Quit being pussies and post

this is Bryon's concept that he put on the yahoo group. looks basically like what we had.
By the way since it's the 4th this fri I won't be going to atlanta. Feel free to meet up, but I won't be there. I will however be there next wed for the playtest.

I will not be there either, Being 4th of July and all. I doubt they will even have a play test scheduled for Fri. but who knows
As for the following week I will be preparing for the arrival of my daughter so that week is shot as well.

On to other news.
I have the first section of the levels BSPs modeled out in Unreal. It looks pretty plain without the static meshes. So I thought I would whip out a couple of models to throw in there (like the pipes) and that is where I hit my first snag. Apparently Unreal doesn't recognize Sub-D's. There has to be away to do, it I'm just not sure how. It converts the poly models with no problem but when I tried a Sub-d it gave me an error saying it was an improper selection and was not able to convert. The model was a simple cylinder and only consisted of 12 polys so I know there wasn't anything out of the ordinary like a 5 point or overlapping verts. I don't know...... I will do some MORE research and update you guys later.

could it have to do with the fact that sub-d works in a different edit mesh kind of deal. Because if you were to take a poly model and sub-d it then put it into vert mode they aren't actually on the surface of the object. You'll probably just have to creat a mesh to make it look round.

Ya, I don't know what the hell I was thinking. You can not use sub-d when modeling for Unreal. Thats why they call it poly modeling. And that of cousre is why I guess normal maps are used so extensively. Oh well every body is allowed a brain fart now and again.

But during my research I found out a couple of cool facts.

1). In Unreal 3 you can have up to 70 - 90 thousand polys visible on screen at any given time, with out it bogging down slow machines. Of course you could have more displayed, on faster machines, but 80,000 ploys seams to be the magic number right now.

2). Static meshes are instanced in Unreal 3.
If you have a static mesh visible on screen that contains 500 polys and you duplicate that static mesh 9 times, so you have a total of 10 identical meshes, Unreal will treat that as one static mesh. Basically after you duplicate your mesh to a total of 10, you really have a total poly count of 5,000 but Unreal thinks you still have only a poly count of 500.

Hey guys I have been fooling around with MudBox for creating normal maps for low poly objects, instead of Zbrush and I got to tell ya this program kick A$$. It's a hell of a lot more intuitive than ZBrush and you don't have to worry about accidentally flatting your image. Best of all since it it made by Autodesk (which I wasn't aware of till now) it has the same shortcut keys as Maya.

The navigation is also the same, holding alt and Left click for rotating, right click for dollying and so on. Which makes the learning curve almost nonexistent. MudBox also works on layers like Photoshop so you can duplicate a layer, hide the original and then sculpt. If you don't like it or mess up, simply delete the layer and you still have your original just unhide it (not sure whether or not ZBrush has that same feature, but I like it.) The only thing it doesn't do which ZBrush does do and very well I might add is painting.

Any way you guys should definitely check it out.


By the way is unhide a word?
When I typed this up it said that unhide was spelled wrong and that got me wondering.
But when you read it in the original context above it seemed to fit ok.

Scince I'm asking questions I got a few more for ya.

Why is it that when you’re driving and looking for an address, you turn down the volume on the radio?
Why do they sterilize the needle for lethal injections?
What was the best thing before sliced bread?
What is the speed of dark?
How do they get a deer to cross at that yellow road sign?

zbrush is made by autodesk now as well I believe. But it still seems retarded and if Mudbox works good then we have a winner. Anyone who needs mudbox let me know and I'll give you a copy next week. Unhide looks right to me, even though my comp tells me it's wrong as well.

It's A Girl 7lb, 5oz.
Luckily she looks like her mom blue eyes blond hair.

Well I got to get back to the hospital just came home to do the three S's.

congrats man. what's her name?

I won't be at school this week so i'll see everyone the following week.