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Game Dev 2012

MentalFish — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:37:32 +0000

Its 2012 and the local peeps are awesome. After attending Bergen Game Jam last weekend and the first international Join Game conference yesterday and today, one can not help but to be excited and inspired to get back into the game dev mode. I need to update some LScripts and I think some Unity/C# scripts should be released too. Sharing is caring.

If you so happen to be a Norwegian or a local Bergeneese, head over to spillmakerlauget.no and join in on the game dev fun. If you are in the 3D/CG realm, then also head over to cgbergen.org and join the mailing list.

Full steam ahead!

Tofu Arrival

MentalFish — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 23:00:10 +0000

Dang that was fast, Tofu arrived today and is all awesome! Yoda says he will be his padawan and not adopted by the evil empire. I am wondering what he is up to though, seems like Tofu is freaking out… Never trust a dude who always walks around in a bathrobe.

About 19cm tall including block of tofu with a good plastic quality and have some nicely painted details on it. On the removable base there are some vegan approved food items and it is possible to rotate arms and feet so he can stand on his own as well. Not on windy day though, he is a zombie after all. Oh, and beware the tofu block is removable too.

It is really cool to see a physical representation of a digitally animated character, inspiring to say the least.

Stranded on an island

MentalFish — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:45:10 +0000

I came across an issue the other day while doodling on a 3D model of a car wheel. The nuts, or bolts if you will, were too small and I found it strange that there was no tool inside LightWave to scale them individually as separate entities as they were inside the same layer (mesh) in Modeler. This would mean I had to manually select each island and scale them one by one. Not a giant task by any means as it was only a few items, but still annoying.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5802071&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ff9933&fullscreen=1

So I went to the NewTek forums and posted a question on whether or not there is a solution for this, either hidden somewhere in LW or some sort of plugin. I got some suggestions on plugins to use and a script to try. They weren’t exactly what I was after, but it gave me a starting point and idea of how to get this functionality working as I wanted it to.

I studied the suggested LScript (LightWave Script), got the grasps of what was going on, analyzing why it wasn’t working, and after a couple of iterations came up with a solution that worked. This was in turn taken by someone else, new to the discussion, and improved to yet another level.

At this point the script was doing what I wanted in terms of scaling each “island” of selected polygons, but in a very try-and-see-what-happens kind of way, as there was no interactive feedback of the end result while changing the scale value. So I added an interactive update to it as well as the next step.

From this it was a couple of lines extra and we had “island-rotation” as well. The only problem here is that it happens on world-coordinate axis, so if your island of selected polygons were on differently slanted angles, it could mess them up. If they were aligned flat on the same plane, they were fine.

Now this LScript is in a stage of adding scaling around each polygon-selection’s average normal (its local “up” axis) and if this works then… woohoo! Anyone with some 1337 LScript and/or 3D math knowledge is welcome to contribute.

I would not have found these solutions as fast if it was not for the community and the general attitude of sharing and contributing.

That’s it for now, check out the forum thread and follow the continued development of this:

http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=100587

Download LScript