I’m late on my post about it, but it was recently that time of year again when people dress up like fools and peacock around town for everyone to see. Yup, Halloween! I decided that I’d have none of that this year though and so I decided to just go out in my everyday street-wear. It’s weird though, I mean… I wore it to work and for some reason got an award for best “costume”. Maybe it was because I was clean shaven for a change… but for some reason I must have reminded my co-workers of people from their past. I kept getting comments like “that reminds me of past boyfriends!” or “I’ll never be caught looking like that again”.
At any rate, I want to say sorry to Katie and Gerry. It was an awesome party, and I probably should have realized it was a costume party. Sorry for just wearing my every-day attire; if I’d known I could have gotten a cowboy hat or something.
A while back, I made a series of video tutorials for Fluid Dynamics in Houdini. I’m pleased to say, that these were rather well received, and I had a lot of requests for the scene files to be made available. The glass of water video in particular had been garnering lots of attention since it was released last year, and so I decided to make the files available for everyone. It took a long time to prepare, but I ran through the files and updated them for newer builds of Houdini, and at the same time wrote comments on the majority of the nodes so that people could easily figure out what was happening in the files. These files are now available through bit torrent on the Side Effects Software Inc. website.
Now to develop new tutorials!
Last January, I made a trip out to The World’s Biggest Bookstore and browsed around not only through the Graphic Novels, Fantasy Novels and Movies; but also decided to browse through the cooking section. I like to cook. I came across a nice book while I was there called Making Bread at Home, which I decided almost instantly to pick up. I’ve made several of the recipes from this book (which I would very heavily recommend) and have gotten comfortable enough with baking bread that I’ve even improved a few times (I did this for Thanksgiving… and unfortunately it didn’t turn out as great as I’d hoped it would). One of my favorite recipes from this book is definitely the Pain Polka. It’s a sour dough recipe that I find works especially well if you use Baguette dough as the starter. Anyways, I just pulled a loaf of Challah out of the oven and figured the rest of the world needed to know.
No, seriously, buy stuff for me.
Nintendo DS GamesNew Super Mario Bros.
Mario Kart DS
Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin
Advance Wars: Dual Strike
Children of Mana
CDs
Liquid Trio Experiment: Spontaneous Combustion
Liquid Tension Experiment: Liquid Tension Experiment 2
Yngwie Malmsteen’s Rising Force: Perpetual FlameAn Evening with John Petrucci and Jordan Rudess
John Petrucci: Suspended Animation
Machinae Supremacy: Redeemer
BooksThe Art and Science of Digital Compositing
Dragon Quest Guitar Solo Collection
Guitar StuffBoss DS-1 Distortion Pedal
Morley Bad Horsie Wah Wah
SUPER Expensive stuffPlaystation 3
Nintendo Wii
I just finished another simple video tutorial (this time on the “Wedge” tool in Houdini) for Side Effects Software, and it’s been posted over on their site. Wedging is a pretty simple tool, and can be rather useful when a: you don’t know what parameters do, b: when you just want to test stuff out, c: when you want to simulate low-res particle sims with different jitter values and then merge them all together for a high-res sim that didn’t take the same amount of time as a high-res sim would normally have taken. I also noticed that I’d forgotten to add my previous tutorial here in my own tutorial section and so now both this one on wedging, and my previous workfile based example on using normal maps can now be found through permanent, easy-to-find links on my site as well.
The two titles to your left (whose radiant beauty hails to me like an aurora borealis of audiovisual awesomeness), have always stood out to me as the Rosetta Stone for the Role Playing Game genre. Like many out there, Final Fantasy was the first RPG that I had ever played. When Final Fantasy II on the Super Nintendo became available in the local video rental store, it was a holy thing that I was not allowed to touch. No, my older brother and cousin were the ones who were in charge of the SNES in those days, and so it was they who played this game first. I was barely permitted to sit in the same room. It was for this reason, I knew it was a good game.
Of course I was able to re-rent it later and play it by myself, and this was when the game really got me in its relentless vice. I replayed the game several times in my youth on the SNES, Playstation 1 and yes even on the Game Boy Advance when it was released in my college days. Oh my, Final Fantasy IV Advance hit the spot with just the right amount of new features while still keeping everything intact that I loved. I think Square did it just right with that re-make. If you’ve read my blog before, you may already be aware that I bought the Nintendo DS remake when it came out in August. I’m sad to say having played it once through, that in my opinion this particular version does not live up to its past incarnations.
The opening cinematic was awesome, and in fact the graphics everywhere were a nice touch. The music was nicely done as well, though I’m disappointed that with all of the soundtracks they’ve made for FFIV, they did not include live instruments in the game. The re-translation of the story was also quite nice; the additional tidbits of story came off quite nice. The gameplay however was dreadfully poor.
The little bastard to the right also went a long way toward making the game less enjoyable. I could live without being able to change my characters names for the sake of the voice acting (which was shoddily recorded imo), however he also offers side-quests that directly harm the ability to enjoy the game. Very soon into the game, he offers you some empty maps of all the areas you will visit. Completing these maps will gain you some items. It will also mean that you will spend more time looking at the map than taking in the wonderful environment art that was made for the DS version of this game. He will also send you on a quest for pudding. I believe this is actually just psychological conditioning so that when you realizing that the only way to acquire the game’s best armor is to commit suicide on your social life — you will be less apt to run the game through a meat grinder. On the note of grinding, it seems like the developers of this game felt that the audience likes nothing but the tedium of random encounters.
It is entirely unnecessary to waste hours of your life looking for some pink tails to complete this game, but the New Game+ feature of the DS version will certainly bring out the OCD tendencies in you. This will partially be because this rare equipment will be the only thing that carries over into the New Game+. If you’re interested in the replay, you’ll want any advantage you can get against the needlessly difficult battles. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that strategy will be your ally in this game’s tougher battles: rather you will be forced to simply grind for levels to be able to survive random encounters. All too often I would encounter an enemy who would wipe me out before my characters had an opportunity to act. I spent as much time grinding my jaw in annoyance as grinding my levels.
All in all, if you have a Nintendo DS and have never played Final Fantasy IV, I would recommend picking up Final Fantasy IV Advance instead of the DS native version. The added features that made FFIVA really shine are missing from the DS version, and the added features in FFIVDS are in my opinion just not worth the price of admission.
The other shining beacon that you should hail to is Dragon Quest IV. One of the later games released for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Dragon Warrior IV is perhaps my all-time-favorite RPG and features a rather unique Chapter system with fun characters, a great story, and enthralling gameplay. I’m pleased to report that this classic game’s DS remake does not disappoint. Yes, the graphics have been improved and yes, the music has been … well it’s hard to say improved since I actually am rather fond of the original 8-bit sounds, however they did update the music and make it stereo. There is of course the perk that the opening screen features an orchestra (an enhancement that really could have nicely worked into the rest of the game as well). The development team made quite good use of the DS screens, spreading out the maps and menus nicely over the dual display. The environments are nice and lush and it’s interesting navigating around areas using both screens as one larger screen. For those who care, the touch screen in this game is only for looking. Personally I have no qualms about such matters, but you dear reader may.
I feel they really did an excellent treatment of this remake, and where FFIV’s tooth grindingly frustrating battles may force you to require dentures prematurely, I think they may have actually made Dragon Quest’s IV’s battles ever so slightly more easy. At least I think that in my youth this game required more grinding. At any rate, the battles are at an enjoyable difficulty that does not force you to spend hours walking in circles fighting monsters so that you can boost your speed up enough to not be instakilled against the monsters in the area where the next part of the plot is. An extra chapter was added as well with a little bit of bonus content for those who like to re-write history. Unfortunately the developers felt that North America didn’t deserve of the bonus content and so left out almost half of the script that had been developed for this game when porting to the English folk. While it is disappointing knowing that this stuff exists but not in any game I’ll ever get to play, it doesn’t really detract from the game since this content was not in the original to begin with.
My biggest gripe (a
nd thankfully a very small one) is that they appear to have performed some mako experiments on the game’s antagonist. I don’t know why that little sprite meant so much to me originally, but I do know that it held far more charm for me than the DS design. Aside from that, I think my only other complaint was the changes in the awards at the casino. All in all, some pretty minor complaints, and ones that bug me mostly due to nostalgia. Otherwise I would say that this game is excellently executed, and by no means do I regret the purchase. I enthusiastically await the remakes that are yet to come of Dragon Quest V, and VI. These two games complete the Zenithian Trilogy (of which DQIV is part one) and seeing as how they were never (authentically) available in North America I have yet to ever play them. In the meantime, I’ll have to just read the DQIV comics available in the Multimedia section of the DQIV site.
Concerts I’ve been To:
– 07/12/97 – Thunder Bay (Thunder Dome) – Barenaked Ladies
– 08/31/02 – Toronto (Molson Amphitheatre) – King’s X/Joe Satriani/Dream Theater
– 03/09/03 – Toronto (Opera House) – Symphony X
– 11/06/03 – Toronto (Massey Hall) – G3 (Yngwie Malmsteen/Steve Vai/Joe Satriani)
– 04/02/05 – Toronto (Massy Hall) – Steve Vai
– 09/30/06 – Toronto (Roy Thompson Hall) – Toronto Symphony Orchestra (Beethoven’s 4th and 5th)
– 07/18/07 – Toronto (Opera House) – Symphony X
– 08/18/07 – Toronto (Molson Amphitheatre) – Dream Theater
– 04/11/08 – Toronto (Opera House) – Symphony X
– 06/28/08 – Toronto (Yonge & Dundas Square) – Video Games Live
– 09/18/08 – Toronto (Air Canada Center) – New Kids On The Block
I guarantee you, that as ridiculous as their dances look in this video: They look 500% more hilarious in person. The tickets were also acquired for free, though had a “value” of over one hundred dollars (not to be confused with a value of over 9000). Awesome.
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has finally been powered on and is in progress as I type this of going through some kinks to get it working. It took a few tries for them to get the beam working as expected, but it currently is a “GO”! In fact the beam is now about halfway around the 28km circuit, and well… I honestly don’t know enough about what’s happening to fairly be able to explain it to others, but I must say I find the experiment exciting. Over the course of the next hour, CERN intends on getting the beam to work it’s way the rest of the way through the circuit. Their intent for the moment is to simply get the beam going, however they also state that if all is going well they will certainly attempt to collide particles later in the day.
In case you’re completely lost in what this is all about, the LHC is the world’s largest Particle Accelerator, and CERN intends on using it to send particles colliding with each other at just shy of the speed of light. This should send off a shower of particles that will effectively recreate conditions that would have existed moments after the Big Bang. Many people fear the miniature black holes that this will create, while scientists (who have far more knowledge on the subject than I) assure us that these black holes are like those that are formed in our atmosphere on a regular basis, and will evaporate in seconds. Of course, this means that people actually have a chance to study these black holes, as well as other effects from the experiment. The end result is that we may just be able to find out whether multiple dimensions do in fact exist.
This could end up with some of the greatest advancements in physics (and in other areas) for years to come.
* 5:41PM – UPDATE: This link is quite informative on the LHC
Hey there, not a whole lot to report on since the last blog entry, just been workin’ away! I’ve been exploring VOPs (building shaders in Houdini) a lot recently and am starting to get somewhere with it I believe. On that note, I noticed a few questions on various forums recently regarding how to implement Normal Maps from ZBrush in Houdini and so decided to tackle the issue. With Mark Elendt’s and Andrew Clinton’s (two of Side Effects Software Inc’s developers) I was able to provide the Houdini Exchange with a simple example of how to use normal maps (both Object and Tangent Space maps) in a material.