Portable programs

I found something cool today and I'd like to share it with you guys. It's free.

I don't know if you know portable programs but the name is pretty self-explanatory. These are programs you can use without an installation process. This means you can carry them around in any data storage medium and use when needed.

I've had issues opening exotic format files in other prople's computers, or trying to open videos encoded with strange codecs and this makes these things a lot more interesting.

This website developed a system wich allows users to integrate those programs in an easy to use interface, which helps if you want to teach a computer newbie to use it. The basic platform lets you build your own little system and add or remove programs at your will, making it as heavy as you want it to be.

Honestly, after trying it for a while I thought I don't really need all that and just kept the executables I thought were useful. Bye platform but hellooo programs.

The programs I found are web browsers, internet messengers, image editing software, games (of course!), openoffice, media players with several codecs, file compressors, pdf readers and editors. There's also a portable version of Blender if you're interested. Here's some more.

It's pretty nice, I feel like I have a digital swiss army knife now!

Simple website, simple viewer

After researching I found the best solution for a simple website is to use something like Simpleviewer, a lightweight (17kb) flash gallery. It has its limits but there are ways to get over most of them. There's a free version and it works just fine.

Pros:
-Simple to use and customizable
-Good-looking transitions and loading animations
-Free

Cons:
-Doesn't take up more than 50 pictures per gallery
-You have to create the thumbnails manually

One of these days I'll have a gallery website made using it. So, for people who are looking for a quick way to have a gallery website online there you go. Hosts are an issue for another post, I still have to deal with that.

Now I have to keep on texturing. See ya!

ZApplink for lowpoly

I recently finished another model for my portfolio and while trying out some things I came up with something that helped me a lot and some of you guys might not know yet. It's not groundbreaking but it helped me to speed along the texturing part smoothly.

As some of you may know Zbrush has a plugin that allows you to project textures directly on your model (as long as you have layed out the UVs beforehand) and that is done using ZAppLink, which connects Zbrush to your image editing program of choice. Mine is Photoshop.

I was trying to use it to texture a fairly lowpoly model of a head (250 tris) but it was giving me some awful results that looked like a shattered mirror instead of a projected picture. It can give you a faint hint at some things but overall it is not that useful. That is because of the model's polygon density. What can you do when you get to this point? Logically you can subdivide your model until it has enough density, but what about ZBrush's pet hate of triangles and vertices with more than one edge connected to it?

Turn this...

Apparently the problem only rises if you want to change your geometry afterwards. In some cases it wrecks your model and that's why if you want to use Zbrush to actually sculpt it's mandatory that it's all in quads. This means you can bend one of Zbrush's main rules: "No triangles, just quads!" to your advantage.

...into this!

So subdivide your model until you have enough density (35.000 tris was more than enough on this case). Some of your model's definition will be lost because smoothing causes it to be a lot more rounded.You don't even have to save your subdivided, unaltered model. After all, the model you're texturing is the one you already had in the first place.

Of course there's a lot of work to do in Photoshop after this is done but hopefully it helps those who find it hard to start texturing. I used about six main projections and a couple of small ones for the whole head.

Good texturing!

(The reference pictures come from 3d.sk)

Demo or Die!

Well this may come as a shocking title if you don't know this sentence. It exists for almost every subculture so don't be offended by it. It just means demoscene is a pretty important thing for some people.

Anyway, free things are always welcome, right?

I recently found these DVDs called "Demo or Die!" and they are pretty good actually. It's basically a selection of demos captured in video that spans for five DVDs (so far, I bet bartman will make another one with the demos that were released in 2007 because some were astonishing). They are mainly PC demos. I would like some captures from other platforms because I don't have them. I know about emulators, though. It's not the same thing.

It's useful if you want to watch demos in a big screen or if you want to introduce someone to the scene. I recently downloaded all of them and the selection fits my taste almost perfectly.

...did I mention they're free to download?

Sincerity

In the past years I spent a bit of time in online forums. Those were enough to give me an idea of how they work and let me tell you this: it's rare to find an extremely sincere person and those guys have the most valuable opinions.

You will probably hate your first encounters with these guys because they are the ones who have the guts to tell you which parts of the works you show are wrong. They are the ones who notice the parts that could be better and point them out. They are likely to have a whole lot more experience than you and they know of the importance of their sincerity. If you understand what they have to say you'll get better quicker. Trust me.

Good comments made by friends feel awesome but they are not neutral comments because those people want to see you happy and they will always say it looks great. If you can take all these comments in a constructive way you'll grow to a point where you'll be sincere and people will hear you roar. And you'll be right.

3D Tutorials for Maya Beginners

As a Maya beginner I have been searching for tutorials on the several parts of making a 3D model for videogames. Lowpoly and highpoly, I have been reading about it all in order to have an idea of the whole process from sketch to game engine.

I recently formatted my PC and lost my bookmarks, but these are the best tutorials I have found so far:

3D Modeler's Network
Texturing by 3D Total
Maya UV mapping
UV 101 (highend 3D)
UV 101 continues
Continuity(NURBS Oriented but you'll understand why it's important)
Making models for Quake
Making a model for UT2004


As you can see from the list I am having a bit of trouble with the UVs and the best help I had so far were these videos from Youtube. You really can find everything there.

Video 1
Video 2