Messing in 3D, just took a few quick photos of the room I'm in at multiple exposures, merged them together to make a 32 bit HDR, then had a play at lighting a scene and some glass objects I made using that image. The 6 ceilings lights cast the appropriate 6 varying shadows as they do in the real room, along with fancy soft penumbra? shadows youd expect, renders very fast too thanks to Vrays image based Area Light. Normal global illumination would take AGES, now lighting a scene using an image is easy!
In fact, the scene has no bounced light in it at all. No point with the nature of the scene really.
Before post work
I have a big shiny Chrome ball, photographing that:
Can then be used to light a room by turning it into a spherical panorama:
Clearer look at the multiple shadows it casts and the interesting natural variance they have, more interesting than boring predictable uniform spotlight any day.
Though of course lighting an object with 6 horrid halogen ceiling lights is going to look pretty awful in an artistic sense, It's interesting in a recreation of reality sense.
In fact, the scene has no bounced light in it at all. No point with the nature of the scene really.
Before post work
I have a big shiny Chrome ball, photographing that:
Can then be used to light a room by turning it into a spherical panorama:
Clearer look at the multiple shadows it casts and the interesting natural variance they have, more interesting than boring predictable uniform spotlight any day.
Though of course lighting an object with 6 horrid halogen ceiling lights is going to look pretty awful in an artistic sense, It's interesting in a recreation of reality sense.
I've been helping a friend out with a render he needs to get done real quick. He's in the middle of purchasing a real computer so I offered to render it for him with my collection of networked friends/machines. Currently totaling around 70ghz on a good day.
Heres the original scene he handed me, It's pretty rough, most of it supplied by the client and with all sorts of inverted normals and light leaking issues which I fixed for him:
I played for a while with the lighting and render settings to get to render faster and more realistically:
Here the Movie below:
It's still very rough, especially in some places. And H264 Codec conversion seemed to screw up the color balance making it a but yuck and desaturated, oh well.
Some other shots from the animation:
Heres the original scene he handed me, It's pretty rough, most of it supplied by the client and with all sorts of inverted normals and light leaking issues which I fixed for him:
I played for a while with the lighting and render settings to get to render faster and more realistically:
Here the Movie below:
It's still very rough, especially in some places. And H264 Codec conversion seemed to screw up the color balance making it a but yuck and desaturated, oh well.
Some other shots from the animation:
Helped tweak a render for a friend, the model is not finished and it was just a quick play to make it look more photographic:
Heres the original render before tweaks:
Heres the original render before tweaks:
Starcraft
The best Real Time Strategy game ever made
I'm eagerly anticipating the next iteration of the game 11 years after the first one! It's been long overdue
It's really taken a decade for computers to get to the point where they can recreate the graphics of the original 2D game but in full 3D. So I'm glad they waited till now to do it, and I hope they do it properly!
The original required all but a 90mhz processor and 16mb of ram! And is still updated to this day, and despite first requiring the now ancient Mac OS 7.6 and Windows 95 it still runs today on the latest Intel Macs running os 10.5 (a full 8 OS cycles later)
It's a bit low poly still as it has to work on a full range of computers, the game is'nt meant to be on the bleeding edge, It's not a FPS, it needs to be accessible and run at a high FPS with thousands of units on the screen.
I just noticed how the units and building for Terran have changed in Starcraft 2 as they are working on it still.
On the left are the new units, on the right the old ones, which appear more cartoony and less defined/low poly looking.
Thank god they fixed that, it looked awful before. Looking at it still though some units/buildings in the other races look like they need a rehaul too, hopefully they are still working on that in the same manner... hangon.. yup looks like they are indeed loking at screenshots stuff is changed every screenshot almost:
Starcraft 1 of course went through massive changes as it was being built, starting all the way back in 1996. I've managed to dig up some old alpha screenshots of that below.
Ooh just found a website with some more information on units changes:
Link: www.starcraftwire.net --- P1
The above unit has been removed entirely.. thankfully!
yay looks like the zerg are also getting up-ressed:
Not bad considering these units are about 40 pixels wide when displayed in game
:-P
And now for some really really old screenshots below:
The Zerg race was originally known as the "Nightmarish Invaders".... lol
Link: www.sclegacy.com --- starcraft-evolution-12
Link: home.planet.nl
1996:
A rather curious video of the beta version:
Link: uk.youtube.com
And then the final version of Starcraft as we know it:
Man I just found my old games:
Yah I'm a nerd, and yes that's 3 copies of Starcraft:
And yes that one is still in It's wrapping-ish
I bought one copy and the cd key did'nt work online, so they sent me another copy, by mistake they sent me 2 new copies, only one of which I think worked online I think? I really can't remember
Ah and six or 7 years later I'm still playing the damn thing
:-D
zim