The Matrix visual effects tests

Hi all! It's been ages since my last post (again). Can't tell much about my recent life though. Just wanted to share some experiments I've been doing with After Effects lately. I'll most likely post some more videos of my experiments in the future :)

PS: This year is The Matrix's 10th anniversary. Are you planning something about it?

Caelum news (at last!)

So, many of you are guessing what I'm spending my time after the exams period (which, by the way, went pretty fine, with the exception of a subject...).

Besides unleashing a lot of ideas I had in mind for pictures, I've got back to the Caelum development. The shaders are under a complete overhaul, and so far they look pretty well. Still want to refactor many things, to make it more physically real, but better to go slow but fine, don't you think? ;-)

Here's a shot I took a couple days ago of its current state. Hope you like it!

Art-rage again!

I've lately suffered another art rage. Call me jealous if you want, but watching a couple of classmates draw was the trigger I needed to start again developing an unstoppable urge to draw and paint like never before!

As a start, I had to do a painting I wanted to do for some time now, that is already uploaded to DeviantART, CGSociety, and PixelBrush. I'm reading like mad again the [pb] forums and CGTalk, and practising a lot. Thanks God I also find a lot of time to study for the coming exams :)

So I'll take advantage of this and create a new blog/community so that I (and other contributors, if they want) can post some tutorials, interviews, techniques and experiences. Any suggestions? :)

Indievelopment

I don't know if I've already told some of you about Indievelopment.

The idea is that the Gamespot crew is releasing a series of videos (most of them home-made) with the tribulations of Echelon, an independent game development studio. This is something like a video-journal, where you can see and hear what indie development is about.

Pure coolness :) I'm loving these series!!

PS: Requires free registration to download the chapters, but it's worth it ;)

DOF, parallax mapping, scripting and other proof-of-concepts

Probably many of you have been guessing what's sucking all my spare time lately. I can't tell you any details on the project I'm working on, though you'll eventually get all the info available.

However, to keep the masses calmed (well, the small group that actually spends some time reading this :-/), I'll tell you a bit of what you can see in these screens:
Well, first of all, sorry for the crappy images. I promise next time will look better ^__^'

Okay, onto the explanation. These last two weeks I've been working on the basic scene parsing. Right now, you can load scenarios from a script, containing static geometries and almost all the camera features. I'll release a video with the camera system working next time. Right now, it smartly switches cameras and adds some interesting effects such as rolling the camera, vertigo effect, and shaking :)
You probably have noticed the scene is blurry. That's Depth of field. Another effect I feel quite happy with. It kills quite framerate, but on high-end cards it does probably look impressive in many circumstances.
The last feature I want to talk today is that crappy material that makes you want to rip your eyes off. I've beaten my personal record spending 7 whole times getting it to work (yes, that means I was up and programming until 6am yesterday... today... whatever!!). That proof-of-concept applies an asphalt material to an object. The material self-applies the UV coordinates depending on the vertex world coordinates, and even shows cracks as required by an "age mask". Quite impressive to see, and even more if using parallax mapping with it as well! If you pay attention, you'll see the cracks looking like 3D even if it's just a simple polygon! This is likely to be redone, but I got it working (quite an achievement as I'm almost a novice when dealing with shaders!)

Well, that's how "my girlfriend" looks like...

Busy-ness

Just wanted you to know I'm pretty busy at this moment (that's why I'm not posting often here).

I finished my exams, and have some good expectations about them, but I'll wait until I've got the final qualifications to let you know.

However, I'm busier than before, because I've took back an old project I really want to see finished. Started it from zero this time, just to start developing it as a serious project deserves. As soon as I have some things working I'll post images/videos here so you understand why I'm this busy :P

As a sneak-peek, this is the result of a proof-of-concept shot after some research regarding fog:

Understand this project means a lot, and I want to tell such a lot of things through it... I simply want this to be done; it's one of my life goals!

More Caelum news

I've just read some extra shader auto parameters have been added to Eihort. For those of you who doesn't know yet, Caelum will support Eihort (Ogre 1.4.x) from now on. Some of these parameters will be extra useful for Caelum (for instance, in the layered clouds support).

Oh, now that I'm talking about layered clouds...

I've just installed a screen movie capturer for Linux, xvidcap, and thought that it would be nice to take a video of the clouds prototype in motion. I'm sorry for the mouse cursor and the sloppy animation. It performs pretty well, but the video was captured at 10 fps :(

Please, tell me what you think of the moving altocumulus :P