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.

What I've been doing this December

If you regularly keep up with my blog, then you've probably noticed that I haven't updated very much this December. Well, how's this for an explanation?

Yep. It may be hard to believe, but that is my own completely* original creation. I used reference images from the internet and modeled it by hand, just like I did with the Warrior of Light. "Why make such a complex model?" you might ask. Well, I made it for a relative who loves cars. I asked him what the best car was, and he told me that the Pagani Zonda was his personal favorite. So this was a Christmas present for him. Unfortunately, I am still trying to explain to him that I made it, and it's not from Gran Turismo 5 or some such racing simulator. Anyway, I feel really great about this project. It obviously turned out spectacularly. I did not think I would achieve this level of awesomeness in Blender so quickly. Oh, and it was rendered by Blender's internal renderer. No Yafaray or Luxrender here. I tried them, but they were too grainy and they rendered too slowly. The render time for this Full-HD image was 4 hours and 30 minutes. Oh yeah, and the scene contains roughly 1 million vertices.

I'll be getting back to Axis Mundi after my break. After working on this up until the last minute, I definitely need one. Merry Christmas!

*I got the tire rims from a generous fellow who posted them for download. It was the last thing I had to do, and I really didn't feel like doing any more modeling.

Texturing Completed

Woo! The rest of the texturing went by at warp-speed! And I couldn't be happier with how it turned out!

Prepare for awesomeness in 3... 2... 1 AWESOMENESS:

It look so close to the original! I am extremely pleased. Now I just need to finish my other ...secret... assets, and I can start animating some action scenes!!! Yaaaaaaaayyyy!

Done with the model

I have finished the replica of the RCT3 Peep who plays the Warrior of Light. Here's a comparison:

The guy on the right was rendered in RCT3, and the guy on the left was rendered in Blender.

Now I just need to texture it, and get it rigged up so that I can animate it. I hope that RCT3 handles the mesh deformation properly. So far I have not deformed any meshes in my tests with animated CSOs. I'm also not sure about UV mapping. In order to get the textures on him properly, I may need to use UV mapping, but I'm not certain if RCT3 supports that or not.... I think it does. And it also probably does support mesh deformation. I just don't know if it supports weight painting, and I don't know whether I will need to weight paint or not.

Anyway, sorry for all the 3D jargon. I'm kind of thinking out loud right now.

In other news, the SCAD Film festival stops accepting entries in 9 days. After that, it will be a week until the winners are notified. So keep crossing your fingers!

The Blender animation is on it's way

So I stayed up until 3:30am on Friday night finishing the animation, I rendered it on Saturday, and I'm just doing a very small amount of editing and the video should be up later today. Seeya then!