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HJAVN
2002-03-21 21:49:18
I recently went back to playing Tribes... it hasn't imporved since I left. I'm mean, who finds being spawn-killed five times in a row fun? For that matter, how can just doing the same thing over and over be entertaining? Most of the players haveput too much of the focus on winning instead of having fun. "Challenge" isn't a part of their vocabulary. Let's see, most of the time I'm on the side that doesn't have a chance/doesn't want to play, and on those rare occasions where I'm on the winning team (which, statisticly, shouldn't happen), it's equally as one-sided and increadibly hollow. It's a shame too, as I have had the best games ever in Tribes, but for consistancy I find Unreal Tournament better. Right now, having been away from the game for God knows how many months I'm still pretty close to being the best player on my team (and that's without resorting to repetitive tactics that a two-bit program could make a bot do) and that's just not right. I should be way last in these things, but somehow I can still break a heavy defense single handedly. Well, enough of my rant, I just need a better computer so I can buy Tribes 2.
I have come up with yet another video idea. I can tell you this one in detail as it would be extreamly work-intensive to pull off and therefore the chance of it being stolen is low. I'm thinking of putting the full version of the opening theme of Sorcerer(Bakuretsu) Hunters, "What's Up Guys?", to Magic Users club, but doing it as you would expect an anime opening to be done. So, I will really need to learn After Effects for this, plus I'm going to need to get me a lightbox. I've got some rather simple animations that I may have to make, plus I'll have to draw some stills of the characters. This is something I'll do in the future and I do have every intention of pulling off. And if it turns out well, I'll try my hand at that FLCL vid I have brewing. -
GNXZI
2002-02-25 02:13:21
Well, in a strange coincidence, Pyro was not the only one who attended a dual birthday party over the weekend. Of course, this was a little different as it was my father's and my uncle's (no, they're not twins...). Anyway, it was going great until the end, when my great uncle had to be have 911 dialed. Turns out that he's got a case of pneunomia, but at least he's in capable hands now. He had us scared for a while there. And damn was the response time for the ambulance fast. I mean, I'm thinking probably five minutes till they get there, but in reality it was under two! If we were in Milwaukee, we'd probably still be waiting...
Well, onto happier, more AMV related news. As I said I have been working on that 11 (actually, more like 12 and a quarter) second 3D clip. I'm going to do it in three parts, otherwise the camera movements will look really bad. Anyway, to first let you know the scene. Remember ST:TNG? You know the opening where the camera flys past all those planets and pans down to the Enterprise? Well, I'm doing something similar here. The first part (which, btw, I have completed rendering) is the heavenly bodies themselves. The texturing job is very nice on them if I do say so myself and it times perfectly with the music.
The second part is the background, which consists of stars and nebulas, that sorta thing. I'm working on that now, trying to keep it from looking like I'm scrolling across a big picture. I'm also going to throw in my moving starfield into the end here, and in order to get the proper effect I have to accelerate the movement of the texture. Now, this should be simple enough. I can input a keyframe at tA and another at tB and change the values, then I should be able to go into the motion lab and set the general acceleration of the change. Unfortunately for me, Bryce 3D provides tools in the motion lab for every setting for the textures from transparency to diffusion to ambiance to specularity to density to edge softness to the texture source etc, etc, except for anything relating to basic x, y, and z coordinates. So what I need to do to get the desired effect is go FRAME BY FRAME and manually tell Bryce where the texture should be at that particular moment. And guess what happens if it doesn't look right? YUP! I gotta do it all over again! I'm about to go on my third try with this...
The third part will be the Outlaw Star itself, and this should (I repeat, should) be the easiest of the three. Then again, I thought the background was going to be easy, so I could be wrong. The unforunate part with the OS is that I won't be able to make the movement as nice as I originally planned. I'm kinda limited by my scene planning and the nature of Bryce to completely, totally, and unavoidably f*ck up complex movements. You should have seen my first attempt. After that atrocity was rendered I figured I should contain my camera to a simple arc and a 90 degree rotation, as then Bryce wouldn't get confused. So, all that the OS will be doing really is drifting slowly infront of the camera, as opposed to also having the camera attempt to track it.
The really interesting part is going to be when I composite these things all together, as the camera movements will be slightly different for each element to prevent any part from looking rushed and jarring the viewer. I REALLY hope that it looks good on my first compositing attempt, otherwise that'll be a week's worth of work down the drain...
Well, now that that's said, I have been hit with another AMV idea. Actually, I noticed that there were no AMVs set to Marvelous 3, so I listened to a few songs and am really set on making one to "Freak of the Week". However, the only anime I can think of right now is Haunted Junction, which seems to work the more I listen to it, but the attitudes aren't really the same. One's a comedy, the other's a little pissed. Don't quite know how that would work out, you know? Ah well, that will go back into my brain to marinate for a while longer. The benifit of Haunted Junction is that I actually own that series. I still need to finish my Jubei-chan collection and buy all of Escaflowne for my other solid series ideas, while my various idea requires me to buy about ten other series. Oh yeah, I'm getting an idea for a Rammstein vid too, as I really want to do one (even though they've almost been done to death). I just need to find a suitable song that isn't Engle and doesn't deal with masturbation, incest, or walling a girl up in a room and leaving her to die. And Klavier was my favorite on that whole CD too. If I had paid more attention in German class I probably would have caught on sooner. Anyway, I should probably buy their new CD, as the music's good, just don't know if the content is any better... - DJSTV 2002-02-19 01:24:28 Let's see. I only have two more CG sequences to go and then the rest is a piece of cake. So far I've been pretty pleased with the way everything has turned out, and I find myself enjoying my vid more and more. I'm begining to see that I've actually got some pretty damn good action synching going on, whether it's with the anime footage or the CG. So, right now I'm biting the bullet and commencing work on that first CG sequence I've been avoiding since I began this endevour. I'm scrapping a lot of the effects that I had planned for it because I don't think they would have looked good after all. Anyway, I created some REALLY good planetary ring textures in Photoshop. It would be nice if I could make a good terrain map so that I won't have people recognizing Earth, Mars, or Saturn (I don't think many would get Pluto or Venus, and the Moon is so generic... who cares?). I would have loved to have tracked down complete maps of Io and Ganymede, but NASA hasn't seen fit to provide them. Oh well, I should be thankful that I have the most expensive images ever produced by man at my disposal. It could be worse, I could be stuck with Brycean textures like every other Bryce user. I swear, some of these people have a lot of talent, they just lack basic horizontal thinking skills.
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TRASJ
2002-02-12 18:17:42
Well, sometime durring this entry I will have reached the 666 hit mark.
It's official the Olympics are on and they are getting the worst coverage ever! I hope NBC never ever ever gets the rights to air them ever again. Between Nascar, Golf, their crappy daytime shows on Sunday, and their overwhelming coverage on the security at the Olympics, it's a wonder they have the time to air what few seconds they do. Could we have live coverage please considering this is going on in Salt Lake City? No, to follow with the opening performance NBC will be transporting it's tapes via covered wagon back to New York. The only thing worse than NBC's coverage were the judges at the pairs' skating. Alright, that's off my chest.
Only three more CG scenes to go! Woohoo! I've almost figured one of them out and will probably begin the final rendering of it tonight, then I've got another that requires a bit of preperation in Photoshop first, and finally that damn 11 second clip which I've been avoiding doing since I started this thing. Other than that there isn't much more to be done on the anime end of things. A couple scenes still need to be ripped from the DVDs and there's some minor touchup work to be done. However, none of that will take long at all. Then I just need to get hosting for it after it's premiere at ACen2002. -
GASOF
2002-02-06 18:56:48
VCAs are in and I couldn't care less! Well, I could care less, otherwise I wouldn't be mentioning it here. Nutz... Anyway. As I statedin a thread, I was stupid this year and should have UNchecked that little box. I really don't like participating in popularity contests. They are also so lopsided and highly inaccurate. I see winning one of those categories as being a sign that there must be a bunch of other vids out there that are better than yours, if that makes any sense. People in large quantities are dumb, and that's why the best never seem to make it. Hell, last year (or is that two years) the Red Hot Chilli Peppers won the "Pushing the Envelope" award for VH1 when they haven't changed since 1991, and Bill Clinton was elected POTUS not once, but twice. See? People are stupid. I guess that makes Bush a better POTUS than any other because he lost the election :)
It's a bad sign when you restart your computer and lose a gig of HD space. So, I've had my computer running scandisk and defragmenting for the past 24 hours, that's fixed it. I still have 9 gigs on my 20 gig HD left, and probably a little less than half of the footage left to make/capture.
That brings me to my video progress. I've got over half of this edited and I'm going to make an announcement about what to expect with this video. Yes, there will be better out there. Yes, the editing job will not be stellar (that's not to say it's bad either). However, this will be unique. This will be an experiment that others can look at to see it's success. If it bombs, people will be very careful about using CG in future AMVs. If, for some cruel twist of fate, it becomes unbearably popular, I'll shoot myself. No... wait... I ment to say you can probably expect a bunch more from other people with better software and setups than I have (the one word which describes best what I'm working with is "Humble"). Adressing TR's VCA complaint: If you have the patience, it doesn't matter what setup you have. Anywho, three more CG sequences are complete, one's in post, and another is being rendered. The only big task in front of me is making that first CG sequence. So, this is coming along fairly well. I might even have this finished a month before ACen, which would be very nice :)
JOURNAL: alternatefutures (Jim Schuler)
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