted to assume that's the connection he's trying to make here, but maybe he decided not to show his work for this proof so that he could maintain some kind of plausible deniability should he be pressed to defend it. And this conclusion prompts a number of questions I'd like to ask Mr. Marks: does he play violent videogames himself? Has he shot anybody? Does he know anybody who has? Has he conducted any control-group sort of studies to test his ideas? Conducted any polls? Or does he rest his faith in the truth of the 'serious problem' that he's trying to call our attention to solely in this one book? Do LTC Grossman's ideas stand up to peer review? Is Robert Marks familiar with the concept of peer review? In a way, I almost envy Marks' approach to the subject. Unburdened with inconvenient things like facts or prior research, he is then free to tackle, huge, huge questions with unwavering moral certitude - like being able to blame videogames makers for arming "90 percent" of people who play violent videogames with "the capability to use deadly force." I don't know if I'm prepared to call that kind of assessment ballsy, though there's a number of other things I'm prepared to call it. Fortunately, he's got every unsubstantiated claim covered with an equally unsubstantiated get-out clause: You're welcome to disagree if you like, but violent videogames are a problem, "no matter how vehemently we deny" that they're a problem. Touche, I guess? What is most frustrating about this article is not that it is poorly researched or that its thesis is poorly supported, but that it is these things and it comes from the Escapist. Grossman's book might make some waves with that segment of our population that is still trying to make a buck off of keeping older people afraid of younger people, and there's not much to be done about that. We're used to seeing sloppy fact-checking and breathless sensationalism about the dangers of videogames from the mainstream press, and we've more or less gotten used to it and are okay with it because like Dr. Bartle says, the fight to legitimize videogames and overcome censorship is one we've already won. But we just shouldn't have to put up with this caliber of dumb from one of our own outlets, especially one as entrenched and respected a voice of Serious Games Writing as this. Let's hold ourselves to a higher standard.]]>

Storybook Houses

2008-06-15T22:00:10Z

I want to make houses like this. This is totally rad. A family commissions an architect to renovate the interior of their home, and gives him some vague suggestion to make it 'playful,' and hide a poem written by the... I want to make houses like this. This is totally rad. A family commissions an architect to renovate the interior of their home, and gives him some vague suggestion to make it 'playful,' and hide a poem written by the previous owner somewhere in the house 'like a message in a bottle,' and said architect then spends four years turning their house into a walk-in game of Myst, with encrypted poetry written on the radiators and tiny scale models of rooms hidden behind panels in the walls, and storybooks full of clues commissioned specifically to be written for the house. Thanks to Raph Koster for linking to this!]]>

Team-building, in space

2008-06-15T03:42:03Z

Why aren't there any MMOs (or really multiplayer games of any sort) that put you in the role of one of a crew of people on a spaceship? I'm kind of shocked that the videogame industry has been humming along... who should know these things, hasn't created a videogame that functions this way yet. WoW and other fantasy MMOs are pretty much designed to encourage players to team up to take advantage of the diversity of character classes - if you're going to do a raid, you need your tank, your healer, some other spellcasters, whatever. I don't know too many specifics, I'm like one of the last three dudes on the internet who still hasn't played WoW. But when I was a teenager I played D&D, so the mechanic isn't totally unfamiliar to me. I think that the party-forming and raid-launching mechanic would translate beautifully to space. You'd think that the crew-a-vessel mechanic would be a no-brainer, after being exposed to exactly that sort of mechanic for years of sci-fi tv shows: Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, etcetera. The mechanic was laid down for us in Moby Dick: some wealthy player or NPC owns a vessel and wants to send it on a specific mission, and so has it in port to enlist a crew, and thereby allow players the opportunity to grow their characters until such a point that they themselves are able to own and captain vessels and fleets, and launch expeditions and wars of their own. The top dog of space MMOs at the moment is Eve Online, which pairs every player with their own vessel, and it's sort of developed this huge culture of players basically being shitheads to each other in the name of piracy and privateering in space. It's a famous favorite of griefers for the degree of backhanded behaviour it engenders, and one of the more entertaining scams I've read about took place there. The skill trees and advancement paths would be familiar to anybody who's already played any kind of RPG. Bigger, badder vessels require larger crews, and as technologies available to the starship become more sophisticated, they'd only be available to characters who had developed the necessary proficiency to be able to exploit them. Communications officers could jam hostile vessels abilities to coordinate their efforts and higher-level comm officers would be able to open voice chat between a larger number of friendly vessels; tactical officers can only operate weapons they know how to use, each turret would benefit more from having a human operator than an AI, and so forth. The bigger the ship, the more minigame-style activities are necessary to be executed concurrently by several players to keep it ticking. And on top of all the complexity that multiple-player vessels would introduce, it would probably also turn the nature of piracy and griefing in space as established on Eve Online upside down. How are you going to spam cheap vessels at your targets juggernaut if even the smallest craft requires four dudes to operate it? I'm not going to say it wouldn't happen, but I'm willing to bet it'd require clever assholes to get a whole lot cleverer. I did some digging and it does look like a Star Trek MMO is in the pipeline somewhere, with the option of multiple players staffing a single starship, but Star Trek's legacy in the videogame sector (ha!) hasn't really been stellar (ha ha!) so I'm not holding out too much hope there. Does anybody know of any other games that have been made or are in the process of being made that fit this description?]]>

I can see you, tiny people

2008-06-09T17:50:52Z

So this here blog is almost 100% functional, there's still some pages I need to upload and some plugins what need plugged in, but it's close enough to done now to be called live, and you're here reading and I'm... live, and you're here reading and I'm here writing and I'm glad you'll be my neighbor. I'm having more fun installing pointless functionality and stuff that pings other stuff than any person should reasonably be allowed. Oh, and don't get me started about the ads. I've never been so excited to sell out in my entire life. I installed the Project Wonderful ads three days ago and I've already made a shiny nickel. Back the truck directly up to the internet, I am here to collect my winnings. One of my favorite plugins is the Meebo widget, visible on the blog's main page, in the left sidebar sort of midway down. Whenever somebody loads the page it automatically creates a temporary meebo account for you and you appear on my buddy list: Chances are pretty good you don't even see the widget at first, because you need to scroll down a bit to get to it. But I can see you. I won't know who you are until you tell me, of course, but I can still send you unsolicited messages that will beep at you until you've been sufficiently creeped out that you don't come back. And that's really what web 2.0 is all about for me, folks.]]>

Games

2008-06-09T03:38:47Z

Cryptic Sea Gamasutra Game Set Watch Joystiq Kotaku Penny Arcade UK: Resistance... Cryptic Sea Gamasutra Game Set Watch Joystiq Kotaku Penny Arcade UK: Resistance]]>

3d Messageboards

2008-06-09T03:25:03Z

CG Society GameArtisans Polycount Official Silo Forum Strut Your Reel Subdivision Modeling Tweak CG... CG Society GameArtisans Polycount Official Silo Forum Strut Your Reel Subdivision Modeling Tweak CG]]>

Local Radio

2008-06-09T02:48:29Z

KPIG Tomorrow Matters with Deborah Lindsay KRXA 450AM, Progressive Talk... KPIG Tomorrow Matters with Deborah Lindsay KRXA 450AM, Progressive Talk]]>

Silo 2 Update Pending

2008-05-24T00:50:10Z

The application I use for pretty much all of my modeling, Silo 2, has got a point update on the way and they just posted a video of one of the new features they're adding, which is a surface tool... This video demonstration of it is way cool. Silo already has a really awesome topology tool that lets you basically just draw your geometry on a high-res mesh, and this new tool in conjunction with their existing topology tools is just totally radical. They don't really show you in the video but you can use this tool with surface snapping, so if you've got some really fancy character that you sculpted with a tablet, you don't have to waste a lot of time getting a low-res mesh with proper edgeloops or anything.]]>

Hello (have a spaceship)

2008-05-23T18:50:58Z

This is my first attempt at making a spaceship. It's not done yet, so don't nitpick too much. I've been noodling with 3d software for about four years now (Started with some Maya classes in college, though these days... This is my first attempt at making a spaceship. It's not done yet, so don't nitpick too much. I've been noodling with 3d software for about four years now (Started with some Maya classes in college, though these days I use Silo for the modeling stage) so it's sort of a wonder why I didn't try making one sooner; I am going to go ahead and blame my buddy Matt for putting me off taking a crack at it earlier: Spaceships, he says, are cheap. Without even addressing the question of cliche, there's really no right or wrong way to make a spaceship so as far as a test of your abilities it's a very poor metric. People, on the other hand, are much more challenging, because everyone knows what a person looks like, and even someone without any kind of technical skill can tell if something looks 'off'. (and will usually tell you, believing themselves to be offering 'constructive criticism', when in reality their comments are about as helpful as somebody humming a tune you might be trying to play on the piano, without having any knowledge themselves of how to make the notes with the keys. but that's a complaint for another day.) So maybe as a result of Matt's comments I've studiously avoided modeling anything that might be 'cheap' and I've probably done myself a disservice in the process, because now I have a hard drive full of half-finished projects that I started in the interest of doing only Very Original and Challenging Work that was probably all way beyond my early skill level to attempt in the first place. Heaven forbid I should try something simple like a sword or a screwdriver or a cellphone! If my first attempt isn't worthy of the cgtalk frontpage, I'm obviously going about this whole 3d caper the totally wrong way! And so on. But, I mean, hey. I can do people now. So now it's time for some self-indulgent spaceships, motherfuckers. One of the spaceship designs I liked best from film was from a movie most people have forgotten by now, the late-90s adaptation of Lost in Space. Briefly, toward the start of the film, there was a fighter craft that featured a spherical glass cockpit, around which the rest of the ship would rotate freely. I thought that made a lot of sense in a zero-gravity environment, where visibility in all directions would be critical, and so I sort of stole that idea for this ship. I've also been totally into Battlestar Galactica lately, and something I really dig about that show is the unusual extent that real science informs their spacecraft. The fighters use jet propulsion to maneuver, and you can see the air venting from the maneuvering thrusters whenever they change direction; and staying inside of that realm of believability is a goal I have with this design. (The forward-swept wings are similar to a cylon raider's, too, but that at least wasn't done intentionally.) So, the questions I'm asking myself over and over as I put this thing together are 'how does this thing do x?' and 'how is basic function y being addressed?' And I'm not terribly sciency-smart so I'm trying to keep the made-up fictional bullshit to a minimum. This thing has no landing gear because it's intended to be a supplementary craft that docks in a larger zero-gravity hangar, it has no capacity for atmospheric operations. Its locomotive abilities are provided by jet propulsion and air vents. It's a short-range fighter craft, designed for perimeter defense of mining operations, and if it uses plain old gunpowder bullets (or even magnet-driven ones) there'll need to be retrothrusters to compensate, because firing them would push the ship back. And so on. The problem, though, with becoming this imaginatively invested in something like this is as I work on it I find myself fleshing out the kind of world this thing would be a part of - pre-ftl colonial expansion to other planets in our solar system, with a mining boom providing raw materials and prefabricated components for enclosed climate-controlled settlements, like in that old DOS space expansion game, Millenium: Return to Earth. Telepresence robots do all of the actual labor, controlled remotely by VR jocks suspended safely inside settlements miles away, eliminating the need for dangerous spacewalks and keeping the hazards of large-scale construction in the hostile environment of space far away from the people who live in the finished structures. And all this daydreaming, of course, makes me want to model bigassed donut-shaped space stations, austere domed settlements on martian landscapes, impersonal telepresence robots with their heads all packed with sensors, et cetera. It wouldn't be a problem, except I'm always tempted to drop what I'm working on half-finished and get started on the next project!]]>

Elsa

2007-11-13T04:58:08Z

This was sculpted in Silo, based on a character design by my friend Nicole Dornsife.

Animal Stencils

2007-10-31T06:19:36Z

]]> Ponoko's laser-cutting on-demand service to have some fancy, detailed stencils made up for me, that I could then use for making t-shirts or vandalizing things with spraycans or whatever, and when I'd done a decent number I went through the process of prepping and uploading my artwork, thinking if I just had it done on polypropelene or whatever it wouldn't be too expensive. And then I discovered that the materials are really the cheap part of the Ponoko process, it's the laser time itself that costs money, and having highly detailed work like these stencils done would cost a few hundred dollars - not to mention there was no guarantee they'd come out correctly the first time! D: So now I'm investigating a budget solution, printing out the stencils on paper and cutting them out of plastic myself with a soldering iron.