Exciting Things from Gaming News

Just last week I posted a He-Man game model I recently finished. In a nicely-timed coincidence, I learned the existence of this game today:



It is called Toy Soldiers. (Let me clarify that I have nothing to do with this game.) Listening to the cheesy He-Man lines made me smile :\
More info in this Kotaku article.
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I used to be excited about video games. There was a period of time I thought I would work in a game company. With time and work experience, I changed. I was, and still am, convinced that what I really like is animation and story-telling, not games.

Games are complicated. Some games, such as Chrono Trigger and Terranigma, captivated me with their stories, music, and atmosphere. Other games, such as Sonic The Hedgehog 3, captivated me because of a fun game play, large stages, and great music.
I was lucky enough to grow up more or less in parallel with the game industry. The side effect was that I realize whatever factor I found fun in a game would be irrelevant in the "next generation" of games. To illustrate, I cannot honestly recommend Chrono Trigger and Terranigma to people to play now. They were fun for their time; they were fresh when they came out. Now they feel tedious to play.

The same thing applies to Sonic. I used to like Sonic games. I played Sonic 3, Sonic 1, Sonic 2, and Sonic & Knuckles. For a period I drew nothing but Sonic. A few years ago, probably around 2008, I revisited Sonic by playing Sonic Rush. Similar formula, so in theory I should like the game. I was puzzled to find the game tedious. Since then, at the back of my mind, I wondered what changed.

Today, I found this rather in-depth video about suggestions on how to redesign Sonic games. It is called "DEAR SEGA // Sonic Re-design."
(I link the video instead of embedding it with the hope that you will go there and leave a comment.)
I found the video answered some of my questions. It made me excited about games. I think great games do not have to push the innovation envelope; in fact, such games will probably feel tedious in a few years. Great games should respect the gamer and give an experience mixed with unexpected touches (instead of giving the same experience only with new levels).

The Passing of Mr Lee Kuan Yew

Mr Lee Kuan Yew passed away on Monday morning, 23 March 2015. The last three days have been internally confusing. I wanted to express my gratitude towards this great man, but I did not know how. Today I decided that I should at least share articles that formulate in words what I feel about him.

Mr Lee Kuan Yew's lawyer, Davinder Singh, remembers the man

Here is a quotation from the article that I personally feel important.

"My father immediately stood up when it was announced that Mr Lee had arrived, even though he must have known that, standing so far away in the midst of hundreds of parents and cadets, Mr Lee would not have been able to see him. After he stood up, others from all races followed. It was then that I truly realised what this Chinese man meant to my Punjabi father who was not even born in Singapore."
"It were these spontaneous reactions from migrants, who had seen what life was like in their home countries and now felt protected by a man they completed trusted, that made me pause and think."

The text in italics expresses my personal feeling about Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore.

Critics call Singapore an autocracy. But I never felt more free than when I lived there.

Personally important quotation:

But in the coverage that followed the death of Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew on Monday, Western media has painted a very different picture. They describe a crushing autocrat that chained his people and stripped them of basic freedoms. My experience was quite the contrary. Outside of this tiny island utopia, I never felt more free.

Again, the text in italics formulates my feeling.

Beyond foreign leaders, international brands join in to pay tribute to LKY

Closer to my present occupation, this article was a surprise find. Perhaps I underestimated Singapore's gravity as an economic destination.

On Wednesday evening I went to the tribute site at Jurong East, just behind JCube. I have two anecdotes that I feel worth sharing.

• I saw Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam and Ms Halimah Yacob there. To my surprise, they said "Thank you for coming." I thought it was I who should be thankful to have a tribute site arranged near where I live.
• I saw a young father, around my age, with his young daughter, probably younger than Primary 1 age. He softly said to his daughter, "Let's give respect and then we go home." It brought so many thoughts, memory, and feelings to me. I start to understand that we all try to introduce some understanding about the past to the next generation, "to link the far past with the far future."

Rest in peace, Mr Lee Kuan Yew. Thank you for enabling Singapore to be what it is today.

Parallels of the Planets of the Apes

Recently my wife and I watched Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014). We found it good enough, that I suggested that we watch first film, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). Watching the two films near enough to each other enabled us to see some interesting parallels between them.

(Spoiler alert. If you do not want to be spoiled, please stop reading here.)




















Both films start with a group hunting another group.

• In Rise, human hunted apes.
• In Dawn, apes hunted... other animals.
• Perhaps this parallel tries to tell us how far the apes advanced.

Both films put a (school?) bus as a significant piece in human versus apes battle.

• In Rise, the apes pushed a bus to shield them from human machine guns.
• In Dawn, the apes loyal to Caesar were imprisoned in a bus.
• I do not know if this is intentional. If it is, why a bus? If you have an insight, please comment below. I will be happy to know.

Both films have a scene in which an ape rode a horse.

Both films have a sense of dread throughout. My wife and I agreed that somehow the films makes us dread the bad thing that will happen in the climax.

Overall, though, we thought Rise was more fun to watch than Dawn.

(Edit on 10 Feb 2015)

In both films the "villain" character fell (to his death?).
My wife pointed out an interesting observation related to this:

• In Rise, Koba pushed the villain character.
• In Dawn, it is Koba who fell.

It struck me as a poetic way to show Koba's character arc. Further, it revealed this to me:

• In Rise, Caesar was not willing to do the pushing/killing. He let Koba do this.
• In Dawn, Caesar accepted that he needed to do the killing. So, he let Koba fall.

What a way to design parallel scenes to show arcs of the two major characters.

Jogging Log for 18 Feb 2014

I was curious to explore a route to get to the old train station. It did not feel that far...

 

Why G.I. Joe fits Chinese New Year

Sunday, 2 February 2014, was the second day of Chinese New Year and Channel 5, one of Singapore's TV stations, aired G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra as a "Chinese New Year special." On the surface, it looked like a simple coincidence. After the film ended, though, my eyes went wide with realization. G.I. Joe has an abundant of characters (quite a few even have flashbacks); it also has an abundant of cool things for audience to see. The last scene in the film perfectly captures these. The film is about abundance, one of the traditional things related to Chinese New Year.
Now I know why G.I. Joe fits Chinese New Year (and knowing is half the battle).

Jogging Log for 27 Jan 2014

Today I jogged with David Liew, Gareth, Patrick Woo, and Winston. Here is our route:

We ran 4.5 km!? How did that happen?

Sufficient is enough

After one year of no post, I am posting a silly post.

Chinese New Year (CNY) is coming soon, so there are quite a number of CNY-related ads appearing on MRT stations. This morning I saw one that said "Happiness and Abundance." At that moment, I realized the Answer to why a lot of people were unhappy: abundance (or at least wanting abundance). I thought the ad should have said "Happiness and Having Sufficient"; but then I realized it wouldn't have been traditional and perhaps CNY is about tradition. So I walked on.

In conclusion, a few hours later, a blog that had no new posts for a year finally got one. And that's both an abundance (relatively speaking) and sufficient (for now).

By the way, if you happen to be one of the students in my VFX class, please have a look at these photos. Looks like an idea to execute using green screen, don't you think?

Bruce Willis Bust - Beauty Render

I finally finished the beauty render for the Bruce Willis bust.

Rendered using 3ds Max Mental Ray and composited using Nuke.

A lot of thank yous to these people who helped me to get this render done:

• Dmitry Gaborak for the ZBrush class & feedback,
• Jose Cua for pushing me to get Bruce Willis likeness,
• David Liew for sculpting advice,
• Giovi Lee for pointing out that some eyelid detail was missing (it led me realizing that the strongest fill light should be above the model),
• Patrick Lim for advice with SSS,
• and Wu Liu Shao for pointing out to me that a class is a golden opportunity to finish something good I can be proud of.

Thanks everyone :)

Bruce Willis Bust - part 2

I finished sculpting and texturing the model. Here are a few ZBrush renders (the eyes are temporary).

Sculpt only

Sculpt with displacement map

Sculpt with displacement & diffuse maps

Next, I am going to bring the model into 3ds Max, add a proper eye mesh, set up a SSS (sub-surface scattering) material, and finally have my beauty render.

Bruce Willis Bust

Right now I am working on a Bruce Willis bust for the ZBrush class I am attending at CG Protege. The bust is the project at the end of the class, so I want to create something decent for my portfolio. Here is the sculpt render at more or less final state (click for a larger image).

The (more or less) final sculpt

I am rather happy with the model; I think I get some degree of resemblance. I spent around a month on the model, most of it spent tweaking details. Here is a series of snapshots of my process.

I (and all other students in the class) started with creating a base model in 3ds Max. I personally found this step the most uncomfortable step mainly because I had so many questions unanswered, such as:

• How square do the polygons need to be?
• What is the polygon count I am going for?
• What topology is good for sculpting? I cannot imagine a head model without a point shared by 5 polygons (instead of the ideal a point shared by exactly 4 polygons).

Perhaps this is what classes are for: just going in with best guesses and came out of the process with better guesses. So here is my base model.

The base model

After sculpting on the base model, I find there are too many polygons on the model. I learned that the base model should be fast and easy to modify, so it should have low polygon count.

Topology-wise, I find the mouth problematic. There are too many polygons at the end of the lips (where the upper & lower lips meet) that I needed to spend time redistributing polygons while sculpting.

Another minor point is having a simpler topology for the ears. I thought topology will guide me during sculpting (which may be true for other people), but I ended up fighting the very topology I spent time creating.

The first draft

I spent a week sculpting the first draft. Dmitry, the class instructor, pointed out that the resemblance was weak. It was hard to accept his feedback (myself at fault here); I needed a night to cool down. The three quarters view (the second one from the left on the image above), having the least "Bruce Willis" feel, helped me to convince myself that I could improve the model.

The second draft

A week later I had this second draft. (I was also working on the texture in parallel.) I basically toughen up the look:

• I made the muscles in the cheek look as if he is grinding his teeth.
• Skull shape is now more squarish.
• Neck is wider; the clavicle bones are more defined.
• The brow is stronger/thicker.

At this point, I think I was concentrating to get specific angles right that I actually hurt the overall look. I got frustrated because the three-quarters view just did not get better.

In a coincidence, Jose, the drawing & design instructor at CG Protege (also a colleague of mine at Tiny Island, so I got to know him from going to lunch together), dropped by and helped me with more feedback, mainly on the ways Bruce Willis head breaks the rule of ideal proportions, such as:

• His eyes are wide horizontally. If we draw a vertical line from the inner end of his eyes down towards the nose, the line ends up inside the nose rather than just touching the edge of the nose.
• His lip line is rather low from the bottom of the nose; around halfway between the bottom of the nose and the bottom of the jaw.
• His upper lip is very, very thin from front view.
• His forehead is especially large.

Jose also remarked that I over-detailed the jaw. While simplifying the jaw, I noticed that on side view, the lips end rather far into the head, around vertically down from where the eyes end. This fixed my three-quarters view problem and I was happy. (The moral of the story is to get to know people by going to lunch with them so they tell you how to fix your model :))

Right now I am fixing my texture because I realized rather late into the process that I put the eyebrows too high. I will post the update soon.

VFX Videos

I think it is high time for me to post some VFX videos in this blog. For the moment, I have only videos I created for student exercise when I was a part-time Basic VFX instructor at CG Protege.

First, a video to demonstrate material and volume light animation:

My goal with this video was to test the students' understanding of material. Rather than just giving them a simple material exercise, I threw in volume light to get them off balance a little (which seems to happen a lot to me in production). Elements in the video:

1. Animated procedural texture,
2. Animated volume light.

The video was rendered using 3ds Max scanline renderer without any compositing. The reason being the class had not reached compositing yet.

Second, a video that combines almost all elements introduced in the class:
At the time I created this video, the students were about to go through their first project. I intended this exercise to help them prepare for the project. Here are the elements in the video:

1. A simple geometry with animated texture for the energy bullet,
2. Particle system for the debris,
3. Light pass & volume light look & timing,
4. Extra texture for the block for the hit mark.

This video was also rendered using 3ds Max scanline renderer with no compositing. The glow on the energy bullet was done using 3ds Max's render effect.

I will post more videos (hopefully from Dream Defenders) soon.

ZBrush Practice: Simple Head

Apologies for neglecting to post my progress with the ZBrush sculpting class I am attending. The class is conducted by Dmitry Gaborak at CG Protege; the goal of the class is to eventually model a full body human character. For now, the classes focus on the human head.

After studying the human skull, the class continued with simple head. So why start with the skull rather than going straight to a simple head? Because by starting with the skull, we are forced to see the structure of the skull and see which bones contribute to the shape of the head.

I personally found starting with the skull very helpful. I have studied the human head for drawing a lot of times, and I sort of memorized the shape of the head. What I missed is perhaps the understanding of the shape of the skull.

Figure 1. Simple head sculpted during class

Figure 1 shows the model I sculpted during class. I took around 2 hours (I did not note down the time). We started with a polysphere (a rounded cube), applying DynaMesh when necessary.

Dmitry made us follow a selection of steps presented in Burne Hogarth's Drawing the Human Head book. The first step is really simple, basically a round shape for the cranium and a box for the jaw. I thought it was too simple and in some ways negated our exercise with the skull in the previous class; but I was surprised to find myself struggling a lot with the first step. As figure 1 shows, I could not get the shape of the top and back part of the skull right.

When it became clear to me that the class was really going through a series of simplifications which got more and more complex with each step, I could not salvage the model I worked on. I decided that I would follow through with what I got and would revisit the steps on my own after class.

Figure 2. Simple head sculpted after class

Figure 2 shows the outcome. Again, I did not note down that time I took, but it was extremely long. I started from a polysphere, taking my time to get shape and proportions right. It is worth noting Dmitry's tip for this class: check the shape of the eye socket from three quarter views, both the front (second from the left on figure 2) and the back (right most on figure 2). I personally check these views myself because they are the angles I often draw.

Figure 3. Simple head with eyelids

I then added simple eyelids and nostrils to the model. The result is figure 3.

So, here are points I concluded from this exercise:

• At the back, the boundary between the bottom of the skull and the top of the neck is vertically around half way the head's height. (This is roughly the same height as the base of the nose.)
• The bone that frames an eye is a landmark. (By landmark, I mean a prominent shape that serves as am important guide to get proportions right. I got this term from a life drawing class at CG Protege. I do not know if this is a generally accepted term in drawing & sculpting.)
• The cheek bone is another landmark.
• The nasal bridge is a potential landmark. In some cases it is not important; in others it means a lot.
• Going front to back, the head is the widest around where the ear is. The face is narrower in comparison.

In addition, this exercise convinced me to take the time to go through whatever the class went through at least one more time on my own. I guess repetition is a part of exercise :)

ZBrush Practice: Human Skull

I am attending a ZBrush sculpting class conducted by Dmitry Gaborak at CG Protege. The goal of the class is to sculpt a full-body character. As a starter, though, the class concentrates on the human head first.

Last week's lesson was about the human skull. Dmitry gave us a series of skull turn-table images as reference and we sculpt the skull from a polysphere (basically a rounded cube). We began by sculpting the major shapes, then used ZBrush's DynaMesh to get a better topology. After that it's up to us to sculpt the details.

I spent around 3 extra hours at home to continue working on my skull model. It turned out rather well, so I am posting it here.

The model is still relatively coarse, as you can see on the teeth. Also, the cheek bone shape is still off (I cannot yet spot what is off right now, I'm hoping I can see it with fresh eyes later).

Dreams Come True

That's the name of a band this post is about.

I bumped into them from a thread at OCRemix forum. The bassist, Masato Nakamura, composed the music for the games Sonic the Hedgehog 1 & 2 for Sega Genesis.

I guess he took short melodies from tunes he had in mind and expanded them to be the music for the Sonic games. However, the song linked from the OCRemix forum, called Sweet Sweet Sweet, sounds almost the same (if not exactly the same) as the ending for Sonic 2. I happened to play Sonic games a lot, so listening to the song felt like something major to me. A new piece related to my past. The song got me teary-eyed a little. Just a little!

2012 Update

After more than a year of hiatus, I decided it is time to resume writing for this blog.

There are many reasons to this. Work schedule finally stabilizes so I can allocate time for my interest outside work. I had a magical holiday week with my family so I felt the urge to resume writing down my thoughts. I helped a little with a social network marketing at work (please visit the Dream Defenders blog & Facebook page). Plus, Patrick started working at CG Protege and rekindled my interest in group projects.

So, an update is in order. I am now working as a VFX (visual effects) artist at Tiny Island Productions. Last year (and a little portion of this year) I was involved in the production for a Ben 10 tv film, Destroy All Aliens (the film in turn gave me a page at IMDB). Now we are working on Tiny Island's original series, Dream Defenders. In addition, I am helping out with VFX class at CG Protege (our school next door to our production studio).

Being a class instructor gave me the opportunity to explore things outside the usual things I do during production. Even when the class is about a simulation tool I use at work (FumeFX, for example), I can try out values and parameters that I had never paid attention to before. It has that boundary feel between experimentation and repeating steps I am familiar with. Sometimes trying reveals something completely new; though most of the times it turns out less than spectacular :p

So, here I am. I plan to write my thoughts about VFX work for animation. Soon. Maybe. If we are lucky.

Iguana Model

I finally finished 2 models last month. I am posting the first one here. It is a small model of iguana head. I worked on it for a class on modeling using a software called Mudbox.

I must admit that I have not heard about Mudbox before the class. With Mudbox, we sculpt instead of model. At first I found the process awkward, but after a while I started to enjoy sculpting. For the purpose of this class, we were basically encouraged to go overboard with details on our model (with the hope that we learn more about sculpting that way), so small models were encouraged. The modeling process is more or less illustrated in the following image.

Basically we used Mudbox to sculpt details on our models and then create a displacement map. Next, we applied the displacement map to a base model using 3ds max and then (after setting up lights) rendered the output images.

I am quite happy with this model even though I am not fully satisfied with the diffuse map. However, with my current skills, I do not know what I can do to improve it :p Anyway, here are more renders.

Here is one thing I learned while working on this model. With Mudbox 2011, exporting a Mudbox model to an OBJ file behaves in a way I did not expect. It creates 1 OBJ file; however, the OBJ file has multiple models at the same position. (I have not yet tested if the multiple models are from sculpt layers in the Mudbox file or from the sculpt levels.) I expected that I would get 1 model that has merged details from all sculpt layers. Still, this unexpected behavior can be easily fixed by opening the resulting OBJ file and then deleting models that does not have the merged details.

On 3D Modeling

It has been a long time since my last post, so allow me a quick, unpolished post this time.

I have been learning how to create 3D models the last 10 months. Here are what I learned from my modeling lessons.

• Modeling is basically putting vertices on 3D space in such a manner (for example, 2 vertices are connected to form an edge, 3 or more edges form a polygon) that the computer can create an image that we can recognize as objects.
• Polygon modeling using 3ds Max, to me, means defining edge loops at points important to define a shape; then let the computer interpolate the area in-between (using the TurboSmooth modifier). As a computer science graduate, I see this style of modeling as a way to selectively add details.
• Modeling using Mudbox begins with defining a basic shape (called the base model). Vertices on the base model should be spread as uniformly as possible; equivalently, quads on the base model should be as close as possible to a square. Next, we sub-divide the base model and add details by pulling out or pushing in vertices. As a computer science graduate, I feel this style of modeling reminiscent to brute-force algorithms. We rely on the computer hardware to handle the large amount of data generated as we keep sub-dividing the base model in order to add finer and finer details.

I found myself agreeing a friend when he said that modeling using Mudbox is just using a fancy FFD (Free Form Deformation). However, further use convinces me that the tools provided by Mudbox are much more powerful than FFD. The difference among the tools are subtle enough to fool me into thinking that sticking to one tool is enough. They, however, serve different purposes and are useful on different scenarios/problems.

All in all, I find modeling using Mudbox much closer to drawing. I can concentrate on getting proportions right, enhancing shapes, and other high-level thinking instead of worrying about the topology of the model.

Comparing Stereotypes

I made an interesting observation recently. It is about Lyo and Merly, the mascots for the recent 2010 Youth Olympic Games.

The setting was a chaotic but warm family gathering, with many adults and 3 children. The TV was on, and Lyo and Merly made a brief appearance. Someone asked, "Which one is Lyo and which one is Merly?" Another replied, "Usually blue is boy, what. So blue should be Lyo and red should be Merly."

I instantaneously thought, "Hey, that's a wrong stereotype!" I was using the Power Rangers stereotype in colour scheme. Red is always the main guy; blue is one of the sidekicks, who is sometimes a girl (especially if the blue is close to cyan, like Merly's colour).

The next moment, I questioned my own thought, "Why is that wrong? After all, the boy is usually given the color blue and the girl pink, a shade of red."

I find it interesting that 2 stereotypes I take for granted clash each other in a manner I never expected.

Vague Art Discussion #1: Rhythm

Now that I will be able to focus on arts (drawing and 3D modeling), I decided to start a series of blog posts in which I write my thoughts about what I learn in drawing and modeling. I'll call this series "Vague Art Discussion" because art discussions feel vague to me most of the time.

Rhythm
Last year, while my sketch group was working on our doujin artbook, I tried reading the book Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators by Michael D. Mattesi, but I could not understand it at all. Recently, the book was recommended for reading by Dom, one of our life drawing instructors. So I am trying to read the book again now, with an additional motivation to make sense of what it says. I still don't understand most of what the book says; it uses many terms that I just cannot understand: "directional force", "applied force", and "rhythm".
(This only reinforces my opinion that art discussions are vague most of the time.)

I didn't pay much attention to the word "rhythm" when reading. It started to seem important in the next life drawing class, when Dom (casually) mentioned the word while demonstrating drawing a series of sketches to depict an action. It made me want to understand this concept.

Before proceeding, let me make it clear that what I write below are my attempt to understand what rhythm means in drawing. I could very well be completely wrong.

I personally interpret rhythm as the regular beat in music. It suggests the need for time. The best way I can define rhythm is "something similar that happens more-or-less regularly".

• "Something similar" because sometimes beat sound changes, yet I can still understand that rhythm continues.
• "Happens more-or-less regularly" because, again, sometimes the duration between 2 beats changes, yet I can still understand that the rhythm continues.

As I re-read the paragraphs about rhythm for the third time or so, suddenly it hit me that there is a time dimension in drawing.

• When drawing, I start from a position, go to another position, etc, with a pencil/charcoal. I know that I have a certain kind of speed when drawing a line; so I need a certain amount of time to draw a length of a line. Thus, drawing similar length of line takes me similar duration. This may explain the "more-or-less regular" part of rhythm description.
• Now I only need to draw something similar "more-or-less regularly" and perhaps I will have my rhythm!

The example given in the book is about drawing zigzag lines, with skiing downhill as analogy (on hindsight, perhaps my finding above should be straightforward after all), so it seems like I'm getting closer to understanding rhythm.

However, this is life; obviously the next wall comes hitting me in the face very soon after that: the moment I hold a pencil and tried to apply my understanding of rhythm when drawing. The examples given in the book were drawn by people who understand rhythm, so it is easy to see rhythm in these drawings. In life drawing class, however, I see a real life model. Suddenly I realize that I need to find rhythm as an imaginary overlay from a real model. Some poses make it easier to see rhythm than others; most of the time, though, I just cannot see a rhythm on a pose. So that's something I need to be working on, I guess.

NB: Anyone reading who understand rhythm, please feel free to leave a comment. Thanks!

Hierarchy

Recently, I see the concept hierarchy everywhere. I am attending a 3D modeling class, which includes a life drawing class; and at work I am coding an editor for a web application.

In life drawing, Andrew, one of my instructors, says "Go for the large shape first". I think it's easy to imagine that the same advice applies in 3D modeling. After all, both drawing and modeling are about defining shapes.

In programming, it is more difficult to see how Andrew's advice applies. Perhaps it helps to put programming activity in the context of a development project. A project has goals and time limit. Thus, it is sensible to go for the large items first. "Large" in this case I interpret as "essential" or "must have". Then, I progressively go for smaller and smaller items to refine the system's behavior as close to the ideal behavior as possible. I interpret "smaller items" as "non-essential goals" or "nice-to-have items" and "non-essential bug fixing".

I was uncomfortable with "non-essential bug fixing" at first because, as item#5 in the Joel Test suggests, fixing bugs should have higher priority than writing new code. However, in the tight deadlines I was in, it simply felt right that non-essential bugs should wait. Re-reading what Joel wrote, I think what's important is not a rigid "fix bugs first then write new codes" rule; but finding a compromise between implementing new items and fixing bugs in items already implemented.

Anyway, I thought it's interesting to see a parallel between drawing and programming process. Perhaps I see it only now because the life drawing classes forces me to draw in a very limited time (3-minute poses, 1-minute hands, 10-minute faces, etc).