I'm not sure if you're referring to inverse-kinematic skeletons, or a physics engine automatically applying forces to objects based on hit velocities. Neither of which is relatively new; the latter was demonstrated by test builds of the Unreal engine when they first started using Karma.
Heck, you already have a quite robust physics engine for people to play with in UT2k3--not only does it ship with physics-based vehicle support, somebody's already built a Stair-Dismount mod.
You do realize that Blender got its start as an in-house production-quality 3D tool, no less valid at that time(~1996), comparatively speaking, than the tools you list? Ton built it for NeoGeo for experienced artists--he released it to the public only because he thought people would like to play with it. As such, it was always geared towards fast turnaround times and ability for the artist to work out simple things quickly, with a minimum of advanced render quality, animation features, or catering to inexperienced users--because they didn't need them!
I find it pretty funny that you state "hodgepodge of icons and textboxes". Seems to me that's always been the Achilles heel of the Maya interface--back when I started with 3.0, I remember being confused that "if this is considered a professional app, why does the suggested workflow feel like somebody smashed a sign truck into a printing press?"
In addition, other favorites of mine that you can still find in the store if you look: -100 Bullets(various) -Athena(Dean Hsieh) -Heavy Liquid(Paul Pope, who's actually worked in the manga industry) -Hitman(various)
Frank Miller's "Sin City" series are also good, although they're more of an exploration into beautifully rendered noir, than a continuing story.
here. DirectShow on Win32 has quietly evolved into a multimedia scene graph similar to Quicktime, and GStreamer is the rather smarter effort on Linux. (see here for an example of the clever tricks you can do in DirectShow just by accessing the scene graph with GraphEdit)
Unfortunately, most people seem more interested in demanding obscure playback modules in MPlayer, rather then looking at the problem from an abstracted view.
(OGRE takes the same approach for 3D engines, but people would still rather look at Crystal Space. le sigh.)
No, they don't. The Unreal engine has never been multi-threaded(there was a RUMOR that a future build of UT2k3 would have it in for laughs, this has not happened yet). For Quake3, you can use the "r_smp" variable in a Q3 engine game, but this is more of a testament to Carmack than anything else(stability problems, here we come). Speaking as an owner of a dual-Athlon system, buying a SMP machine entirely for gaming is a shootable offense--there's no viable reason. Most games really aren't bound by the CPU, they're very fill-rate and TnL dependent, and more likely to run into your video card, RAM or bus speed barriers first. More CPU helps if you're running a server or for some reason want to play with a ridiculous amount of bots, but a bus speedup or better video card will aid the client much more. Where it DOES come in handy is if you do development work; you can launch the client without having to quit out of your editing environment, compile a level in the background, or encode MP3s without a single loss of frames...
I've tried the demo on my P3-600 and G400, and with all graphic settings on minimum, gotten less than 15fps on average. Benchmark settings are an abysmal 20.75 for flyby, and 10.02 for botmatch. People using K6-450's with GeForces have reported playable framerates.
I would say that the choice of videocard matters much more; especially if you've bought a CPU from the past few years.
S'funny--I instead see a significant number of posts poking holes in Dean's original argument("when will Hollywood replace their render farms"), with the really good reason of "render farms are a hell of a lot cheaper in the long run".
I don't really see a lot of "we shouldn't ever explore this artform period!" posts.
Watch it again--Yohko and the gang really are inside the battleships. The key is that they're using teleportation-based ejection systems, so if they take a lethal hit, the pilot is returned to the command center without a scratch.
>they're based in Redmond, across the Lake, where the demons lie.
It never fails to amuse me when native WA'ers point frantically at Redmond as the source of "evil". As if there's those Microsoft flags waving on every flagpole. As if the Microsoft buildings weren't a hell of a lot closer to Bellevue/Crossroads than they are to downtown Redmond. Let's hear it for "unincorporated King County".
'Course, downtown Redmond's city planning map resembles the average Microsoft product, so maybe they actually have something there...
SVCDs are indeed a neat way to get around not having a DVD burner, but be wary. Since they're in MPEG-2 format, you can't play them back on a PC without a software DVD player(of which there are no free ones that support SVCD). Also, if they're made onto CD-Rs, then you won't be able to play them back on most settop DVD players, since it's still unclear how many commericial players are shipping with dual-lasers to read both CD-Rs and DVDs. I've heard that you can get around that by using CD-RWs(which supposedly are in high enough of a frequency to be read by a DVD player's laser), though.
ErMaC, at AX '01, passed out copies of his music video reel on SVCD CD-Rs. While I totally respect the man for going for quality, I can't play the disc at all since the family DVD player can't read CD-Rs, and my computer has no DVD-ROM drive. I managed to watch it only via a friend with a DVD drive, and even then, it could only read about half of the videos).
I really don't think most companies are set up to read the more exotic formats yet; my demo reel is still on plain ol' VHS, with some music videos included on a mini CD-R. Better to get them seen first, then worrying about quality.
Redmond City Hall IS invisible already. Stop any random Redmond passerby and see if they know where it is--2 outta 3 will probably remember it more as "that building close to where the carnival rides are set up for Derby Days".
Hell, I wouldn't even remember where it is if I hadn't had to take my brother over there for a few licenses and exams. The City Annex probably gets more traffic.
A friend on the SHMUPS! forum works at a repair shop, and noted that they'd gotten in a lot of DCs for repair that had had extensive CD-R playing. As in, playing-nothing-except-CDrips(not just using a boot loader to play imports). I suppose this might wear on it a bit quicker.
A friend of mine used to play a buncha rips like DOA2 and GGX for a few months; he switched back to real GDs and his DC seems fine. YMMV may vary, as always...
Newer Dreamcasts can read CD-Rs. They just need to be burned differently than the older methods(due to changes in the BIOS).
The only existing Dreamcasts that refuse to read any sort of CD-Rs, are the limited edition Sakura Taisen and Hello Kitty units produced in Japan.
No American DCs will flat-out refuse a correctly burned CD-R.
(It does seem that extensive playing of CD-R games does tend to shorten the life of the GD-drive significantly, however).
Second, it was never GPL'd, it was a private program.
Third, the decision to go pay-only was not a huge surprise. You already had a license fee if you wanted to register the 1.0 version, and this was not secret. Axogon actually resembled Blender's C-Key distribution back in the day.
Fourth, the decision came a LONG TIME before the paranoia over the DMCA started. MainConcept(who make precisely ZERO big-name products) made an offer, and if I was a college student not knowing where to go next, I'd sure as hell take it.
Fifth, you can still use the damn thing. 0.93.1 is available from scads of shareware sites, and is still rock-solid and a great on-the-cheap compositor/non-linear editor(as I've used it for all of myprojects).
..in the midst of an XSI training course right now, I find it very similar to Blender(i.e., using lots of hotkeys). As other people have said, once you learn the major conventions in the Blender interface, it becomes _really_ fast to use. Subdivision modeling isn't as well implemented as it is in XSI; you end up using NURBS to get the basic shape, then doing fine-tweaking as a mesh in Blender.
I'm not sure what other part of "faster" you want; Blender does pretty good at keeping up. Maya's renderer is definitely slower and a pig for memory(having taken a course at school, it would regularly devour dual P3/800s w' 256M of RAM for lunch). Of course, you don't get ray-tracing in Blender, which some people feel is important..
The only other problem is the IKA system; it's rather primitive compared to anything else. It takes a lot of practice in rigging to get anything complex going(check out Barry Bond's work, though).
My main complaints are the added cruft of the gaming system(which I'm completely uninterested in), and the fact that both Matrox and NaN blame each other for the fact that Blender hates Matrox OpenGL, leaving a poor G400 user to disable it each and every time.
The pirates use modified Dreamcasts to spool the data to a hard drive--in effect, using the DC as an external GD drive. You won't be able to fully read a GD for some time, if ever.
Being able to create pseudo-GDs is more a case of luck and lax format specs--since almost no developer has used the high-density ring in the center of a GD. The rips aren't nearly the quality of PSX burns either--a friend tried DoA2(locks up repeatedly after about 15min) and Capcom Vs. SNK(loses music periodically), with less-than-stellar results.
If I remember reading right, in "The Art Of The Matrix", one artist noted that the W. Brothers stated machine society wasn't nearly as unified as it seems, with renegade bots sucking juice off of the Power Plants in sneak raids. It isn't hard to postulate that there might be other stronger AIs out there pulling the strings of everyone else(including the Oracle?), without concluding the Matrix is sentient. Mebbe the best example of a situation like this is Gregory Benford's "Great Sky River".
Maeda Mahiro(who, along with the other Gonzo guests, were immensely fun to listen to) stated in an AX2000 Q-n-A session that the clash between the 2D and 3D art in Blue Sub #6 was intentional(ref:EX Online).
Much better examples of mixing CG and animation are Studio Gonzo's newest TV series; Gate Keepers, and the just-now-airing-in-Japan Vandread.
Admittedly, they are both fanservice series, but Vandread in particular really looks exciting(after watching episode #4).
You can use Mikado's excellent 3ds export script to export a Blender scene into 3ds, and from there any small Quake modeling tool can convert it to Quake format. Copy it from chat.carleton.ca/~rmckay/3d/scripts/3DSFormat.blend. DeMoN has also written a preliminary md2 export script; available from members.xoom.com/chwillrich/, under the "other projects" link.
Appleseed-animated is barely even close to the manga. It compresses Book 2 into movie form, but leaves out the rich undertone and becomes a stereotypical shoot-the-terrorist show(and the dub adds an almost insulting supermarket-worthy soundtrack). Read the comic instead. The only series he made that adapted to anime adequatlely was Dominion Tank Police; which if you're listening Taco, you should also pick up.
I use TMPEGEnc exclusively now; it's very fast and has high quality(and will even support MPEG-2, if you are so inclined). Only bad point is that it was written in Japanese for Win95/J, so you will get garbage unless you have a character converter like NJWIN. You can get it from http://www.ingjapan.ne.jp/hori/TMPEGEnc.html; the very top link.
Miko from the Blender community wrote a very small user's guide for non-Japanese speakers; it's at http://chat.carleton.ca/~rmckay/3d/inspiration/tmp genc/. Avoid avi2mpg, it has some nasty problems with animation and VBV buffer overflows.
And on Axogon: I agree, it's quite good. I used it to build a music video a few weeks ago for Shmups! and Sakura-Con. It's not very good at handling long sound files, but as an effects package and basic editor, it can't be beat. Although I wouldn't reccommend serious stuff being done in it unless you know what you're doing; it can't lossless-undo compression codecs, so every time you edit and re-save, you'll lose quality with a recompress.
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I'm not sure if you're referring to inverse-kinematic skeletons, or a physics engine automatically applying forces to objects based on hit velocities.
Neither of which is relatively new; the latter was demonstrated by test builds of the Unreal engine when they first started using Karma.
Heck, you already have a quite robust physics engine for people to play with in UT2k3--not only does it ship with physics-based vehicle support, somebody's already built a Stair-Dismount mod.
Ah, so you're one for the "Everybody but the main cast must DIIIEEE!" style. ;)
Personally, I had the most fun with "To Hell With Nostradamus!", despite the token cute kids.
I still want to see "The $1 Money War", though.
You do realize that Blender got its start as an in-house production-quality 3D tool, no less valid at that time(~1996), comparatively speaking, than the tools you list? Ton built it for NeoGeo for experienced artists--he released it to the public only because he thought people would like to play with it. As such, it was always geared towards fast turnaround times and ability for the artist to work out simple things quickly, with a minimum of advanced render quality, animation features, or catering to inexperienced users--because they didn't need them!
I find it pretty funny that you state "hodgepodge of icons and textboxes". Seems to me that's always been the Achilles heel of the Maya interface--back when I started with 3.0, I remember being confused that "if this is considered a professional app, why does the suggested workflow feel like somebody smashed a sign truck into a printing press?"
Virtually anything Warren Ellis has had a hand in; especially his own original works:
Transmetropolitan
Global Frequency
In addition, other favorites of mine that you can still find in the store if you look:
-100 Bullets(various)
-Athena(Dean Hsieh)
-Heavy Liquid(Paul Pope, who's actually worked in the manga industry)
-Hitman(various)
Frank Miller's "Sin City" series are also good, although they're more of an exploration into beautifully rendered noir, than a continuing story.
here.
DirectShow on Win32 has quietly evolved into a multimedia scene graph similar to Quicktime, and GStreamer is the rather smarter effort on Linux.
(see here for an example of the clever tricks you can do in DirectShow just by accessing the scene graph with GraphEdit)
Unfortunately, most people seem more interested in demanding obscure playback modules in MPlayer, rather then looking at the problem from an abstracted view.
(OGRE takes the same approach for 3D engines, but people would still rather look at Crystal Space. le sigh.)
No, they don't.
The Unreal engine has never been multi-threaded(there was a RUMOR that a future build of UT2k3 would have it in for laughs, this has not happened yet). For Quake3, you can use the "r_smp" variable in a Q3 engine game, but this is more of a testament to Carmack than anything else(stability problems, here we come).
Speaking as an owner of a dual-Athlon system, buying a SMP machine entirely for gaming is a shootable offense--there's no viable reason. Most games really aren't bound by the CPU, they're very fill-rate and TnL dependent, and more likely to run into your video card, RAM or bus speed barriers first. More CPU helps if you're running a server or for some reason want to play with a ridiculous amount of bots, but a bus speedup or better video card will aid the client much more.
Where it DOES come in handy is if you do development work; you can launch the client without having to quit out of your editing environment, compile a level in the background, or encode MP3s without a single loss of frames...
Some clever people have already thought about that.
I've tried the demo on my P3-600 and G400, and with all graphic settings on minimum, gotten less than 15fps on average. Benchmark settings are an abysmal 20.75 for flyby, and 10.02 for botmatch. People using K6-450's with GeForces have reported playable framerates.
I would say that the choice of videocard matters much more; especially if you've bought a CPU from the past few years.
S'funny--I instead see a significant number of posts poking holes in Dean's original argument("when will Hollywood replace their render farms "), with the really good reason of "render farms are a hell of a lot cheaper in the long run".
I don't really see a lot of "we shouldn't ever explore this artform period!" posts.
Watch it again--Yohko and the gang really are inside the battleships.
The key is that they're using teleportation-based ejection systems, so if they take a lethal hit, the pilot is returned to the command center without a scratch.
Shigeto Maeda, author of [ka - ra]. Every image on the site was created with Blender(every month or two he'd post one at the Blender message forums).
Also, try the 2002 Blender F1 Competition to see what a diverse group of people can do with a single idea(including my entry!
>they're based in Redmond, across the Lake, where the demons lie.
It never fails to amuse me when native WA'ers point frantically at Redmond as the source of "evil". As if there's those Microsoft flags waving on every flagpole. As if the Microsoft buildings weren't a hell of a lot closer to Bellevue/Crossroads than they are to downtown Redmond. Let's hear it for "unincorporated King County".
'Course, downtown Redmond's city planning map resembles the average Microsoft product, so maybe they actually have something there...
ErMaC, at AX '01, passed out copies of his music video reel on SVCD CD-Rs. While I totally respect the man for going for quality, I can't play the disc at all since the family DVD player can't read CD-Rs, and my computer has no DVD-ROM drive. I managed to watch it only via a friend with a DVD drive, and even then, it could only read about half of the videos).
I really don't think most companies are set up to read the more exotic formats yet; my demo reel is still on plain ol' VHS, with some music videos included on a mini CD-R. Better to get them seen first, then worrying about quality.
Redmond City Hall IS invisible already. Stop any random Redmond passerby and see if they know where it is--2 outta 3 will probably remember it more as "that building close to where the carnival rides are set up for Derby Days".
Hell, I wouldn't even remember where it is if I hadn't had to take my brother over there for a few licenses and exams. The City Annex probably gets more traffic.
A friend on the SHMUPS! forum works at a repair shop, and noted that they'd gotten in a lot of DCs for repair that had had extensive CD-R playing. As in, playing-nothing-except-CDrips(not just using a boot loader to play imports). I suppose this might wear on it a bit quicker.
A friend of mine used to play a buncha rips like DOA2 and GGX for a few months; he switched back to real GDs and his DC seems fine. YMMV may vary, as always...
Newer Dreamcasts can read CD-Rs. They just need to be burned differently than the older methods(due to changes in the BIOS).
The only existing Dreamcasts that refuse to read any sort of CD-Rs, are the limited edition Sakura Taisen and Hello Kitty units produced in Japan.
No American DCs will flat-out refuse a correctly burned CD-R.
(It does seem that extensive playing of CD-R games does tend to shorten the life of the GD-drive significantly, however).
First, it's Axogon.
Second, it was never GPL'd, it was a private program.
Third, the decision to go pay-only was not a huge surprise. You already had a license fee if you wanted to register the 1.0 version, and this was not secret. Axogon actually resembled Blender's C-Key distribution back in the day.
Fourth, the decision came a LONG TIME before the paranoia over the DMCA started. MainConcept(who make precisely ZERO big-name products) made an offer, and if I was a college student not knowing where to go next, I'd sure as hell take it.
Fifth, you can still use the damn thing. 0.93.1 is available from scads of shareware sites, and is still rock-solid and a great on-the-cheap compositor/non-linear editor(as I've used it for all of my projects).
..in the midst of an XSI training course right now, I find it very similar to Blender(i.e., using lots of hotkeys). As other people have said, once you learn the major conventions in the Blender interface, it becomes _really_ fast to use. Subdivision modeling isn't as well implemented as it is in XSI; you end up using NURBS to get the basic shape, then doing fine-tweaking as a mesh in Blender.
I'm not sure what other part of "faster" you want; Blender does pretty good at keeping up. Maya's renderer is definitely slower and a pig for memory(having taken a course at school, it would regularly devour dual P3/800s w' 256M of RAM for lunch). Of course, you don't get ray-tracing in Blender, which some people feel is important..
The only other problem is the IKA system; it's rather primitive compared to anything else. It takes a lot of practice in rigging to get anything complex going(check out Barry Bond's work, though).
My main complaints are the added cruft of the gaming system(which I'm completely uninterested in), and the fact that both Matrox and NaN blame each other for the fact that Blender hates Matrox OpenGL, leaving a poor G400 user to disable it each and every time.
The pirates use modified Dreamcasts to spool the data to a hard drive--in effect, using the DC as an external GD drive. You won't be able to fully read a GD for some time, if ever.
Being able to create pseudo-GDs is more a case of luck and lax format specs--since almost no developer has used the high-density ring in the center of a GD. The rips aren't nearly the quality of PSX burns either--a friend tried DoA2(locks up repeatedly after about 15min) and Capcom Vs. SNK(loses music periodically), with less-than-stellar results.
I wonder if there'd be anybody who would want it in bass guitar style, with bunny-ears and painted pink.
If I remember reading right, in "The Art Of The Matrix", one artist noted that the W. Brothers stated machine society wasn't nearly as unified as it seems, with renegade bots sucking juice off of the Power Plants in sneak raids. It isn't hard to postulate that there might be other stronger AIs out there pulling the strings of everyone else(including the Oracle?), without concluding the Matrix is sentient. Mebbe the best example of a situation like this is Gregory Benford's "Great Sky River".
Much better examples of mixing CG and animation are Studio Gonzo's newest TV series; Gate Keepers, and the just-now-airing-in-Japan Vandread.
Admittedly, they are both fanservice series, but Vandread in particular really looks exciting(after watching episode #4).
You can use Mikado's excellent 3ds export script to export a Blender scene into 3ds, and from there any small Quake modeling tool can convert it to Quake format. Copy it from chat.carleton.ca/~rmckay /3d/scripts/3DSFormat.blend.
DeMoN has also written a preliminary md2 export script; available from members.xoom.com/chwillrich/, under the "other projects" link.
Appleseed-animated is barely even close to the manga. It compresses Book 2 into movie form, but leaves out the rich undertone and becomes a stereotypical shoot-the-terrorist show(and the dub adds an almost insulting supermarket-worthy soundtrack). Read the comic instead.
The only series he made that adapted to anime adequatlely was Dominion Tank Police; which if you're listening Taco, you should also pick up.
I use TMPEGEnc exclusively now; it's very fast and has high quality(and will even support MPEG-2, if you are so inclined). Only bad point is that it was written in Japanese for Win95/J, so you will get garbage unless you have a character converter like NJWIN.
p genc/.
You can get it from http://www.ingjapan.ne.jp/hori/TMPEGEnc.html; the very top link.
Miko from the Blender community wrote a very small user's guide for non-Japanese speakers; it's at http://chat.carleton.ca/~rmckay/3d/inspiration/tm
Avoid avi2mpg, it has some nasty problems with animation and VBV buffer overflows.
And on Axogon: I agree, it's quite good. I used it to build a music video a few weeks ago for Shmups! and Sakura-Con. It's not very good at handling long sound files, but as an effects package and basic editor, it can't be beat. Although I wouldn't reccommend serious stuff being done in it unless you know what you're doing; it can't lossless-undo compression codecs, so every time you edit and re-save, you'll lose quality with a recompress.