Almost Here

I'm so excited, and a little anxious. My desktop that I referred to in my last post should arrive at my house sometime tomorrow! The GeForce 9800GTX+ was replaced with a GeForce GTS 250, which, for the 512MB cards, is basically a rebranded and smaller 9800GTX+. And after exploring PhysX, CUDA, and just modern game graphics, I'm more excited than ever for my computer to get here. Having the new Houdini 10 beta is also nice; as I'm sure it will be fun making smoke with 4 cores. However, I am a little anxious because after reading reviews it appears that sometimes CyberPower PCs arrive is, less than ideal conditions. Not everything is plugged in, something might be improperly mounted, or the worst, the PSU (Power Supply Unit) or another part is DOA (Dead on Arrival). But it also appears they've gotten better recently, I guess I'll have to wait until tomorrow to see. If it is a little less than satisfactory, I guess I get what I pay for. I am currently prepared and able to deal with anything not plugged in to the motherboard, a DOA hard drive, anything not properly mounted, and that's it.

Signature; Desktop

As I somewhat insinuated in my previous post, DICE is a cool company and I am glad they make games for me and everyone else. And so to honor their awesomeness (and give myself a forums signature) I went and made this image.

http://flickr.com/photos/heydabop/3317351852/
 

Hope you like it.

 

Now on to my desktop. For a while now I've been saving up to buy a laptop, since my current laptop plays most newer games at 10-20FPS at lowest settings, needless to say, this takes away from the fun of the game. But today I figured I'd go browse desktops and see how they are these days. In about 10 minutes I lost all interest in buying a laptop. Sure the portability is great, but is it worth +$400? Not for me it isn't. So after looking around and picking and choosing carefully, I bought a desktop from CyberPower PC this afternoon. In order to take advantage of free shipping I had to skimp on a few things, like some RAM, an optical drive…and an OS. However, I can buy myself an optical drive soon after I get the computer, and I can install the Windows 7 beta (which is AMAZING) from a USB drive. What I did not skimp on was my video card and processor. My processor is an AMD Phenom X4 9850 2.5GHz, which will go great with SideFX Houdini. The video card is an NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX+ 512MB. I would've liked to get it with 1GB, but I wasn't sure if that was overkill for what I wanted, and I didn't have a whole bunch of money. So for the next 2 weeks or so, I will be greatly anticipating the desktop's arrival. But for now, I think I'll go play Battlefield 2142 at 20 FPS.

Pleasing People

Am I the only one who is appalled at how hard it is to please most people? I can think of many times I've witnessed this, but right now I'm thinking of one or two specific instances, centered around Battlefield Heroes and Battlefield 1943, two games being released by Electronic Arts and Digital Illusions CE. I'll start off with people's reaction to Battlefield Heroes. Yes, EA has missed their initial release date by months, but if it makes the game better is it worth it? In my opinion yes, and people shouldn't find reason to complain about it, but they do. They are currently holding a closed beta, which of course has many people yelling for a beta key to get in, or complaining that it is closed. Has it occurred to them that, this being a game in development that is completely online, it probably doesn't have many servers to run from? Apparently not, because they just yell and whine that the game isn't out and the beta is closed. O, one more thing, this game is and will be COMPLETELY FREE! Right there I think unless EA or DICE really messes something up, people lose most all room to complain. Now onto Battlefield 1943 and the lack of gratitude surrounding it. EA announced this game about 10 days prior to this writing, and it is the debut of the Frostbite engine on the PC. This allows almost complete destruction of buildings and other objects in the playing environment, which is great! However, people have already found ways to complain about it. Saying EA will just ruin it, or it isn't realistic enough. If people assume EA is going to ruin it, then chances are they will think it is ruined when it is released due to their current mood. I just don't see why they don't give EA a chance; they have yet to majorly mess up any Battlefield game from what I've seen. And if you want realism, go play America's Army, and if that is too real, go play Call of Duty. But really, complaining about a free game, or about a game that no one has any detailed information on? That's just childish and stupid. Thank you for reading.

Physically Based Rendering

After learning about Physically Based Rendering (PBR) in Houdini, I realized it is cool and useful, if one knows how to use it. PBR uses to physical properties of light, hence its name, to render scenes. This allows it to render with caustics and global illumination by the use of "photons". I knew how to do caustics before this, but using PBR makes it more straightforward. After reading up on PBR, I know most of my way around it, so for the past few days I've been messing with it, and here are the results all smashed into one image. All of these are low resolution and low quality renders, because I was just experimenting and didn't want to spend a lot of time rendering.

http://flickr.com/photos/heydabop/3252569754/

Match Moving

Due to my current sculpture project being harder than I had expected, I have taken a break from it, and instead tried some match moving. For those of you who don't know, match moving is taking film of (usually) a real scene, such as a road or a room, and analyzing it to create a virtual camera to put in a 3D scene. This allows the 3D program to render its model using the virtual camera, and the end result is a model that will fit well into the original footage since both the model and scene are being viewed from the same perspective. The result of my attempt to do this is this video. http://vimeo.com/3008967

Desktop; Twisted

Still no sign of my laptop, last week I was told the guy repairing it still hasn't gotten in contact with the people who gave him the motherboard last time. I have not heard anything since then so I have no idea when I'll be getting it back. In the mean time however, I have managed to get a 4 year old desktop from my friend. It is not exactly fast, but it is capable of doing what I want it to do until I get my laptop, and will be useful as a render farm node once I have my laptop. It has a 2.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading, 2GB of DDR-SDRAM PC-2700, an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200, and an 80GB 7,200RPM EIDE hard drive. So although I won't be doing any gaming, it is not much worse than my laptop, it is however good enough for SideFX Houdini 9.5. This brings me to my next subject, Twisted.

After I set the desktop up how I wanted it and installed the Windows 7 Beta, which I must add works very well and fast, I decided I'd install Houdini and mess around. I had a couple ideas, but most of them included dynamic simulations, which I didn't feel like using on this machine due to processor speed and memory constraints. So I just made a simple curve, copied it four times, rotating 90 degrees each time, added a PolyWire node to it, and subdivided it, which resulted in an interesting looking "sculpture". Once the model was finished, I gave it a silver material, and created a floor with a slightly modified cirrus marble material. I then set up my camera, added depth of field effects, and did some draft renders. Once I thought everything looked nice, I added an area light, and left my computer to render for five hours. The end result was what you see below.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/heydabop/3231694220

I am currently working on another scene with a similar base idea. From the picture I have in my head, the new one will look better and have more detail than this one. I cannot take all credit for the new one, because after discussing this current one with my friend, he gave me some ideas for the new one, which I hope will come out looking very nice.

Ideas

Well it may be longer than I had expected until I get my laptop back, which is quite annoying. I have all these ideas of things to do in Houdini and Photoshop, but I can't do them until I have my laptop...