Recently in DDA II, we've been working with lighting and how lights interact with objects in 3DS Max. Our most recent project, which had to be completed at home due to the coronavirus, involved working with the Arnold Renderer and the Arnold lighting system. Arnold lights are versatile and appear to be photorealistic, and I personally really like how my final scene turned out. The only problem that I have with them, and the Arnold Renderer in general, is the fact that it takes a really long time to fully render. A preview pass takes an upwards of three minutes, which is fine, but my full render for the scene took around 3-4 hours, but it looks incredible. Below are two renders I made of my scene- one of the preview passes, and the full render, which I'm really proud of. The preview passes are grainy at best, but give a good idea of what the full scene really looks like. Overall, I really like Arnold lighting, but rendering takes a really long time, which can be a problem if I'm working on a school assignment.
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Sword of the Black Stone has to be one of my favorite games of all time. It's a true masterpiece, a classic of its era, perfect in every way. I don't praise games like this often, but I will vouch for the quality of this game until the day I die- it is possibly the greatest piece of media ever created, across all forms of entertainment.
This game truly is for everyone. If you enjoy an engaging and deep story with unique and heart-wrenching characters, this game is for you. If you like deep and complex combat systems, with a sort of easy to learn but difficult to master mentality to it, this game is for you. If you simply play games to experience cutting-edge graphics and see just how far technology has come, Sword of the Black Stone is for you. The game's story is so complex that even I cannot begin to grasp it in its infinite complexity. So much of its symbolism and dialogue goes over my head that I am simply left bewildered with every character encounter I have. I am simply left to assume that the human mind is simply incapable of grasping the sheer perfection of the story. In a similar way, the graphics and artstyle of the game goes over my head as well. The avant-garde, cutting-edge graphics are so powerful that my lowly PC cannot render them in full, and can only manage a low-detail mess of what must be the most graphically impressive piece of media ever made. The game is perfect in so many ways. There are so many things that I cannot even touch upon, because the game is so good that I cannot get past the first area without utilizing a technique used only by the most daring speedrunners. My lowly human mind simply cannot grasp this game's sheer perfection. 10/10, 5 stars, play this game. Plus, it's only $1.99 on steam. Recently in DDA, we've been learning about UVW mapping and texturing on 3D objects. So far we've learned that it's a difficult, tedious, and hard process, and a lot can go wrong with it. The amount of content we had to learn to texture a single can is hard to believe- it took me about a week of straight work, and then some, to make this: They're not even all that good. The process is cool in concept, where you slice a mesh along a series of vertices to apply a seamless texture, but if you try to work with anything more complicated than a box, it gets so difficult and tedious that it's barely even worth it. All in all, it's probably a skill we need to have in this class, but that doesn't change the fact that I don't like it. Noita is a 2D roguelike platformer with a twist: every single pixel is simulated. Dirt and sand fall, water drips, etc. It's like all those mobile games where you tap to drop individual particles of water or acid, and then shake your phone to mix them all up. It's all made to simulate real life physics and chemistry, like where water neutralizes toxic sludge, or where oil is denser than water, so when the two mix, they separate and oil falls to the bottom of the container. There's all sorts of little things like that, which make the attention to detail almost as impressive as the developer's programming abilities. Speaking of the developers, Noita is being made by the same people who made games like Baba is You, so they have experience making great games.
The simulation gimmick isn't all that Noita has going for it. It's only in early access, but it's polished and optimized about as much as it can be. The core gameplay of it consists of flying around, collecting wands and spells that completely alter how you play the game, and ultimately reaching the bottom of your current floor, so you can replenish your health and spells, and get new items and perks. The game's hard- really hard. There's so much crammed in and hidden that I've probably only seen 10% of what the game has to offer, after a good few hours playing it. Music and the sound effects are top-notch as well. Noita is a great game, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys a challenging, obtuse game. It's original enough to set it apart from all the other rogue-likes and rogue-lites in my mind, and it's always fun to pop in for a quick ten-minute run every now and then. The best part is that it's being updated regularly, each update coming with new content and improvements. I can't wait to see where it goes. I'm not usually a fan of top-down RPGs- I usually don't play tactical games like them, but lately, I've been getting into them more and more, playing games like Darkest Dungeon, and more recently, Divinity 2: Original Sin.
Over the course of my winter break, I finally took the time to finish my character model. I added details to the legs, I added a cape, and did some other stuff to make it look like a finished project, including an overhaul of the backpack, and I added a pedastal for him to stand on. I'm proud of how it turned out- I like how I used the reference image to pose him the way I did, and while the level of detail isn't great, I think that it'll be easier to print out in the end. Below you can see some low-quality renders I did- after I was done with the model itself, I messed around with some lighting and materials to show off what I did. Finally, I simply scaled it down to the size of a standard mini (1 in. x 1 in. x ~28 mm.) for printing later on. I did run into a problem while doing this- the spear made it taller than most minis, making it stand at around 38 mm. instead of 26-28 mm. I fixed this by scaling it down a small percentage, making the base somewhat smaller than 1 in., but in keeping the proportions the same, the height was put at about 32 mm., which was a lot better than 38 mm. I thought this was pretty good, and so I saved it as a copy, leaving me with two files- the original, and the one scaled for 3D printing. When I get back to school, I'll share both versions with my teacher, and see about printing it. Overall, this project was a lot of fun, and I'm actually excited to work on more things like it in the future. For the past month or so, I've been creating a 3D model of a character design that I drew. I'm making it to hopefully be 3D printed, and so far, I've made some great progress. I really like how it looks so far, and I'm nearly done with it- hopefully, I'll be able to work on it at home over Thanksgiving break this week, and maybe even finish it. I've drawn a few inspirations for the design- I only recently redid the spear, which is inspired from the game Dark Souls. I'm really proud of how it turned out, and I think it's a major improvement over my old spear design, which was pretty poorly modeled. I also redid the chestplate, making it look a slightly more detailed, and it looks like it actually fits with the pauldrons, which have also been redone. All I really need to now it the legs, feet, and skirt, and the pedestal on which the figure will stand. I'll then make the cape using the cloth modifier, and finally scale it all to the right size in centimeters. All in all, I'm really excited to see where this goes. Up until about a week ago, all my digital art had to be made using a mouse and keyboard. It was clumsy, devalued my already bare-bones art skills, and was just plain uncomfortable to do. However, I recently got the Huion G10T drawing tablet as a birthday gift, and I haven't looked back since. If you didn't know, drawing tablets are tablets that come with a pen or stylus. You connect them to your computer, and it basically turns the pen into a mouse input- moving the pen around the surface of the tablet moves the mouse accordingly. Tapping the pen to the tablet simulates a mouse click. Where this otherwise cumbersome feature turns into a useful one is when you use it with a digital art program- such as Krita, or Photoshop- it makes digital art much, much easier. There are things like pressure sensitivity, which I believe most tablets worth their salt have, and hotkeys on the tablet itself, etc.
The Huion G10T has both of those, with I think ~1,700 levels of pressure sensitivity I think, and a small mousepad and hotkey-able buttons as well. I've been using it for a little bit now, and I love it. I haven't completed a full piece yet, but what I'm working on is coming along well, and there's a noticeable improvement to my other digital pieces already. Combining it with tools built into many art programs, like weighted brushes for instance, makes it that much easier to make professional-looking pieces of digital artwork. I put some of my older digital art below, right next to my first piece being made using this tablet, and I think that the improvement is noticeable already. I can't wait to keep using this great piece of hardware, and see where it takes me. We've been working with 3DS Max, a 3D modelling program, for a good while now. I personally love its versatility and variety of uses, and lucky for me, we'll be using it all year. Recently, I've been working on a personal project, where I have taken a hand-drawn character concept, and am trying to make a printable 3D model of it. So far it's gone well. I've pulled up a reference image in the program, and have been working on blocking out where all the limbs and body parts go, making sure to keep the proportions consistent. I then moved onto adding in detailed armor and body parts, which I'm still working on. This part will probably take the longest, but it's also the most fun. I just get to sit back, and model out nice-looking pieces of armor. It's cool to see it all coming together, but I still have a long way to go. Hopefully, by the end of this little project of mine, I'll have a good-looking 3D-printable mini.
A little more than a year ago, I built my first PC, which I am now typing this blog post on. I had designed it to be able to play games, but not be overly expensive, and after a lot of deliberation and watching hardware reviews, I settled on the AMD Ryzen 3 2200G as my CPU. The driving force for this decision was it's affordability- It was less than a hundred dollars, but with that hundred dollars, you not only get a low-to-mid tier CPU, but a low-to-mid tier GPU as well. With the money I saved, I could use it as a starting point for upgrading the PC later. Looking back on how I got all the parts for christmas, my dad asking me a few weeks earlier "Are you sure you want this CPU?", I do wish I had gone for something like the Ryzen 5 or better. But, I can't complain- I saved a ton of money myself, thanks to my parents, and I have a perfectly fine PC, even with it's caveats.
First and foremost, I only used the CPU's integrated for a while before upgrading to a beefy graphics card- the RX 590 Red Devil. Even without that, the CPU can run games like Dark Souls 3, Enter the Gungeon, and even newer games like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice on middling settings. It may be slow, but it can still handle some big games, even Cave Story somehow, with all of it's intense graphics. But in all seriousness, the AMD Ryzen 3 CPU is a fine piece of hardware- I wouldn't be looking for an upgrade if it wasn't becoming outdated so quickly. A quick note to the one person out there reading this that's also looking to build their first PC- your first build doesn't need to be flashy or massive. It can be, but my tiny Ryzen 3 CPU has been doing just fine so far, and while it's not exactly a nine-core Intel Processor, it can play plenty of games just fine. |
AuthorHi! I'm Thomas MacDougall, a sophomore at DSA. Here you can check out my thoughts and recent activities. Please note that the views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools. Archives
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