Some stories have this visceral way of latching on… or perhaps it is us who latch on… either way I see it as a parasitic buffet. A feeding frenzy where all it takes is that scent of blood, and then there’s no turning back. The story and the audience are suddenly dancing and for as long as the song lasts, there is no one else in the room. I’m sure that you can relate to what I mean, perhaps if you’ve seen either Wall-E or The Dark Knight this summer.

Well, there’s another tale involving a Dark Knight that has me in it’s vice. Final Fantasy 2 on the Super Nintendo was one of the first games I remember playing that was just all-out-awesome. It had me completely captivated and to this day is still one of my utmost favorite stories. I don’t know if I should be embarrassed, or proud to admit that I own several copies of the game. Final Fantasy 2 for the Super Nintendo, Final Fantasy Chronicles for the Playstation, Final Fantasy IV Advance for the Game Boy Advance, and now Final Fantasy IV for the Nintendo DS.

It’s a game that has it all (in my opinion). Amazing Artwork, Memorable Music, Spectacular Story, and was just all around an A+ game. The SNES version rocked. The Playstation version was so slow and had such atrocious load times that it was practically unplayable. The FMV’s were … ugly, too. The Game Boy Advance version however won me back. It included extra plot, dungeons, and a more true translation and difficulty level. All around, it was executed very nicely, and didn’t attempt anything that they weren’t prepared to follow through on.

I’m only an hour into the DS version, and I’m not sure what to think yet. Square Enix seems to have done very nice remixing of the music, a fantastic opening FMV, and legitimately appear to have tried to improve the script and have nice 3d graphics. The game is perhaps best suited for a console however. I’m already starting to feel claustrophobic and wishing I could zoom the camera out. The voice acting is also poorly done, and quite stiff. I want to think that maybe it’s just because I’ve been watching more movies lately… but that shouldn’t really ever be an excuse. The Kingdom Heart’s voice acting was extremely well done… and though it was amusing, I just can’t go back to this.

At any rate, I’m sure I’ll enjoy the game. I just need to get through it in time for this.

I also want to mention Folding@Home.

Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

If you aren’t familiar with it, check it out. You also get to join groups and get points. Not that these points can be redeemed for anything but awesomeness. Note that I don’t think it’s actually calculating my awesomeness correctly at the moment…

Just wanted to post a quick tutorial I did this morning in Houdini illustrating how one can render out their wireframes and then composite them on top of their other lighting passes. Pretty short and simple, but hopefully it clears up some confusion on the matter.

Well it’s another brutal, non-air-conditioned night here at the ole computer. Just got back from the Imax presentation of The Dark Knight. Which rocked. Awesomely. It’s actually been a pretty damned good summer for movies in my opinion, and the only one I’ve been disappointed with has been Indy IV. I loved the new Batman, and the Imax cameras were -really- a nice touch. We seriously need to use those cameras for *all* films. The other summer winner for awesome cinematic experience was Wall-E. I saw that one twice. If you *haven’t* seen it. I heavily recommend that you go forth and empty your wallet this instant!

In other news, there’s a new SMC at Threedy, and so I’ve participated. Here, you can see my wonderful Wine Thermometer. I nerded it up a little with a Houdini related label on the bottle. Mantra is the Houdini rendering engine. Word on the street is, Mark Elendt was first working on Mantra on his Amiga 1000 back in 1988. While the Centigrade (Celsius) temperature of this bottle is clearly 9.5 degrees (how precise!) I also went with that number because yesterday Houdini 9.5 went gold.

Hi there! I know I’ve been quiet here for a few days, but that’s mostly because I’ve been hard at work dominating the world. Of course, when not engaged in important life altering battles, I’ve also been trying to produce some Fluid Dynamics video tutorials for Houdini. I’m pleased to say that I’ve completed my 15 part (almost three hours) series on the subject and that they are now available for download from the Side Effects Software Website! Each video can be downloaded separately as a .mov file, or the whole collection can be acquired using Bit Torrent. I worked to make this as beginner friendly as possible, so hopefully I don’t have any of the advanced Houdniks screaming at me for keeping it too basic.

I also hope that the knowledge allows you to tune out the occasional sound of traffic. I promise that the sound quality improves after the first few.

I eventually want to get started on an introductory series to shading in Houdini as well, but I think I’ll take a little bit of a break to ensure that my fingers stay nimble. It’s been a while since I’ve done any strumming on the guitar, and the music section of my site is starting to crave attention.

As you can see from yesterday’s blog, I’ve taken an interest in the Speed Modeling Challenges at forums.3dtotal.com. Personally I find it exhillarating to be forced to do something under the clock like that, even though I end up relaxing and leisurely lighting/shading after the fact. Back in March, I actually did the image you see to your left as my first entry to the SMC’s. It was very hectic for me since I’d done extremely little modeling in Houdini before that point and so needed to retry the challenge several times to be able to get something in the time limit that was assigned for the challenge.

I’m excited to say that as it turns out, I ended up tieing for first in that challenge! There were some great entries for that challenge, so be sure to check them out if you have time.

I’ll also mention that I recorded another 20 minute video this morning. I hope these lessons don’t bore people when they become available!

I’m slowly plugging away at video tutorials in my mornings, but I am making progress! I currently have three done: Intro to Fluid Dynamics in Houdini, Intro to Voxel Fluids, and Turning Objects into Smoke. Bunches o’ more left to go!

In the meantime, here’s an image I just finished a few moments ago; it was for the Speed Modeling Challenges at the Threedy forums. The challenge was to model a vase in under an hour, and in these challenges you don’t get any sort of points for the “supporting cast” so I actually just grabbed the rose from TurboSquid and then did a bunch of manipulations to it. Did some extra fun stuff to it as well like running it through a foreach loop and colouring each petal based on the bounding box (didn’t do any uv or texture maps to get those rose petals textured!).

I also had a chance to go climbing with a bunch of people from work recently. It seems like Toronto Climbing Academy has a sadistic obsession with making the grips as far apart as possible. I’ll have to go back again though… while the climbs at TCA are stylistically pretty different from Joe Rockhead’s, it is cool that they have other gym equipment there too, and it’s certainly interesting having such different styles to the climbs.

It’s been almost two weeks since my last update. The reason is that I realized I was starting to run out of hard drive space and so decided to take preventative measures! I just bought a new 1Tb hard drive to replace my 80Gb C:/ drive, and it’s taken me pretty much a week and a half to get the thing all formatted. I’ve nerded up my machine a bit and replaced a bunch of the default sounds in Windows (log in with the Start-up sound from Super Metroid, USB plugs with door opening sounds from Super Metroid, and most of the basic dings and alarms with sounds from the Civilizations games) so that I’m not forced into cringing whenever Windows does anything for me.

I’ve also discovered that Quicktime does in fact work on Windows x64! No more media player classic with no controls for me! Also found some other cool things like an application that reduces Firefox’s memory usage and another application that allows the taskbar to be reorganized (like internet tabbing).

I’ve also been in the mood to get some video tutorials out there on Houdini Fluid Dynamics. We’ll see what I’m in the mood for once that’s done… I’m thinking vex/shading personally. But this has also involved a drawn out process of buying a mixer for my mic and learning a little bit more about mics in general and how they work. I’ve just recorded the first Intro to Houdini Fluids video. I’m going to hold off on making it available though until I get the rest done. Fear not! I do intend on finishing her, but until I get the tutorials finished (next week?) further modeling of Samus is on hold.

On an unrelated note, here’s a picture of my arm after a slight rock climbing injury a couple of weeks ago. There’s a pretty intense 11b route that I’m trying to surpass. The wall apparently has other agendas. This is what happens when your arm gets pinned by your rope to a ledge that you’re trying to get on top of.