The future is now

I feel really accomplished today. Why? Because I fixed all of the problems with my imported animations. The Warrior of Light is now 100% ready to kick Evil's butt. He is fully modeled, textured, and rigged, and, as of today, totally bug free. He looks EXACTLY like the peep I chose to play the Warrior of Light. I don't know if I have ever accomplished a goal this perfectly. It works exactly like I imagined. Speculation is now reality. What used to be the distant future is now the very real present.

Back in March of last year, I wrote an post that I entitled "The Future of RCT3 Machinima." By far, it has been my most viewed blog post over the last year (Good suggestion CzWorld!). In it, I talked a lot about Animated CSOs. Basically, I considered them to be the "final frontier" of RCT3 Machinima. At the time, though, I wasn't sure if it was possible to implement animations like I dreamed of doing. Today, I have confirmed that it is indeed..... very possible. The outer limit of what I thought might be possible, is now possible. It's the best case scenario.

Sometime this year, all of this ranting about how awesome animated CSOs are will come to fruition, and I'll release The Battle for Axis Mundi. In the best case scenario the film will be released this summer. Wait, I already said this was the best case scenario, didn't I? Well then, in the best case scenario of the best case scenario.

Latest Model Update

Good news! The importation of the Warrior of Light model into RCT3 has been an absolutely smashing success!! I would say that the model is 90% accurate to the original. In most shots, the peep looks identical to it's CSO doppelganger:

It is only in shots where the two are juxtaposed that you can see any real differences:

This means that I should be able to switch the "stunt double" for the actual peep, and you really shouldn't notice a difference.

Another great thing is that UV mapping works properly. In order to test UV mapping compatibility in RCT3 without going to the trouble of actually texturing the model how it is supposed to be, I rendered an Ambient Occlusion pass to a UV image of the model's unwrapped mesh. I then used that texture as the model texture. This meant that if the model looked like AO was applied to it in RCT3, then UV mapping works. If the texture looked like a garbled mess, that would mean that UV mapping wouldn't work. 

As it turns out the texture mapped properly. As you can see, there are indirect shadows on the model below, which was rendered in RCT3. Notice the area on his forehead behind the right eyebrow. See how it is dark right behind his eyebrow, and gets lighter farther away? This is the effect that Ambient Occlusion has when rendering. Since the UV texture was mapped properly, these "indirect shadows" show up in the correct places.

As for the SCAD Film Festival: today is the last day that people can submit their films. Then on the 15th the winners will be notified and the online voting for the "viewers choice" will begin.  So......... yeah. Still waiting.

That's all for this update.

RCT3 Animation Demonstration

As I said in my last blog post, I have managed to import Animated CSOs into RCT3. And while it is great to see even just a simple little thing like the green ball swinging back and forth, I want to emphasize how useful Animated CSOs can be for much more complicated animations and models. That's why I made this video yesterday. It shows how you can create your own character designs, and fully animate them. I am proud to say that this video only took me a few hours to make, from initial idea, to uploading to YouTube.

Animation in RCT3

OK, so recently there has been a really big development. I have finally managed to import animated custom scenery into RCT3. This opens up A LOT of potential. I am working on seeing how much I can integrate this new ability into Axis Mundi. I also decided to create a tutorial of exactly how I managed to do the importing. Half so that I can remember, and half because a forum member over at the LG Machinima Community requested it.

Here's the tutorial, if you are interested:http://gulk.bplaced.net/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=629

And here is an example of what I have been able to import into RCT3:

It may not look like much now, but I fully intend to blow your mind with some crazy animations later on.