04

- Cleaned up the Writing for the presentation
- Did half-a-pass on the Portfolio Site
- Decided to switch blog from Blogger to Wordpress
- Set up Wordpress's Template

03

- Finished off the second part of the "Syllabus"
- Started cleaning up the writing and making it Presentation-Friendly.

02

- Chores and Gym
- Cooking
- First part of a rough syllabus complete
- Microphone tests + Audacity's Noise Reduction Effects

Boiler Room

I haven't heard about "Boiler Room" until now;

Wiki:

Boiler Room is a global online music broadcasting platform commissioning and streaming live music sessions around the world. Founded in London in 2010, Boiler Room has now hosted shows in around 100 cities worldwide

Check when they're gonna be

Nothingness(dark) turns into something with Thought(light)

It's interesting that us, humans, take chaos (around us) and turn it into a discipline (or a science). Taking something that seems extremely random, invisible (to the eye) with unfathomable logic and turn it into something usable, and not only usable but something that will push our technologies even further.

01

- Learned about UE4's Level Sequence (Matinee turned into Legacy)
- Watched "Creating Skin Subsurface Materials In Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial Basics" from HiredGun Games
- Customized his ^ ideas of the shader to fit my needs
- Discovered a problem, upon importing a 3ds Max 2015 scene into 3ds Max 2017, then exporting from 2017 the scene as an .fbx back into 2015, Normal/Smoothing Group issue arises. It looks fine in viewport but in UE4/Marmoset it looks busted.
- To solve the issue one can export the geo from 2015 as an .obj, then re-import it, and replace the mesh. Then upon exporting as an .fbx from 2015, the normal groups should look fine.

recapitulation

I'm going to try to post everyday, almost as a meditative way of grounding the days. Trying to express, even in point form, the activities of the day. So, I'd be able to look back and see 'time'. Unlike now, when days blur into years.

.

There is a difference between an AI way of thinking vs. Human's stored memory (HSM) (i.e. Dixie Flatline)

#inktober


On one of the many Vancouver's rainy days, I was walking past a scene, of two construction workers wearing long yellow rain coats surrounded by the lush green forestry of the quite suburbs. For my acute perception and foggy glasses I saw the two men tape of an area, go down a manhole and recover an unexplainable object.

I guess for time of great importance, they managed to quickly light a small propane fueled flame around the deep purple object. Strange smell filled the air as they've began to light some twigs on fire.

A dance began, slow at first, then picking up pace, they danced to an insane beat of a drum unheard. Infusion of break dance and gymnastics, operating smoothly within the wet conditions.
For a second, I was convinced that the strange object started to pulse with light from within. The men's faces covered in protective masks began to change shape; the clothes felt like they started to infuse with their skin.

My thoughts filled with madness, and I couldn't take seeing the sight much longer. Plus, I was late to work.

Lizard Textures SketchFab

Lizard Textures - Marmoset

Lizard Turntable



Another pass on the Tan's Lizard texture. Rendered him out in Marmoset, then put together in Premiere.

Beginning of Rant:

This time around I had to experiment with codec compression, I ended up playing around with H.264 under one of the HD presets.

The goal, as always, is to get the image sequence matching 1 to 1 with the video output. Yet, I'm struggling to understand why after outputting it, the mp4 vid seems 'washed out', less contrast/saturation. I discovered that Quicktime player views the mp4 correctly, in VLC you have to turn off 'Image adjust' (in adjustments and effects - video effects - essential);

Bringing it into Youtube, the final output still looks 'washed out', so manual inc. of contrast by 1 (w youtube enhancements) seems to make it look like the original image.

Lizard; Anim, Rigged Game Chr

Word ^,

Still a WIP, Been working on this little guy after work.

Concept of the Lizard, by the talented Tan ZhiHui
The environment is, UE4's modified 'Elemental Demo'

Currently I'm on my first Animation / Texture pass.



Gif (Problems)

- Shot the anim. sequence as a 30fps, has to use http://ezgif.com/speed to inc. the speed by 400%; but then there comes a breaking point, when you have too many frames for it to work. What I had to do was re-record with 15fps and up the speed using https://screentogif.codeplex.com/


Ultimately, quality wise I wish to get something crisp such as:

(This was just one of the Stress Tests)



Goal

My goal was to sum up the knowledge I've learned for the past year and a half working with extremely talented Adam AC; To create a simple Animatable Character with an easy rig system and place him into an engine.

Rigging can be intimidating, hopefuly I can create a short tutorial later on showing how to put together this little guy.

I've been thinking of the best ways of presenting the Asset with the ability of getting a thorough critique. Currently SketchFab offerse the most options.

This is just a T-Pose, with first pass textures on him. Later, I want to take 3d Coat for a spin.



Animation (Problems)

- Because I tried a slightly different approach to rigging the character (using primitives); the actual controls are still displayed, and currently there's no way of switching them off in SketchFab;

- On my Home computer I get "Model is too heavy for your device and can not be rendered properly";
I learned that CPU renders bones/anim; GPU skins the mesh -- so the inability to display the mesh, is probably because I have too many bones for SketchFab to handle (over 70).

- I was going for semi-game animation loops, not too long, not too short and they all have to tie in with out another by the Idle anim (which isn't included yet). Currently there are too many keys which I'll have to clean up in the Polish pass.

First Pass on the Walk Anim


First Pass on the Run Anim


First Pass on the Jump Anim


First Pass on the Attack Anim



Things I haven't managed to solve (list for myself)

- Eyes
- Making high quality SSS mtrl in UE4

* Update#1: Managed to figure out how to get rig of the skeleton rig/controls from showing up in SketchFab; In the Materials Tab, I got two roll outs: "RootNode" and "StandardMaterial"; switching over to 'RootNode', one can, in "Transparency" roll out inc. is to 100%, thus making the Controllers/Bones transparent.