What's this about plasticy CGI? I do 3D modeling and I must say, it's incredibly simple to get something to look organic. In fact, it's harder to get something to look plasticy than it is to make it matte.
I tend to spend almost an hour per texture getting them just right. Earlier this month, I was trying to make a white plastic similar to what Apple uses for the G4 iMac (matte exterior, but still slightly translucent with a white interior). It took upwards of an hour and a half to get the reflectivity right. Now, matte or metalic is simple, and now that I've done that plastic, I could do something similar in much less time.
Anyway, my point is that CG textures can be just about anything we want them to be. Just look at the phantoms in Final Fantasy. Just make it white as opposed to red and turn up the transparancy and reflectivity a bit. Viola, you have a metroid's skin.
Now, metroids might have more of a shell than a jelly-like skin. You never really see them flex their skin in the game, so lets asusme that it's more like a clear shell. So, simply don't tell it to flex. Instead of smoothly binding it to the skeleton, do a rigid bind to the root joint. That would keep it stationary relative to the main body of the metroid and rigid.
Actually, Dune and Children Of Dune were both pretty good. All of the characters were almost as I imagined them and there were only a few events missing or rearranged.
I would like to see something of that quality be made of each of the Foundation books, but I don't really see how that would be possible.
Now, the SciFi series are pretty dumb, (Tremors?!? They canceled Farscape for Tremors?!?) but their miniseries movies are pretty good.
Which is why you DON'T cast some famous actress in that role. The film that I'm explaining could be done entirely by Pixar or some other digital animation studio.
In fact, it could probably be done by an independant film maker as long as he had access to 3D modeling and rendering software.
Really, the power suits from Starship Troopers were more like the Terminators from Warhammer 40k.
I love that character Chief Librarian Mephiston, Lord Of Death. "Your book is a day late! The late fee: YOUR SOUL!!!" I mean, seriously, what kind of childhood did the makers of that game have?
Well, yes, they could do that. I was just pointing out that most of the character could be done using CG. With digital characters, almost nothing is impossible. The transition to the morphing ball would be a little odd, but other than that, there is very little about the game that couldn't be caried directly to the screen.
I really can't imagine Samus for an extended period without her helmet. That would just look weird. Now, scenes from inside the helmet would be cool.
I am a CG modeler. It's unbelievably simple to convince people that they're watching a human if they don't see the face. Our brains have portions dedicated to identifying faces. We can recognize that something is wrong with one in a split-second.
Gollum was the single best CG character that I have ever seen. They did motion capture for his face, so even it moved correctly. The oly real problem that I saw was during one scene, the cloth he was grabbing didn't behave correctly. That's probably because Andy Serkis' fingers aren't as long as Gollum's.
Stills from Final Fantasy were very good, but the video was less than perfect. Gollum's motion was wonderfuly fluid. He moved like a real creature instead of as some construct. I was mostly amazed by how good his facial expressions were. Those are very hard to do manually.
Yes, but they weren't much like the Protos. IIRC, they were more like people born in space in every other Sci-Fi book. Tall, thin, agile, but not too physicaly strong.
Well, you see, the HIV is constantly evolving. Any doctor who does not believe that evolution is a fact should not be working with HIV.
I agree that people should be able to believe what they want to, but there are far reaching consequences to some of these beliefs. It isn't easy to see how a knowledge of evolution could help fight infection, but it can.
Similarly, it isn't easy to tell when a closed minded doctor wouldn't see something vital because it doesn't coincide with what he believes.
Of course, I'm talking mostly about researchers here, but the idea can be applied to many areas of medicine.
Exactly. If the students fight, then they would win a battle for EVERYONE and they would be able to counter-sue the RIAA for quite a sum of money.
Let's see if we can list all of the cries that the RIAA has committed against them.
Libel, for one. Calling them criminals and pirates when they've done nothing wrong is most certainly defamation.
Malicious prosecution would most certainly apply. The RIAA has instigated just about the most unjustifiable and unreasonable civil litigation in this case that I've ever heard about.
Ummm. No. Starcraft was obviously inspired by the descriptions of the aliens in Starship Troopers. Come to think of it, quite a few of the Terrans and the Zerg come from that book.
The Overlords are the rough equivilants of Brain Bugs, Marines are the guys in power suits, etc.
To make a Metroid movie, there would have to be more bounty hunters. It would probably end up looking like an Alien ripoff, really. It would also be kind of tough to convey the history of the game if it took place during or after the series. A skilled writer could pull it off.
Also, it would be tough to find someone to play Samus well. Now, it's not like you would ever have to see her face until the end of the movie (and possibly the beginning), so really, most of it could be CG and motion capture pretty easily. No real actors, just voices mostly, a few face shots to make it look better, and some people in motion capture suits to keep the movement realistic.
I just want to see a Metroid flying around. That would be so awesome!
Final Fantasy was pretty cool. The story was pretty dumb, but the movie was visually stunning. If they actually wrote a good story and used that quality of CGI, then I, for one, would love it.
When I say a good story, I mean FF6 quality. It was long, not too confusing, and it was just cool overall.
They still need to get facial expressions, but after seeing Gollum, I think that some studios, at least, have that down.
I, for one, knew months before the release of the normal FotR DVD that there would be an extended edition. Anyone who really pays attention to this stuff knows well in advance.
Of course they will. ISPs are taking the RIAA's lead and trying to charge us for everything they possibly can. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they started charging per byte over a certain limit. "You shouldn't need more than that much bandwidth", they'll say.
We, the member companies of the RIAA have prepared the following reply to the above.
1. We blame the economy on these "illegal online services". It is clear to us that music pirates are the cause of all of the world's troubles. We are laboring day and night to prove this to our representatives (We paid for them, so they're ours!) in Congress.
2. The MPAA should follow our lead and publish fewer movies. When they start to lose money, they can simply blame it on invisible pirates stealing their work.
3. We only want ClearChannel to play 2 groups, so when record sales suffer across the board, it's obviously ClearChannel's fault for playing more groups than we want them to. They're in league with the pirates! They give music away for free! That's Communism! Communists are terrorists!
RIAA_mode:= OFF
Their reality distortion field is almost as powerful as Steve Jobs'. Of course, they are far more evil than he is.
They ARE raping our inboxes! We never consented to allow them to fill our E-mail inboxes with their penis enlargement spam, let alone without the protection afforded by the "ADV:" tag!
Anti_spam_fanatic_mode:= OFF
I hope that someone finds the personal info of those 180 people and posts it here on/.. We should be able to harrass them endlessly and make their signal:noise ratio equivilant to ours.
However, if we did that, then we would be no better than they are. Perhaps a more effective thing to do would be to sign our governmental representatives up for every E-mail mass marketing campaign there is and do so with the name of one of the 180 spammers. That wouldn't be too hard.
Plus, we could always claim that a nasty virus did it.
You make many good points. The whole "so they don't fall into the hole" is probably just a byproduct of what I think was the original intention: round pipes are better structuraly than anything else.
It's really quite sad that the interviewer was unhappy with the answer, because it is much more complete than the cliche answer. That would be like me leaving the "+C" off of an antiderivative. It simply isn't correct because it isn't complete.
I would love to see someone try to roll a manhole cover around. They weigh well over 40 kg, IIRC. Standing the thing up on edge would be about as hard as standing a dime on edge.
Well, the last time that I read through the copyright law, there was no provision whatsoever for parody and the only "fair use" provisons allow educational users to make copies without permission.
Slashdot Mirror
What's this about plasticy CGI? I do 3D modeling and I must say, it's incredibly simple to get something to look organic. In fact, it's harder to get something to look plasticy than it is to make it matte.
I tend to spend almost an hour per texture getting them just right. Earlier this month, I was trying to make a white plastic similar to what Apple uses for the G4 iMac (matte exterior, but still slightly translucent with a white interior). It took upwards of an hour and a half to get the reflectivity right. Now, matte or metalic is simple, and now that I've done that plastic, I could do something similar in much less time.
Anyway, my point is that CG textures can be just about anything we want them to be. Just look at the phantoms in Final Fantasy. Just make it white as opposed to red and turn up the transparancy and reflectivity a bit. Viola, you have a metroid's skin.
Now, metroids might have more of a shell than a jelly-like skin. You never really see them flex their skin in the game, so lets asusme that it's more like a clear shell. So, simply don't tell it to flex. Instead of smoothly binding it to the skeleton, do a rigid bind to the root joint. That would keep it stationary relative to the main body of the metroid and rigid.
Easy as 3.14159265358...
Actually, Dune and Children Of Dune were both pretty good. All of the characters were almost as I imagined them and there were only a few events missing or rearranged.
I would like to see something of that quality be made of each of the Foundation books, but I don't really see how that would be possible.
Now, the SciFi series are pretty dumb, (Tremors?!? They canceled Farscape for Tremors?!?) but their miniseries movies are pretty good.
Which is why you DON'T cast some famous actress in that role. The film that I'm explaining could be done entirely by Pixar or some other digital animation studio.
In fact, it could probably be done by an independant film maker as long as he had access to 3D modeling and rendering software.
Actually, my /. name is a play on my real name. I should have gone with Bob Zimmerman, but I think that it was already taken.
Really, the power suits from Starship Troopers were more like the Terminators from Warhammer 40k.
I love that character Chief Librarian Mephiston, Lord Of Death. "Your book is a day late! The late fee: YOUR SOUL!!!" I mean, seriously, what kind of childhood did the makers of that game have?
Well, yes, they could do that. I was just pointing out that most of the character could be done using CG. With digital characters, almost nothing is impossible. The transition to the morphing ball would be a little odd, but other than that, there is very little about the game that couldn't be caried directly to the screen.
I really can't imagine Samus for an extended period without her helmet. That would just look weird. Now, scenes from inside the helmet would be cool.
Have you seen Gollum lately?
I am a CG modeler. It's unbelievably simple to convince people that they're watching a human if they don't see the face. Our brains have portions dedicated to identifying faces. We can recognize that something is wrong with one in a split-second.
Gollum was the single best CG character that I have ever seen. They did motion capture for his face, so even it moved correctly. The oly real problem that I saw was during one scene, the cloth he was grabbing didn't behave correctly. That's probably because Andy Serkis' fingers aren't as long as Gollum's.
Stills from Final Fantasy were very good, but the video was less than perfect. Gollum's motion was wonderfuly fluid. He moved like a real creature instead of as some construct. I was mostly amazed by how good his facial expressions were. Those are very hard to do manually.
Yes, but they weren't much like the Protos. IIRC, they were more like people born in space in every other Sci-Fi book. Tall, thin, agile, but not too physicaly strong.
Perhaps I should read the book again.
Well, you see, the HIV is constantly evolving. Any doctor who does not believe that evolution is a fact should not be working with HIV.
I agree that people should be able to believe what they want to, but there are far reaching consequences to some of these beliefs. It isn't easy to see how a knowledge of evolution could help fight infection, but it can.
Similarly, it isn't easy to tell when a closed minded doctor wouldn't see something vital because it doesn't coincide with what he believes.
Of course, I'm talking mostly about researchers here, but the idea can be applied to many areas of medicine.
I must say, I've been pretty satisfied with my latest CD purchases.
I got Busted Stuff from the Dave Matthews Band and it came with a pretty cool DVD with all sorts of extras.
Then, I got The Best of 1990-2000 from U2. It was two CDs and a DVD. It didn't cost too much, either.
However, the RIAA member companies still charge way too much for most CDs.
Exactly. If the students fight, then they would win a battle for EVERYONE and they would be able to counter-sue the RIAA for quite a sum of money.
Let's see if we can list all of the cries that the RIAA has committed against them.
Libel, for one. Calling them criminals and pirates when they've done nothing wrong is most certainly defamation.
Malicious prosecution would most certainly apply. The RIAA has instigated just about the most unjustifiable and unreasonable civil litigation in this case that I've ever heard about.
Ummm. No. Starcraft was obviously inspired by the descriptions of the aliens in Starship Troopers. Come to think of it, quite a few of the Terrans and the Zerg come from that book.
The Overlords are the rough equivilants of Brain Bugs, Marines are the guys in power suits, etc.
However, for the most part, the Protos were new.
To make a Metroid movie, there would have to be more bounty hunters. It would probably end up looking like an Alien ripoff, really. It would also be kind of tough to convey the history of the game if it took place during or after the series. A skilled writer could pull it off.
Also, it would be tough to find someone to play Samus well. Now, it's not like you would ever have to see her face until the end of the movie (and possibly the beginning), so really, most of it could be CG and motion capture pretty easily. No real actors, just voices mostly, a few face shots to make it look better, and some people in motion capture suits to keep the movement realistic.
I just want to see a Metroid flying around. That would be so awesome!
It's submarines! In space!
Final Fantasy was pretty cool. The story was pretty dumb, but the movie was visually stunning. If they actually wrote a good story and used that quality of CGI, then I, for one, would love it.
When I say a good story, I mean FF6 quality. It was long, not too confusing, and it was just cool overall.
They still need to get facial expressions, but after seeing Gollum, I think that some studios, at least, have that down.
I, for one, knew months before the release of the normal FotR DVD that there would be an extended edition. Anyone who really pays attention to this stuff knows well in advance.
Of course they will. ISPs are taking the RIAA's lead and trying to charge us for everything they possibly can. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they started charging per byte over a certain limit. "You shouldn't need more than that much bandwidth", they'll say.
Well, it'll do that if you don't use a computer as a gateway. If you do, then it probably won't look like more than one computer is connecting.
Or do I completely misunderstand how this works?
The same day that the RIAA realizes that people don't want to pay for each copy of a song that they have.
We, the member companies of the RIAA have prepared the following reply to the above.
:= OFF
1. We blame the economy on these "illegal online services". It is clear to us that music pirates are the cause of all of the world's troubles. We are laboring day and night to prove this to our representatives (We paid for them, so they're ours!) in Congress.
2. The MPAA should follow our lead and publish fewer movies. When they start to lose money, they can simply blame it on invisible pirates stealing their work.
3. We only want ClearChannel to play 2 groups, so when record sales suffer across the board, it's obviously ClearChannel's fault for playing more groups than we want them to. They're in league with the pirates! They give music away for free! That's Communism! Communists are terrorists!
RIAA_mode
Their reality distortion field is almost as powerful as Steve Jobs'. Of course, they are far more evil than he is.
Well, if he has a Region 0 player, then it doesn't matter.
Similarly, if he could play these music files wherever he wanted to, then he would buy them.
You do have a good point there. We have the right to defend ourselves against aggression.
Similarly, returning fire on "civilians" is accepted, but the military is not supposed to fire on them first.
They ARE raping our inboxes! We never consented to allow them to fill our E-mail inboxes with their penis enlargement spam, let alone without the protection afforded by the "ADV:" tag!
:= OFF
/.. We should be able to harrass them endlessly and make their signal:noise ratio equivilant to ours.
Anti_spam_fanatic_mode
I hope that someone finds the personal info of those 180 people and posts it here on
However, if we did that, then we would be no better than they are. Perhaps a more effective thing to do would be to sign our governmental representatives up for every E-mail mass marketing campaign there is and do so with the name of one of the 180 spammers. That wouldn't be too hard.
Plus, we could always claim that a nasty virus did it.
You make many good points. The whole "so they don't fall into the hole" is probably just a byproduct of what I think was the original intention: round pipes are better structuraly than anything else.
It's really quite sad that the interviewer was unhappy with the answer, because it is much more complete than the cliche answer. That would be like me leaving the "+C" off of an antiderivative. It simply isn't correct because it isn't complete.
I would love to see someone try to roll a manhole cover around. They weigh well over 40 kg, IIRC. Standing the thing up on edge would be about as hard as standing a dime on edge.
Well, the last time that I read through the copyright law, there was no provision whatsoever for parody and the only "fair use" provisons allow educational users to make copies without permission.