Čtyřlístek - trailer

Here is latest trailer for 3d animated cell shaded movie from czech production Ctyrlistek, which in english means Quarterfoil. It is about 4 classic characters from old but well known (in Czech Republic) hand drawn kid comic book. Director of this movie is Michal Zabka, who has plenty of experience with making puppet animated characters for  short movies (winning on international festivals), TV commercials including Vodafone chamelleons and TV 3d animated series Prasatka, which means Little Pigs. This is his first full CG feature and third made by czech production. Previous two were Goat Story and Goat Story with Cheese from director Jan Tomanek with AAA Studio.
Ctyrlistek production is based in animation studio ALKAY, which did Prasatka as well as many TV commercials with 3d characters. I think choosing cell shaded look helped to make the production a bit cheaper and gain from the consistent look.
There is also another 3d character animation in czech production, which is called Nejmensi Slon na Svete (The Smallest Elephant in the World) made by Eallin Animation and co-produced by Czech TV.
Interesting to mention is that all these productions are using Maya pipeline.

Doom 4 on Steam beta

Apparently Doom 4 was added to Steam beta subscription database, according to PC GamesN. The Steam database entry which is probably Doom4 is here:
http://cdr.thebronasium.com/sub/2813

This could mean that the game is being probably tested on Steam. There are speculations that game could be close to being released. But how long that means is a question. Beta testing phase has no time limits and probably there would be some trailer few months before the release, which still did not happen. Also as Id Software just finished work on additional Doom 3 BFG levels and moved over programmers from their mobile game division (and effectively closing it) it rather sounds like they could spend another 6 months or maybe more on finishing all work, optimizing, fixing bugs, adding features based on feedback from beta testers and so on.

cleaner

great image, a bandit cleaning up. Maybe he just wanted to make a difference... :)
4th time playing Rage. Simply best looking shooter, best enemy response to being hit, gun shot fx, character movement, textures etc.

30 000

Wow, 30.000 views! I will raise a toast to this on friday. Thanks everyone for dropping by on this blog, it is really cool that so many visits have been here since I started sharing various cool stuff in 2008 (and stopped spamming my friends with emails, which I did originally).

Fabric Engine platform

Today I was at the presentation of Fabric Engine 3d Creation Platform and I was really impressed. So here are couple of notes:

It is a development and TD environment project which has its own 3d application GUI (so you can run something that creates window with perspective view and buttons which look like Maya or XSI). That application has its node editor and it is node network architecture. Quite similar to Houdini. The main difference is that this provides access for developpers to absolute core of the system. Also it is OS independent and its purpose is to provide platform to process and visualize 3d data for visual effects productions. This is focused on those productions who have their R'n'D staff and TDs. These really can benefit from such advanced tool and they actually spend lot of time writing such custom tools. But here is a system which provides very good base and a lot of ready-to-use code dedicated to this purpose.
The platform allows for example implement custom real time rendering engine with easy to change parameters, supporting multi-threading and both CPU and GPU operations. One of its main focuses is to be competitive in scalability and performance and the architecture is built for that.
Another example is deformers, which can be implemented and then interfaced into Maya, XSI or other applications or it can be performed inside Fabric Engine 3d application. It actually can take FBX, Alembic or OBJ geometry, process it and export back to the same format.
What is also good to notice is that most of the developpers of this software are originally from Autodesk, originally developping Softimage XSI. Here is the team background.


Creation Platform CAPI Deformer in Softimage from Fabric Engine on Vimeo.

FLA Airmech album release in 4 days

So the day of release of this special instrumental piece from Front Line Assembley is coming closer. Here are some snippets from each song already on Amazon. Also some songs are available at FLA soundcloud page. I must say it already sounds great, looking forward for the full length tracks. The atmosphere is mainly ambient with some low profile beats, as these tracks were mainly created for the AirMech gameplay background. Although I suppose the mixing was different for the album version focused on a song structure.
The full version of one of the songs - Stealth Airmech, can be heard inside the game during menu choices and settings.

AirMech launches open beta on Steam | VentureBeat

Mechs never looked so pretty as AirMech launches open beta on Steam | VentureBeat:

Here is nice article about AirMech, free to play Action Strategy game for PC and Chrome browser. Some interesting background info about how Carbon Games (makers of Airmech) were founded and their view on independent game making compared to big publishers: "We are proving that the old publisher model is broken. Six people in a room can make a game played by people all over the world" (James Green, Carbon Games co-founder). Also according to the this article, AirMech has to date 420.000 beta testers. That is pretty good for an indie strategy game!

And if you are playing AirMech, you might be interested that there will be Open Beta Tournament on 27.november!
The tourney will be live-streamed by McSploosh on twitch.tv

Doom 3 Lost Mission update

I made some update in the Progress To Hell album... managed to take some more creature screenshots as well.
The hell has actually lot of new assets/textures made. While Mars City levels seem like extension to existing Doom 3 Mars facilities, the Hell parts are more original.
There are some locations which don`t look as good, mainly some bigger open areas have problem with texture scale, unified lighting and contrast. It feels like the level designers handled the small corridors and locations much better. Or maybe this is also limit of the idTech4 engine and how this is adjusted for this game. It was made pretty much for Doom 3 metal shaded interiors, and that`s were it was tested.

Doom 3 black humour

take this ammo, I won`t need it...