Gephoria

I recently saw two things in the news this morning that made me want to blog.  I apologize for not keeping up to date recently but this is a doosey (if that's how you spell that made up word). 

First off let's talk about imaginary lines, or real lines that should not be crossed.  If I were to see a car accident and be the first one to witness it as if it happened right in front of me, I would at least call emergency services to respond to the incident.  That being said would I also cross a line if I just kept going? Or pointed and laughed and kept driving?

San Francisco, up to 20 people witnessed a gang rape of a 15 year old girl in a dimly lit area she was being raped by students from the age of 15 to adults in their mid twenties (which makes me sick unless she herself was drunk enough to confess to it then the twenty year olds still should have backed off or at least I would... that's somebody's little girl/daughter).  Current.com has the full story also MSNBC, I just respect current more.  I seriously think the by standards that didn't notify law enforcement should be punished, or at least told what they were really looking at if they were not aware of the situation. 

In other news, I witnessed a clip from Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 here it is, if it is taken down it may be taken down forever.  The video depicts terrorists taking over and shooting up civilians in an airport.  With all of the 9/11 controversy this is definitely crossing a line if it were to happen IRL(in real life)

I thought this video wasn't all bad, as long as the people can tell the difference between the video game and reality... I would  hate to see some crazed out Iraqi or Vietnam war vet play this and get flashbacks, then go crazy and kill their family, yes, but also most people can tell the difference between digital violence and physical violence.  with that being said the UFC game for Xbox 360 is awesome and really is no worse than this if the subject (player) cannot tell the difference between reality and virtual reality. 

I sincerely hope that Inifinity Ward does not receive too much negative feedback about this.  In all reality the U.S. army will probably use these simulation styles to protect our airports better than what they currently are today, or maybe inspire new architectural advances. 

Lately I feel I have failed miserably at breaking into the video game industry.  I know I have the skills and communication nessecary for almost any position within the world of GD. Here I am going to list the resources I have been going through, maybe through comments or suggestions you can help me or maybe these resources (thinking of Randy Pausch: the Last Lecture here) can help others achieve their dreams. 

I'd think that going straight to the developer would be the best way to go, straight to activision, blizzard, EA, Midway, Interplay, Rockstar, Etc.  I first saw this website and fell in love with the idea at least.  The map has locations that are able to be clicked on and each location has a list of game developers associated with the corresponding location. 

Game Dev Map

GamaSutra

Elance

Now I will state that I would have hoped my college administration would have done a better job of student job placement (or internships or projects for that matter) but then again i'd have to state that they fell short of themselves in their own standards.  Some students that didn't have final projects completed still passed classes sad to say.  some students that have failed X amount of classes and had to retake the class X amount of times should eventually be kicked out of school for lack of effort. Honestly the school and my former teacher send out as many jobs as he can and I would be afraid that the corruption within the classroom would lead to the alumni as well.  Say that Student 1 and Studnet 0 both apply for the same job, would Student 1 get a more favored opinion from the school's faculty than student 0 because of a personal preference factor from the school? Yes probably and I don't blame the school for trying to make itself look good. At the same time this is crooked behavior and should have attention pointed at it.  Just like the internship deals that were happening when one student who I will not name received his internship through "a teacher's company" before other students even got the approved list of available internships. to put it simple it doesn't feel like i've ever played on a level playing field in this game of life. 

(apologizes now sorry i had to let that out)

With that being said, other great places to find employment seems to be various forums.  CGTalk, GameArtisans, Game-Artist, GameDev, DevMaster, and various other 3d oriented websites. 

Anyways, I'm looking for any work, may be relocating to the bigger MPLS soon.  General labor, craigslist stuff, web design, Freelance graphic or 3d work would be the greatest. 

If I discover more later I will update, have a peachy day everybody!

This is the order that I personally attack my LOW HARD DRIVE SPACE. Since Brown College partitions the students' hard drives into a small C:\ and a larger D:\ it gets annoying managing them both and I don't feel comfortable merging them into one C partition. 

1. Disk Cleanup
My Computer -> Your Target Drive -> Right click -> Properties -> At the bottom of the new window that opens is a

2. Defragment
My Computer -> Your Target Drive ->Right click -> Properties -> Tools Tab -> Defragment Now
I would like to recommend Auslogics Defragment Program. It is a true gem of defrag programs and runs more efficiently than the Microsoft Defrag from what I can tell.

3. Uninstall Unnecessary Programs
Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Find programs you do not use, or are not necessary and uninstall them.

4. Uninstall Unnecessary Windows Components
Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Add/Remove Windows Components
NOTE: Some of these are required for internet access.

5. Manage Your Swap File
My Computer -> Right Click -> Properties -> Advanced -> Performance -> Settings -> Advanced Tab -> Virtual Memory -> Change -> This is your paging file.  how and where it is set up and also size is all set here.  You usually want to have this somewhere around the size of your ram, you can always let windows manage it by selecting system managed size, otherwise you can relocate it for example a 1152-2048 size swap file from C:\ to D:\
NOTE: if you set this too high or too low you will experience system failure.

6. Registry Cleaner
Download and Run a Registry Cleaner or Registry Cleanup.  Simple as that if you do not know what a registry cleaner is Google it!

7. Archive Files
Go to your "My Documents" or wherever you keep your personal files that you don't use much.  Then select a bunch of the files (prefferebly the ones you do not use often.  You can also do this with porn and other

8. Delete Windows Help Files
These are often unnecessary for an experienced windows user If you are sure you will never need the help files windows provides (for the Operating system not necessarily associated programs unless you use visual studio or other programming applications) besides you can probably Google the information and it will come up. 

I hope these help you in your quest to have a good functioning computer! take heed of the notes and you should be fine!

Jason, Travis and I recently all started doing the Swordmaster tutorial from 3D Total

I also have been working on a couple other pieces of art. I started on an axe that I plan to ZBrush and make it look uber pretty visit my DeviantArt Page for more information.  also a staff that I may Zbrush unsure if i want to yet or not.  Here you go please leave critiques and comments. 

Here ye go!

Swordmaster head WiP 1 by ~Gephoria on deviantART
 

WTFStaff 1 WIP 3 by ~Gephoria on deviantART

Axe WIP 1 by ~Gephoria on deviantART

Today I found the "HOLY GRAIL" of zbrush tutorials.  After downloading dozens of gigabytes worth of videos that later i realized they are so large i cannot more them from one location to another hard drive I found something useful! I came upon these videos while noticing a ZBrush 3.5 advertisement, naturally I was curious on what was new in 3.5.  I visited the Pixologic website in search of the new features but I never got to them last night nor thismorning yet...

What I did discover is that Pixologic hosts free professional quality training videos on ZBrush.  I feel stupid for not locating these earlier (or they could be brand spanking new) in my education.  They really teach you all you could need to know about how to utilize their software. I stumbled upon this vast knowledge and treasure chest of wisdom accidentally and humbly pass it on to my readers!

Link:

This is a tutorial based off my learning experiences with Autodesk's 3ds max program. With that being said this tutorial is intended for people who use 3ds max and possess basic knowledge of how to use the program (at least making primitives). With that being covered this tutorial I will cover Layers, Creating cameras in a scene, scene states, and setting up batch rendering. I will be using my own scene and do not believe in downloading stuff for this small tutorial. 

Here is the Scene

In this scene I have a platform and three grenades I would like you to start by creating your cameras. To do this simply push "P" to get yourself into a perspective viewport, and when you are content with the positioning of the cameras press "ctrl + C" This will create a camera from the perspective view you are currently in. There are hundreds of ways to create cameras; this is the easiest way for me and probably most beginners also. After you have all of your cameras set in place (however many cameras you want) we can begin this tutorial. 

We will start by placing everything into layers in 3ds max. think of layers just like they are in Photoshop, you can hide/unhide layers and freeze/unfreeze layers, you can also control objects by the layer they are on changing the color/scale/rotation whatever variable you can create or think of it can be manipulated by layers in max the way you can manipulate an object on the scene graph. If your scene does not have any layers currently you can make one by hitting the Tools Menu -> Layer Manager. 

You select all the objects you would like on your new layer, and simply hit the "new layer" button. This puts all of the selected objects into a new 3ds max layer. The layer you have selected is important and is indicated by a check mark to the right of the name of the layer. 

For an example here is my layers dialogue from this scene:

As you can see I like to place all my cameras on one layer, environment on another, and the actual model or center of attention on the default layer. NOTE: If you right click and go to unhide all it will ask if you would like to unhide all layers, if you lose something in your scene this is another way to find it as opposed to the schematic view or other methods (they all work fine I think). This isn't the best way to do it just using it for this example and it's what I’m used to. 

Now that we have our layers organized properly we're almost ready. Next step is to set scene states!

You can set up your scene states by pressing the Tools Menu -> Manage Scene States. Next you are presented with a dialogue box that looks something like this:

Next I will select the layers I'd like to hide, my first one I’d like to show everything but the already hidden reference modeling pictures that I have in the scene. When the scene is ready select save button in the Manage Scene States dialogue. This created a scene state that shows everything you had shown (new items added will be excluded from this and will be shown until you re-save the scene state). Next I will do the same only having one grenade show on each one. Eventually you will have all your scene states as I do below:

Ok we are almost ready to start our batch render! How exciting!

Go to Rendering Menu -> Batch Render this will present you with a new dialogue box. Batch render works directly with the scene states, scene states works directly with layers, it all intertwines somehow and there is some programming genius out there laughing at us all but oh well here we go!

Basically all you have to do here is Click or hit the "ADD" button; this adds a line to the batch render. This line has some options

View: Name the view, doesn't matter, you can name these for your own organization.

Camera: Select the camera you would like the render to use

Output Path: completely up to you probably start with C:\...

Range: this will render 1-x frames of your animation.

Resolution: self explanatory

Scene State: set this to your predestinated scene state you would like to render

Preset: this is your own render preset choose wisely!

In the end you can either hit the render button OR you can export a *.bat batch file. To double click later and have that batch file just start rolling with all the delicious information you put into it.  It will work flawlessly if you set it up right (and really it's not that complicated until you get into scenes with hundreds of objects dozens of scene states and multiple cameras). 

On a personal note, I got evicted from my place of residence the other day spent a weekend finding a new location.  Here are my Updates sorry if it is not much. 

F410 Knife WIP Shot 1 by ~Gephoria on deviantART
 

F410 Knife WIP Shot 2 by ~Gephoria on deviantART

WTFStaff 1 WIP 1 by ~Gephoria on deviantART

WTFStaff 1 WIP 2 by ~Gephoria on deviantART

got the knife idea from a pic on my HDD, the staff is just random modeling i guess.  Promise to make tuts tomorrow! until then my watchers keep modeling and keep your heads up in this post-bush economy. 

TORN

is a game developed by Joe Chedburn.  He has had this idea since the age of 16 and carefully grafted it out in his head and in code.  He is a self proclaimed geek and a computer whiz kid.  TORN is about  a city Torncity and it's crime, crime is the object of the game but so is surviving and some law enforcement.  I would have to recommend you give it a go it is probably the best text based game I've ever played.  It's fun, intuitive and has 41,000 active users.  Here is a link to the original article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6264082/21-year-old-computer-geek-makes-1m-with-online-game.html

Sorry about not updating for a couple days, my computer caught the BestFriendVirus that happens to be like aids and you can't get rid of it (at least this is what Google told me) unless you reformat and start over from scratch.  I wouldn't feel content without posting in contribute like I normally do! With that being said, there's some big news in my world. 

Dota refiner Icefrog has achieved a position at Valve Software and now has a team to help him (I'm assuming) recreate a Dota like game with Valve software engineers at his disposal! That's great news and I'm extremely happy for him.  I'd hope that it doesn't get entangled in the IP that Blizzard Entertainment, Blizzivision or Actiblizzard (Activision Blizzard is stupid I think for a name splice) currently has market share on. The excellent custom map was created and refined by generations of programmers.  Almost everybody that plays Dota loves it and really it is the best part of Warcraft III for a great number of Battle.net users.  I hope it goes smoothly for Icefrog and his Valve Software team. 

I would also like to give props for this picture

Console war? by *Mikeinel on deviantART

I thought it was an awesome pic I wished there was a representation of the Wii, but then again it is in it's own category some could say. 

With that done here is my personal update (I started the tutorial I mentioned earlier, coming in a future post). 

G1 Gernade WIP by ~Gephoria on deviantART 

 
G125 Grenades by ~Gephoria on deviantART

Have fun til next time!

   Greetings! I feel like I'm not posting enough but I'm content with the current rate I'm working at! I am going to be doing my secret shopper thing later this week.  Let's start with the important stuff!

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   My new piece of art, i have 4 more grenades coming shortly. While working on this piece I came up with my next idea for a tutorial or explanation, I will be preparing (not sure when I'll post it) a tutorial on everything from Scene States, Grouping Objects, Cameras, Layers and performing Batch Rendering in 3ds max. When rendering out the shots for the grenade above I performed a batch render, it's really easy. 

   Well I am losing my mind listening to "under the Sea" from the little mermaid for some reason lost my train of thought. 

   Interesting news I heard, I read on Kotaku that Fans of football teams (rugby for anybody not in America) are suing Game Developer Giant Electronic Arts for being placed in the most recent Madden game.  I hate to think it but the designers probably wanted to add some overenthusiastic fans, and well, get sued as a result.  Here is a link to the full story

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