http://casuallyhardcore.com/blog Chronicling the fantastic life of an indie. Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:43:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en About 5 years ago, creating spherical harmonic values for irradiance volumes was painful. There were no tools, just a hodge-podge of code strung together with scripts. Turtle from Illuminate Labs now makes it trivial. You can bake everything from Ambient Occlusion to Radiosity Normal Maps to spherical harmonic coefficients with ... http://casuallyhardcore.com/blog/2008/11/13/irradiance-volumes/ I spent some time learning about bi-directional constraints in Maya via this and have re-compiled and re-packaged the plugin for Maya 2008 (the version I own and use). Here it is - BiDirectional_Maya2008.zip Constraints are typically unidirectional which means if you want to hand be the "controller" (i.e pivot) of an arm ... http://casuallyhardcore.com/blog/2008/11/13/multi-way-bi-directional-constraints-in-maya-2008/ IndieLib - my favourite 2D engine is running a competition in November (1st to 30th) IndieLib is also now LGPL (open source) http://casuallyhardcore.com/blog/2008/10/30/indielib-competition/ Nick Pugh in "Originality in Design" talks about creating an unique visual language, an iconography for your work. We copy and borrow from modern pop culture all the time, so it's often difficult to create something truly "original" or "unique" - especially within a known genre. Nick himself, fights with ... http://casuallyhardcore.com/blog/2008/10/04/the-language-of-our-times/ It's been a tough month - I've been ill or away at weddings or random conferences. At least I've been awarded a Telefilm extension on the project! Anyhow, I've had to let go some junior/intermediate artists unfortunately. There's a well known axiom called "Cheap, Fast or Good - pick two" and ... http://casuallyhardcore.com/blog/2008/10/02/lost-in-translation/ Chris Hecker and Chaim Gingold spoke at GDC 2006 about prototyping and I've only recently discovered it. I wish I had read it before I began my prototype because they discuss some gnarly issues I've encountered. The powerpoint slides and MP3 audio are available here, but I'll summarize the juicy bits. 1) ... http://casuallyhardcore.com/blog/2008/08/24/on-prototyping/ Wow. This will forever be immortalized. http://casuallyhardcore.com/blog/2008/08/24/ralph-bakshi-clip/ I'm about a month or so behind schedule so I might as well talk about why: Implementing deformable collision is HARD My giant robots require skinned collision (collision geometry deforms while the bones are animating) for the superheroes to walk on. Most physics engines will not allow non-static collision meshes to ... http://casuallyhardcore.com/blog/2008/08/03/the-supers-working-title-update/ All 34 games of goodness... One of my favourites is Office Smash: Save a tree! Go play a game now! http://casuallyhardcore.com/blog/2008/06/30/all-tojam-3-games-posted/ But now the first robot has been properly rigged and joined together in game. Unlike most 3D characters, the robots in The Supers are merely a collection 12-15 parts that are stitched together using dynamic parenting. The second robot, after much haggling, is almost through the rigging process. The time frame ... http://casuallyhardcore.com/blog/2008/06/27/its-taken-a-loooong-time/