Down in town

Posted on 6th November 2010 in Something Daily

So I spent all of yesterday either at work or traveling – from 8 AM to 6:30 PM. It was a really long day, so please excuse me for not posting yesterday. I was absurdly tired. I came home from New York to the Philadelphia suburbs for the weekend to see my family, and the trip yesterday took about five hours from start to finish. That’s a subway from NYU to Penn Station, then a bus to 30th Street Station in Philly, and then the SEPTA R5 home. I wanted to sleep on the bus but I couldn’t…the ride was bumpy and I couldn’t rest my head on the window. I know, poor me. But I did get some new Gameboy music composed in my bus-induced stupor, and listening to it now in a more lucid state, it actually sounds pretty good. Definitely worth working on. Actually, I think I’m going to make a Soundcloud account or something today so I can link to tracks I’m working on from here. That would be cool, because then you could hear them…and realize how awesome they are! EDIT: There it is, check out some of my music!

Also, I watched Zombieland with my family last night. I love Jessie Eisenberg’s screen persona, I really do. And I love watching zombies get owned. I also enjoyed Bill Murray’s amazing cameo, and some of the jokes in this movie were really funny. Despite all of this, and despite me really wanting it to be good, it just wasn’t that good. I mean, I enjoyed watching it quite a bit due to the plentiful destruction of zombies and Jessie Eisenberg (and Emma Stone, of course) – but it really isn’t a good movie. It’s got issues, mainly about the plot being totally contrived and predictable I think. Also, I know this was really to be expected, but WTF is the deal with shoehorning in a romantic subplot to every single movie these days? At the beginning of Zombieland, I was almost allowing myself to look forward to the story of Jessie Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson as two lone wolves, which would have been awesome – then I quickly realized that this was wishful thinking. Here’s someone who says it better than I can. That video sums up my thoughts about horror/zombie movies pretty well, as it turns out.

Oh and my sister wanted everyone to know that she learned how to do the dance to that song Apache yesterday. She showed me. It was funny.

I’m listening to Black Star now. That’s Mos Def and Talib Kweli together. You know they’re awesome, and so is their album.

This is another render I did in Blender a little while back.

Goblet, rendered 9/27/10

Yeah. So I’m home for the weekend, coming back to NY on Sunday night. Looking forward to another long bus ride, and hanging out with Quinn tonight!

And here’s proof of who the bed intruder actually is.

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Eric Sluyter owes me some Dibs

Posted on 4th November 2010 in Something Daily

So around this time last year, my suitemate Eric promised me that if I ever finished Ikaruga, he’d buy me some of these:

For those of you who don’t know, Ikaruga is an arcade-style shooter that was released on Gamecube in 2001, known for its high degree of difficulty and innovative polarity-switching mechanic. People have called it a “bullet hell” game, in that at some points there are so many enemies and projectiles on the screen that it’s extremely difficult to find the safe areas. It’s a cult favorite these days, mainly because of how hard it is to finish. I got it about 2 years ago from a Gamestop (for 40 bucks used, it’s apparently rare), and I’ve been playing it fairly regularly since then trying to get past the especially difficult 4th level. I eventually did that and recently have been working on the fifth.

And I just finished it.

So now I can finally shut up about it on the blog, and to everyone I talk to in person.

So Eric, whenever’s good for you, you know? There’s no rush. Really.

-&-

Here’s another render that I did a few weeks ago with Blender (haha, blender render), this time of one of the iconic blocks that Mario has punched in so many games over the years. A little better with the lighting here.

Mario '?' Block, rendered 10/2/10

I finished my initial foray into PHP today, after learning how it’s used to grab data from MySQL databases, and how it makes HTML really easy. PHP is awesome. Also, I’m going home this weekend! I’ll probably still post, but it’ll be from Pennsylvania! Check it out!

Speaking of Blender, here’s the famous iPad Blend. Yes, it’s what it sounds like.

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Will it blend? Yes it will.

Posted on 3rd November 2010 in Something Daily

A few weeks ago, I picked up a program called Blender from these great Internets of ours. It’s a freeware 3D design environment that’s really good for learning the basics of 3D art (at least I think so, I don’t really have anything to compare it with). It gives you an XYZ coordinate plane to work on, and you typically work by starting with a basic shape and chopping or extending it. The confusing part when I started out was getting the cursor where I wanted in the 3D space, which is difficult when using a flat screen and a mouse that only moves on the XY plane.

I learned it by going through these Wiki-tutorials and just building all the stuff that they explain. So I’ve got the goblets, the penguin, the volcano, the water, the rocket launcher, the ‘realistic’ eyeball, and a bunch more from those. I also came up with a few designs on my own, which were of course based on classic Nintendo games (shocker, right? Who would have guessed?). I’ll put some of my more favorite ones up here in the next few days. For starters, here’s the Nintendo 64 3D ‘N’ shaped logo (I know there are lighting issues, but it was like my 3rd day of using Blender ever. Give me a break.).

The Nintendo 64 Logo, rendered 9/27/10

Something very interesting that I learned from making this object: It has 64 total faces (inside and outside) and 64 vertices. How crazy is it that Nintendo would hide that kind of easter egg in their logo?! I mean obviously it’s awesome…just think about that. The logo, in a way, implicitly says “Nintendo 64″ – N + 64 (faces+vertices). Crazy, man. Just crazy.

So yeah, Blender is really fun. I went about making this one in a pretty roundabout way, since I was in the process of learning the interface, but It ended up looking almost exactly like the real thing. If you’re into games or game design, certainly check it out – really if you’re just bored and near your computer. It’s just fun. And there’s a built-in animation and game engine that uses Python, so it’s possible to just use Blender to make full 3D games. Sort of confusing to learn without a tutorial, but the fact that the tutorial is a wiki really helps, since people can edit posts that were unclear and add helper comments. All around, it’s awesome. I’ll put up another one of these tomorrow.

This brought to mind another thought: I am excited for the day in the future when fully 3-dimensional displays are designed and released for me to buy. Not like a flat screen that makes images look like they’re coming out at you (like we have now), but a 3D environment that you can view from any angle in space. I’m envisioning a cubic hologram or something like that, where you can stick your hand or a cursor in and mark any point in the space by moving around it. Flat screens will be a thing of the past. Wouldn’t this be cool? It sure would make using Blender a lot easier.

Listening to Band of Horses – Cease to Begin. This is one of those albums that I used to love to blast in the empty auditorium of my high school when I got there early for theater tech. It’s “big room” music. I think it’s the reverb on his voice that makes it great for playing in a huge space.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of FreddieW, but he’s a really talented younger filmmaker who puts all of these awesome shorts on YouTube. If you’ve ever played Team Fortress 2, The Rocket Jump should make sense to you. And if not, it’s still super cool.

Get some sleep tonight. Sleep is very important. You’ll be happier if you sleep.

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