This is a Photoshop painting I just finished. It was meant to be a quick one, but I wound up working on it most nights for about two weeks. Since “finishing” it I’ve found that some image applications don’t display colour properly (Like the Windows 7 image preview) and you pretty much have to view it with a black background (which this blog doesn’t have).

I’ve been working on this image for the past few days.  It’s just a simple export out of sculptris and into 3DS Max.  I’m still trying to figure out how to get rid of the lines in the low res version of the head though.  If anyone knows, please let me know.

I’ve been learning MudBox lately but for some reason I just find it difficult to use quickly. I’m not sure why, but I just don’t seem to like it much. The other day I read about a free piece of software which works very similar called Sculptris.  After using it for about 10 minutes I had most of the keyboard shortcuts down and was able to create something that looked half decent.

A cartoon duck:

After that I spent a little more time and created a female body.  I’m still not the greatest at drawing photo realistic characters, but it was easy to achieve for the most part.  It’s still a 1.0 release but what I found a little lacking was there was no real way to delete parts of the mesh I screwed up on.  I had issues with the fingers on the hand and quite a few with the head of the character.  In both cases I wanted to revert it to a stump and recreate it but I couldn’t.  What I wound up doing is reducing the polygon count and using a combination of smooth and the inverted draw tool to push it back.

I also had issues with the masking features.  It could have been my fault being new with the software but I couldn’t figure out how to mask things and them move them around.  My characters face was too far out and I wanted to push it back, but every time I did something unexpected happened to it.

Besides those minor issues I had with it, it’s an awesome piece of software and being available for free makes it even better.  I suggest everyone try it out.

I’ve been interested in processing images off of a web cam for a while but I haven’t had the ability to do it until now.  I have been banging my head against the wall trying to install openCV for too long but was never able to figure out how to compile even the most basic app because all of the documentation was out of date.  That changed when I found a You Tube video to guide me through the process.

Once I did that, and remembered how to program in C++ (I’ve been using C# for over a year now – I’m a bit rusty) it only took me a couple hours of reading documentation to write a basic app that does edge detection of a web cam image in real time.  It’s still not perfect and it’s night time so the low light is throwing it off, but it worked out well.  I just have to find out how to reduce the background noise and I’ll be able to do more with it.

It seems to be pretty good at tracking eyes. I just need to figure out how to tell which edges are the eyes and which are the outside of the head.

I borrowed a power meter from the Library the other day and tested my new computer with it. It used less power then I thought it did. The box draw a max of 260W, but it was the monitor that really stumped me. Standby mode does absolutely nothing to the power usage when the computer is on.  Has anyone else out there had a similar experience?

A few years back I put money down on a condo, and it is supposed to be ready in a couple of months. Its about time I figure out where to place furniture and what colours to paint the walls, so I’ve dug out the old 3D model that I made based off of the floor plans and started to mess with rendering it in 3DS Max. I still have to perfect the lighting and I haven’t spent much time on the materials, but its coming along.

I managed to complete Dirty Split yesterday. It’s a short game, but it’s fun and the voice acting is really well done. The puzzles got a little frustrating in parts, but they were all solvable without looking up the answer in an online walkthrough. Some times game developers seem to throw in puzzles which require a lot of random clicking if you don’t think exactly the same way as them. One thing I would have liked to have seen was at least the appearance of choices if not actual choices. You run through all the options until there are no more and then you move on to talking to the next person. It would have been nice to see some side quests of some sort. Maybe in their next game.

On a side note, on April 1st Microids announced that Syberia 3 is on its way. While it was an April Fools joke, I hope they’re working on it. I’d love to see another part to the story. If you get a chance to play the first two they’re a little slow, but well worth playing.

Over the past two days I have received a couple emails from a company apparently working on a TV show for the Discovery Channel on Nostradamus.

I’m assuming they are contacting me because of the false prediction that was going around the net in September of 2001 taken from an essay written by another Neil Marshall. Although he lives/lived in a nearby town and went to University at a similar time as I did, I can assure you I have not written any essays on Nostradamus. If I did, they would be atrocious.

I can only hope that they are going to make a show about debunking the predictions. I wonder if Neil Marshall the horror film director is also getting these emails. I could do some 3D animations and he could direct the show.

…or it is just a new spam email that is getting through my filters.

I’ve been on the look out for an Adventure game engine which will enable me to just focus on a story and graphics without messing around with a programming language and I just happened across one while searching for something unrelated.

Wintermute looks promising.

The interface leaves a little to be desired, but it appears as if it is capable of creating a 2D or 2.5D adventure game.  I haven’t tried importing the raincoat girl yet, but the 2D portion of it looks like it works.  I was able to create a simple room in which the default character could walk around and as it walked into the screen, it automatically scaled in size.

Try out Dirty Split. Its built using Wintermute and it’s pretty good. The art in it is much better then the default stuff that comes with the engine.