Ray's Brainy Quote v0.3

Here's an update to my little sidebar application. (If this is the first time you hear about it, you get more info here. ;) ) The source where I get the quotes from has changed their website, so I had to fix the script a little bit. If you are still interested in using it, please download the update.

All you need to do is download it, unzip it and double click the file Ray's Brainy Quote.gadget. :)

download here
mirror

Snails in the dark

Another photography contest on 3dbuzz with the topic "night photograph". So I was thinking the other night, what animal could be "static" enough to take a picture of in the dark. So I got this idea that I would photograph a snail and because it would take such a long time for the camera to take the shot, the snail would look incredibly fast :-D Well see for yourself :

I spend quite a lot of time observing snails during last night and trying to find a good shot. I wanted to take a completely different photo but I found it very difficult to focus on a specific point in the picture because of the mode I had to use on my camera. So now I have lots of photographs of snails out of focus. Oh well. At least this one turned out quite ok.

Detail and context

I took part in another small photography contest over at 3DBuzz. This time the topic was two pictures put together. One being ta detail and the other putting in into context. Here are a few attempts for the contest.

Global Game Jam 2011 - I Love Kakapo

We have participated in the game development marathon this year where you have to create a computer game in 48 hours. It's a great success for me that we made it in time to a fun to play result. We used the XNA framework and created a simple 2D platformer with 3D graphics.
This year's topic was extinction and we got this great idea for a game:
It's about saving the Kakapo parrots from extinction. These lovely parrots which live in New Zealand have never had any natural predators and with evolution gradually degraded (lost their ability to fly, got fatter and so on...). One day a new predator was brought to the island where they live and nearly all of them were eradicated. Today there's only about 150 of them. What's more, when mating, the male sits somewhere in the forest and makes these deep sounds trying to attract a female. Sadly, because the frequency of the sound is so low, it's very hard to tell where is it coming from - therefore the female hardly ever finds him.

In our game you have to guide the female to her future partner. If you succeed you control the next generation of the kakapo in the next level which is slower and can't fly as well.

We didn't manage to implement everything we wanted in the game so we sat down a few days after the event and added some graphics, a better head's up display, 3D sound effects(yay!) and corrected some bugs to make the game complete.
A couple of screenshots here:





And here is a video of the final version.

You can download the one we managed to do in 48 hours here, on the Global Game Jam's website. And the updated version can be downloaded here.

A couple of night photographs from Brno

I've been trying to take a nice picture for a small contest at 3DBuzz.com with the topic Winter Wonderland. Since I have my tripod with me I decided to go for a night picture with lots of lights and a more saturated color. Here are a few photos I Took:

this one is an attempt for an HDR photograph:

Ray's Brainy Quote v0.2

A new version of my little gadget. I had to fix a problem with reloading the quotes. It didn't reload properly because of the windows sidebar cache. So that's fixed now and quotes are loading properly. I have also added a new version of both styles. It's smaller now and doesn't take so much space. (screenshots are below, you can choose it in the settings) Let me know what you think. :)

How to update?

- download the new version

- unzip

- double click it and choose replace old version :)

Download:

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3 (windows live gallery)

Ray's Brainy Quote

I like reading quotes and I find it quite neat to have one written on my desktop. A nice feature would be if it updated automatically once a day and if you could choose the topic of it.

So there I was looking for something which would be at least close to what I wanted and found many things I didn't like at all. There was no other way than to create my own little application.

I chose the website Brainy Quote as a source of quotes and wrote a simple but sufficient widget for the windows sidebar which display a nice quote every day. You can choose from four topics (love / nature / art / fun) or simply go for one without a specified topic. It wouldn't be me If I didn't draw the icons and created at least two styles you could choose from.

So here it is, version 0.1, if you'd like to try it, I'd be more than happy. All you have to do is download it, unzip it and double click it. Done. Here are some screenshots and links for download:

Download:

Link 1

Link 2

My demonic head is back! [dhead 5]

More than two years ago I started modelling my first humanoid head that I took seriously and wanted to finish it on my own with my own imagination without any references or intentional influences. Because of lack of time and interest I've abandoned this project a long time ago. However I would like to get back to 3D modelling and this old head of mine seems like a good starting point.

So here it is. I made the proportions more realistic (hopefully) and added details as well shaped many features of this face more nicely. To add a little bit of nostalgia I compiled a set of all the old updates to see how have I progressed so far. I'm planning to create a texture, normal map, add some lighting and maybe even animate it in the end. We'll see.

Braid

Today I bought this game because it really deserves it and I wanted to support it's developers at least a little bit. Even though I've finished it before a few moths it still looks as beautiful and well done to me as back than. In spite of how simple and short this game is it might actually be one of the best games I've ever played. It manages to create something very timeless with it's unique style, gorgeous painted graphics, great musical soundtrack and above all the game-play itself.

While playing it it really hit me how simple it is to play and control the character and at the same time one has to really think about what he's doing. This way there are no difficulties what so ever as far as game controls are concerned and the player can truly focus on the game it self. I know it sounds a little exaggerated for a game that needs only 5 buttons but still not many games are so accessible for anyone. There are many puzzles and the difficulty increases as you progress but each problem no matter how difficult may seem always has quite simple solution once you find the right way to think about it. A few times I had a really hard time trying to get one puzzle piece which you collect it the game and then found out I could've done it in a so much simpler way. If only I though about it a little before doing it. Finally on top of all that you even have a little story and a few paragraphs to read throughout the game which have some nice thoughts and give the experience an even more unique taste.

Even if you don't play computer games I absolutely recommend this one because it's all a game should be. Fun to play. Ease to master yet difficult to complete. Nice visuals and music which all go together very well . It even doesn't need too much time be played.

Bending the rules

It was December the 2nd in 1999 when a computer game came out. Five days later the same game was released for linux which was a very bold move since common people were usually quite angry about this operating system. 

It was and still is one of the games that create a concept and game play that doesn't age. As amazing as it is the graphics still have it's style and even with it's tiny polygon counts and limited resources look very well, even after so many years. Many people won't agree with me on this but I have to say that compared to much newer games this one managed to keep it's style and create a world that has it's looks based on ideas rather than effects and supreme graphics and details. Moreover it's focused mainly on the game play experience which is what counts the most when you actually play it.

On the other hand the game is highly repetitive, maps are strictly limited and usually very small. Basically if you look at it, it's just a stupid psychedelic hunt for killing each other in a very fast and frenetic way. I guess that one could say that an unbiased person would be finished with this game after a few minutes saying it's always the same thing.  No to mention blood and various body parts constantly flying everywhere.

For me and many other people it was just the thing. It was simple and yet hard to master, the rules straight forward yet using them to your advantage a whole different story. It didn't take long and it became a small cult. In a much shorter time than you'd expect some people started to be a little crazy about it. In some time ... more than just a little.

In every game people are trying to be the best what ever it takes.  Even find loopholes and use them to their advantage. There were flaws in this one. One particular bug in the code allowed the player to do extraordinary things. In any game this would be considered cheating but this "cheat" was very hard to master and only those crazy enough to study it to it's guts were able to perform these stunts and all this only with standard game control without any modification to the game. This started a phenomenon which spread to nearly every game at that time because it was something commonly used among the elite players. This cheat was very simple in principle but very hard to actually do that the developers decided to keep in in the game on purpose. 

The ability to be something more in the game just by learning the limits of the digital world created a myth of these god-like players who mastered the game like no usual being. We could compare it to the matrix in a sense that once you realized your ideas are unlimited but the world is, you can use it to your advantage. After this, pro gaming, clans, every day training and overall craziness really took off. It didn't take long and a certain community of people emerged. They could play only among each other because anyone else was too much of a n00b. After that it went on to a completely new level of madness when most of the people started memorizing every place and rule in the game being virtually unbeatable when played against in a map they knew well or in any map actually. This led to a new era when common people pretty much lost interest and these pros were the only ones playing the game.

After ten years the game has been re-released completely for free and with the comfort to play in your web browser. It was a huge step everyone thought, but that is a different story.

For these 10 years I have been playing this game. Sometimes frequently, other times not at all. But the wish for being someone who can do these stunts while playing was never granted to me. Until today. Today I have finally learned how to do a strafe jump and even a circle jump. All thanks to a tutorial which explained in detail how to do it. Even with the new release after 10 years the "cheat" is still there and even with an official walk-through on how to do it.

It looks silly and this article got really long but somehow this was surprisingly important to me. After ten years I could finally feel how it was to officially cheat and be admired for that.   

unofficial jumping tutorial

a typical demo compilation

Woot, got one comment!

Wow, this sudden impulse gave me some motivation to continue with this blog after a while. So again I'll try to post something regularly. Moreover I decided to start posting things that are somehow important to me instead of my creations and nothing else (which was the original purpose of this blog - don't post if you don't have anything nice to show). This means that this black and white place will get a little more personal. To be honest I don't really know whether that's a good thing or not. I guess I'm just afraid that it will slowly and inevitably turn into some chitty chatter about nothing ... pretty much like this last paragraph. :-D

The first attempten on a face

So hopefully it's recognizable. Minu herself says so but I'm not too sure. It's funny how much of a difference it makes when you move to drawing people. It requires incomparably more precision and the result never looks that good and by far not realistic. When compared to the duck for example it cost me more than 10 times the effort and while the duck was done very quickly doing just scribbles according to the photograph, it still looks quite "realistic" meaning that one doesn't question the details and just takes them fore granted. All of the feathers and the head... I guess that animals aren't too important for our brain after all. :-D

More animals

Well, a duck and a goat, what can I say? :-D

The fancy camel

The first thing I decided to draw after a while was a camel, because my friends call me that, the reason being me drinking too much.

The joy of quick drawing

It's not genuine, but still I add some style to it and make it more than just a copy. It's not great but still nice and very quickly done. I always liked simplified pictures and recently became fond of vector drawing using photographs as reference. To give you a little retrospective I'll show you a few that I did some years ago as a tryout and in the next posts I'll post a few recent pictures. ;)

The rest of the "green big mouth" animations

After all I had to redo the smashing animationg where our poor hero gets splattered with a flapper. Other than that I have two other new animations for you. :)

Don't forget to click the pictures to see the animations ;)

Lots of "green big mouth" animations

As mentioned before I've been working on the short animations for each of the pictures posted before. So here are six of them, 2 left. :)

Click the images below to see the animations. ;)

a quick sketchy start for a hairy face

Took my tablet today and tried to do something that would suggest an expression of a face or something close to it. After a few scribbles I got this bearded bace hith hair or fur on it's cheeks. It's just a start and I can already see a lot of mistakes in the proportions like the right eye for example, but I'll improve it. :)

blue cups, glasses and dishes all over the place

Sometimes I wonder whether I'd enjoy having a small shop with hand made pottery. I would just sit all day in the garden making dishes and painting them, enjoying the pleasant calmness and people that would come to my shop.....

Nah, that would be just silly, I bet I wouldn't be able to keep doing that longer than a few days in a row. Actually I wouldn't like that at all now that I think about it :-D

Well now that I have that figured out, I'll tty to get back on topic. So now and then I like to paint dished as you might have picked up and if you know me it's very possible that you already have a glass or a cup from me because it's something like an all purpose gift - everyone can use it, I like doing it and it's not very exxnpensive. Anyway I did another one today and realized that I never showed it to anybody except the people I give it to. So to keep my resolution to post something graphic I created every other week I went to the kitchen today and took a few pictures. If you have a minute I'd be pleased if you wrote what you think or told me whether you'd buy anything in my non existing pottery shop ;-).

more bigmouth pictures

As I said in the previous post there will be eight animations with our lovely Mr. Bigmouth. So here are the other 4 previews.