The_Augur

IMO, ill/Rad works a bit better in theory than practice. Not that it's a bad combo, and Rad has some great powers, but illusion tends to spread mobs out a bit, and kill unpredictably, which makes Rad anchor debuffs difficult to use. Rad is great to have for AVs, but I think storm is a perfect fit. Both sets use a lot of autonomous pets, and storm gives you a lot of defenses that make up for illusion's softer control. I also think storm is much better at handling surprises. Rad is probably more group friendly, but illusion is already more solo oriented than other controller sets.

Hey guys! I'm back from a 6 year or so absence. Not sure if there is anyone here who'd remember me, but it's good to see Hami raids are still going on regularly! I still very fondly remember Victory's first raid. And the second. And the next several dozen sort've blur together... Have they changed much since 2005?

Also, do we just show up, first come first served, or is there a signup somewhere?

Simply put: END GAME CONTENT...

And not just more Task Forces with the same basic combat, the same "spam them for 20 minutes before they die" archvillains, etc.

My favorite part of the game pre-50 was, BY FAR, the sewer trial. The Terra Volta trial was also pretty fun. They were actually tense, difficult battles in unique locations that could be failed if you weren't on top of things, and completing them actually felt heroic.

After 50, I devoted a few months to defeating Hamidon (as those who were around back in Issue 3 might remember), which was pretty much the only thing left to do that gave any real sense of accomplishment (the first successful raid took over a month's planning and organization, and I still remember the moment he went down and the HOs came pouring in). The next day, I found over 100 people waiting in the Hive for me to log in, which was also pretty gratifying... the next day was a little less so, and before too long it just became routine.

4 years later, there still isn't really anything NEW that surpasses that. There aren't really even any new trials that live up to the creativity and uniqueness of the sewer trial. I love the invention system, the presence of villains, the slightly more dynamic missions that are peppered throughout the game (more ambushes, more map variety, more dynamic NPCs), but there are no really great achievements to strive for.

And that's why my current stay, like the previous ones, will probably be temporary.

Just throwing this out there, but is anyone interested in a Hamidon raid any time soon, for old time's sake?

I haven't really done any research on how the encounter might have changed in the past 4 years, though...

is he still downed with any regularity?

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-James "Jimmy the Smith" St. John Smythe is the father of Jonathan St. John Smythe in Atlas Park.


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<geek>

Just out of curiosity, is his name James as a further reference to the fact that "St. John Smythe" was an alias James Bond used in View to a Kill?

</geek>

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I'll pop in here so you guys have a new target.

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STAY BACK, YOU FOOL! YOU'RE A DEFENDER! SURELY YOU CAN'T HOPE TO TANK THIS THREAD! Well, I'm sure Cuppa appreciates your noble and heroic sacrifice.

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The original Task Force Datamine took 3 months to finish. That was to go over 2 months worth of data.

We now have 18 months worth of data. We looked for a more effecient solution, but our estimates still come out at 2 years to datamine and get you your badges.

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Thanks for the explanation. That sounds reasonable.

Hmmm, I know Lightwave can do what you're describing fairly easily, but I wouldn't know exactly how to with obf files (I don't think bringing .obj files would preserve the morph data to begin with, but I'm not sure). Also, buying Lightwave for a single task like that would probably be extreme overkill.

Can you post a screenshot of the 2 objects (the modeled object and the flat mesh that you want to have the contour of the first one)? It might make exactly what you're trying to do a bit clearer.

shareaza is a free file sharing program, which I don't suggest using and searching for "modo" and downloading it and trying it out, because I don't endorse pirating software for the purposes of learning said software.

But you could if you wanted to, I suppose...

They might look similar, but from my understanding (admittedly, I know much more about the math behind subdivs than nurbs), they are derived very differently, and have different strengths and weaknesses. Most importantly, NURBS are not very good for creating localized complexity without adding unwanted geometry to other areas of the model, because they're based on a UV grid, as opposed to subdivs, which can be based on a normal polygonal mesh. By my understanding, subdivs were created to incorporate the strengths of polygons and nurbs into a unified system.

Also, Modo can't be found on Shareaza.... And by "can't", I mean "maybe it can, if you're inclined to try" and I'm just trying to not blatantly say it. I'll also go so far as to say that I "didn't" download it yesterday and install it with barely any trouble for the purposes of trying it out.

Yeah, I think Modo was made by the same people that made Lightwave's modeler, so is somewhat similar. I've never actually seen it in person, though.

Also, in regards to n-gons: Lightwave certainly uses them (in fact, update 8.3, I think, upped the side-limit for polygons from 1024 to something really rediculous (forget what, but I think it was 2 to the 16th or something). However, it can't subdivide polys with more than 4 sides. This bothered me at first, until I realized that other programs that can (such as Maya) essentially are just splitting the N-gon into quads and tris and then subdividing, and, at least in Maya, the result of using subdiv surfaces with polys with too many sides is really ugly. Quads are my friends (I love subdiv and poly modeling, and I hate NURBS and splines).

My uncle very fully respects 3D computer graphics, and in fact we worked together on an animation last year that brings ideas he had to motion. Actually, throughout much of his career, his art has ventured into the realm of computer graphics, even before computers were capable of graphics, and his art (in addition to more traditional painting and sculpture) has very often consisted of layering of repeating color patterns. In addition, he's also a very skilled craftsman, and many of his sculptures are machines consisting of moving blocks of wood and hand-cranked conveyer belts or moving pieces of refractive glass and whatnot that allow user input and customization to create animated color patterns. So coming from this type of creative background, he jumped at the opportunity to use computers to both save time (the nature of many of his projects were such that I could recreate a weeks worth of hand-work on a computer in under an hour), and to be free of technical limmitations when adding motion to his work. He just has a bit of a disdain for photographers...

Also, procedurals work fine for objects that need to deform. Generally (at least the default settings in Lightwave), a procedural is applied to a surface before deformations are. So if you use morphs and bones to move an object, the procedural layers stick to the surface. Also, when you layer procedurals creatively, particularly when using procedural layers as alpha channels and as gradient channel inputs (this specific terminology might only apply to lightwave), they can be used to achieve the effects mentioned. Again, it depends on the level of specificity needed for the individual layer in question, though in many cases, image maps can also be avoided by using weight maps stored in the geometry. For instance, if you need the leather jacket to be more specular on either side of the zipper, where it would likely be rubbed more often, you could select the strip of points on either side of the zipper, give them a high value in a weight map you create for that purpose, then use that weight map as an input for a gradient layer that ramps up the specularity based on that weight map. If you then want to make that strip of specularity less regular, you can use a procedural layer as an alpha channel (or displacement channel) for the previous layer, and so on. This can produce really fantastic results that don't rely on image maps, therefore creating more easily contained objects (that you don't have to worry about having images that need to go along with them, which is a huge help when working with other people across multiple computers), which can be viewed at a greater range of scales.

Of course, as was mentioned earlier in the thread, stacking a lot of procedural layers increases render time (though, on the flipside, requires less RAM, so, depending on the shots and your hardware, sometimes will render faster). Though Lightwave also offers the option to bake a texture onto a surface (at a resolution you specify). This will take all the layers and shading for a surface and bake them into a single image map. This process usually takes a long time, but once it's done, the object will render very fast from then on, even though the texture was originally created by using procedurals.

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Kboc2... It may not be directly your fault, but I hate you. I just put over $300 dollars into software....

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You got off easy, then. Lightwave is $1,700. The full version of Maya is $7,000

This, of course, is another reason that Poser is so prevalant. As far as modeling goes, though, I've heard nothing but good things about Wings3D, which, as kboc pointed out, is free.

I agree with essentially everything heliumphoenix has said (though I've actually had pretty good success doing subtle veins with procedurals, but if you need prominent veins that need to lie in a particular spot, image maps are clearly the way to go). I would say that a fully realistic 3D character would need a combination of both for different aspects of the surface, and the 2 are certainly not exclusive of each other. For other objects, I think that the tendancy of most people is to think "well, I need a rock, so I'll start drawing (or photographing) rocks and apply those images to my model" while it's generally more advisable to instead try to mathematically derive what makes a rock look like a rock and then recreate that with procedurals. Other than not having a set resolution, procedural textures also don't stretch when applied to irregular geometry. If I create a nice rock procedural texture that doesn't use any image maps, I can apply it to ANY rock of any shape any time I need one. Rather than creating an object, I've instead created a fully 3D volumetric material that I now have the power to apply to any shape.

The only thing that phoenix says that I'd disagree with is that NOT everyone would consider photography an art. Many painters and sculpters tend to look down on photographers (my uncle, who is a fine artist and sculptor, often refers to them as "image-thieves"). For the most part, though, I don't agree with this point of view, particularly after spending time talking to friends who are photographers and hanging out in the dark room with them while they try to get a print exposed the way they want it. While it might not be as arduous a task as painting a masterpiece, there is still a LOT of room, both in composition and developing, for both creativity and error.

I think the big distinction, though, is that painting is a more purely creative process, whereas photography has a strong editorial component as well.

I enjoy computer graphics because it combines all the creative aspects of painting and sculpture with almost everything that goes into photography/cinematography as well, and I think both fields can learn from each other (for instance, why the hell aren't there any HDRI video cameras! Surely there's a way to build one)

The first year or two of college (as well as a couple years of HS) were devoted as much to programming as they were to computer graphics, so I sort've enjoy writing shaders. I hope to learn how to write lightwave shaders some time soon, because the level of control you have with them is unparalleled.

I probably also have a copy of BMRT stored away somewhere on a hard drive. I don't think it's even available anymore, since Exluna got sued out of existence by Pixar a couple years back (on the day that they filed for bankruptcy, they were bought by NVidia, which, a few months later, unvieled "their" new real time shading technology. NVidia, IMO, is very good at knowing who to buy).

If you want to send me the mech object (is it a .obj file?) I can try my hand at texturing/rendering it.

Send it to AugurCoH@gmail.com

I've tried a few times to make the switch over to Maya, but I'm too entrenched in Lightwave. I also prefer Lightwave's native renderer to Maya's, and every time I try to learn Maya, whoever is trying to teach me doens't know how to do in Maya what I know how to do in Lightwave (same goes true for that class I took that used SoftImage), so I always end up getting frustrated, not only by my inability to do something that I had taken for granted, but that those teaching me can't tell me how to do it either, and I end up going back to Lightwave. Eventually, when I get the time, I'll probably put more of an effort into getting more comfortable with it, though.

It depends what you're texturing. Image maps are obviously necessary for a lot of things (anything that needs specific and controlled details), but I think many people tend to write off procedurals the first time they try to slap a default procedural texture on an object and it doesn't look photorealistic.

It was actually learning how to write Renderman shaders that really opened my eyes to procedurals. We had an assignment in school where we had to create an animation of the moon orbiting around the earth (or, at least, planets that resembled both. Specific continents weren't important) using BMRT (a freeware Renderman renderer) and no commercial graphics software, which meant writing a C++ program from scratch that outputted the renderman animation files, and writing all our shaders from scratch. I ended up writing shaders that calculated elevation, which used that (along with lattitude) to calculate different biomes and cloud patterns and shaded them appropriately. Was probably the most important project I did in school.

But yeah, as powerful as writing shaders can be, no shader will ever actually replicate the actual shape of the continents of earth without images. Ideally, textures are made up of both mapped images combined with procedurals.

Oh yeah, I forgot about Oblivion. ::drools:: Morrowind was one of my favorite games. I hope Oblivion lives up to it (think it probably will).

To Kboc: It might not be that most poser models look the same as much as most Poser renders (since, as you say, Poser isn't used for modeling). Subsurface Scattering is a nice addition to Poser 6. To use SSS in Lightwave you need a plugin (the ice cave render on my photobucket page uses it).

"Resorted" to procedurals?! IMO, procedurals are rediculously powerful, and are often overlooked by people who think you need image maps to do any texturing. The 17 renders I have up on photobucket use all of 6 images between them (the wallpaper, which is a photo, the starfield, which is an amalgamation of about a dozen satellite photos, the text on the golden apple, the iris pattern on all the eyes, the chessboard surface, since I wanted to accurately reproduce my specific chessboard, and the keyboard keys for the steam computer). The great benefit to procedurals is that they can scale up or down without pixelating if you put enough layers on them. They also don't tile. For the project with the guy in the armor on the mountaintop (my senior project at college), I needed the rock that he's standing on to be viewed both from far away and from extremely close up (there's a shot where you see his feet walking), so the bump map alone has 33 stacked procedural textures, all with different types of detail at different scales, so that as you zoom in close to it, rather than blur into formlessness, new details, like little bumps and scratches, emerge that were invisible from further away.

I also didn't like texturing until I learned how powerful procedurals are for achieving photo-realistic results (I'm still not crazy about doing UV image mapping). After learning more about them, texturing became pretty much my favorite aspect of 3D.

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Doom 3 is the best example off the top of my head; the developers (id) made it to be a tech demo, essentially. They didn't need it to sell; they just needed to sell what it can do because they'll make far more money off licensing it than they will off the game itself (not to mention, mods which wilil sell the base game; Counter Strike and Desert Combat in point for those). I honestly wouldn't expect most people to be building stuff from scratch for most things unless it's some unique or very complex project. But as you and Darkjedi said, it is a tool. It and of itself, it doesn't make something complete. The thing with Poser is that it's very easy to fall onto it as a easy crutch; on the other hand, as DarkJedi's stuff, among others, shows, it can also be a very simple base by which very non-Poser looking pieces can be done.

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Id is, indeed, a very good example. IMO, Id makes crappy games (I'll admit, though, that I never even tried Doom3 after my utter disappointment with Quake 2 and 3, as well as Return to Castle Wolfenstein), but really top notch game engines. As much as I preferred both the look and the game-play of Unreal Tournament to Quake 3, the Quake 3 engine was much more streamlined, and was capable of some really amazing stuff. That said, though, I think they might be losing their lead in game engines as well. I don't know much about the Doom3 engine, but I thought Half Life 2's Source Engine looked better (though, once again, that might just be Valve making much better use of their engine than Id of theirs), and the demo videos I've seen of the new Unreal Engine blow both Id and Valve away (of course, the new unreal engine isn't released yet, and Valve's Source engine is being updated to use HDRI, which will be stunning, so who can really tell who's ahead).

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There's crap that comes out of every userbase for every platform.

I know my piece isn't High Art... it's just a figure I played with and rendered, I liked it so I posted it...

What I'd like to know from Arguer is this: if I use an original figure that I created in Poser... like say:

This One...

Would it make a difference since I'm still using Poser?

Here's the thing, Arguer. Nobody is a jack of all trades in Proffessional Level 3D. You will almost never find a modeller who is also working as an animator. You'll almost never find a texture artist doing rigging.

It's why, outside of Poser, there are so very few people doing graphic-novel type work for fun. They're too busy spending hundreds of hours setting up their model. Even 3D God Stephen Stalberg doesn't have the prolific portfolios Chris Derochie has... Derochie doesn't have to bother building figures, he's a classically trained ex-Disney Animator.

He's got credentials that people in the film industry take very seriously and he'll be regognized long before anyone who has only animated in 3D (which is most of us).

But, in the 3D community, he'll be looked down on because his preferred platform is Poser.

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Am I the "arguer" you keep referring to, and if so, are you just calling me names, or misreading my name?

Anyway, I agree with your assessment that no one is a jack of all trades (well, most people aren't, anyway) in high end 3D, which is why I defended your use of Poser for the purposes of fan-art. However, I also felt it prudent and accurate to look at the other side of the argument, which is that, for the sake of high end 3D, Poser is generally looked down upon. Since, however, your fan-art was hardly meant to be a high-budget, multi-person production, your use of Poser is certainly defendable.

Also, my particular personal dislike of Poser comes from the fact that I'm pretty much a jack of all trades EXCEPT for character animation. I do modeling, both mechanical and organic, texturing (mostly specialize in procedural), technical direction, lighting, rendering, and compositing, as well as procedural and physics animation, but I HATE doing character animation (and so almost always pass that part of a project off to someone who specializes in that). Poser is primarily a character animation tool, and is one that doesn't work particularly smoothly with other programs that are much better for modeling, lighting, and rendering, and so it has little place in the higher end (I don't work in feature films, so I'm not even talking THAT high end) productions, and is why it's looked down on. Not because it's bad for what it does, but because most 3D apps don't play very well with each other, and any high-end productions need to use apps that can do EVERYTHING well (the exception usually being modeling, since models can often be easily transfered from one application to another).

As for my oppinion on the mech model: I think it looks pretty good. If you modeled it from scratch, then good job. I don't know much about modeling in Poser, so I don't know exactly what went into it, but unlike the figures, it doesn't LOOK like a modified poser model, and, even with no previous knowledge about it, I would assume it was modeled from scratch. If you want a critique, I would say that the texturing doesn't look very realistic and could use some work, but as you say, texturing isn't your area of interest.

Anyway, if you're interested, here's some of the stuff I've done:

http://photobucket.com/albums/y5/iteration2/

None of it's directly CoH related, though the steam computer (which I was comissioned to do for a small job) was inspired, in part, by a combination of Freakshow, Nemesis, and Clockwork.

As a 3D professional myself, I have to say that my oppinion on the matter falls somewhere in between.

In a way, using Poser is sort've a cheap shortcut. Even if the entire model isn't canned, using Poser implies using canned geometry, albeit very often modified by the artist. Poser models, IMO, almost always look like Poser models, and I only ever use Poser when a project calls for background characters that don't need a high level of detail, or when a deadline (and pay rate) simply don't allow for custom-built geometry and textures. Personally, I don't like Poser (I use Lightwave).

While I've seen far better 3D than the images here, I've also seen much worse, and I'd prove that I could do a better job, except for the fact that (and this is where I get to the other side of the issue that defends the OP), DOING HIGH QUALITY, FULL CHARACTERS IN 3D FROM SCRATCH TAKES FOR[BLEEP]ING EVER!

The OP probably didn't want to spend between a week and a month modeling fan-art of War Witch from scratch, as well as doing all the textures and rigging, so I think we should cut him some slack.

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To be close-minded enough to say they're not art just because he didn't make the base model is like telling a painter his art is invalid because he didn't make his own brushes. Poser is a TOOL used to reach the end-result of a FLAT, 2D IMAGE... just like a pencil is to an illustrator... a TOOL.


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To an extent, I agree with this, but I think a better analogy would be "telling an artist that his collage isn't art because he used pre-made imagery to construct the overall piece". My oppinion is that a collage can certainly be considered art, but can also fall in a hazy area in-between art and hackery. My oppinion on the use of Poser is the same.

Much like creating a collage, using Poser is more of a compositional task than a purely creative one, and it requires both less time and less technical aptitude to create art with it, with the downside being that, as with collage, you're limmited to working with the materials provided (or gathered).

The idea of a painter creating one's own brush (which some do, when they require a result unattainable by commercial tools) is a bit of a stretch, and would be more analogous to a 3D artist programming his own software (which, again, some do, though most lack the technical abilities).