Siggraph Paper - Seperating Direct and Global Lighting In the Real World

A friend of mine passed me the URL to this paper that was presented at Siggraph. The paper is a discussion of comparing direct and global illumination taken from photographs, which probably isn't too interesting to many of you, but those of you who are 3D artists will appreciate all the pretty pictures that show the global and direct lighting ripped out of each sample image and compared on its own. It looks remarkably similar to the flat default lighting we get with our 3D applications :)

Edmonton's Fringe Festival is Back!

For those of you who do not know, the Edmonton Fringe Festival is a world class arts event that involves street performers, actors, magicians, comedians and all sorts of other interesting performing arts type people. The most amazing thing though is that all of the performers who come here actually do so on their own dollar, pay the event $600 bucks for a venue to setup shop and then collect 100% of the revenue that they bring in! It seems rather wierd but it works and has worked for 25 years, making this a well known and renowned world class even that is well worth taking in.

I have no clue who is performing this year, but I fully plan on taking in a few evenings and afternoons of the Fringe as it runs for the next few weeks in Edmonton's historic Whyte Avenue district.

IndieSuperstar.com Does a DH Lore Invasion Video Review

I had this awesome little google video posted to me today on IRC from a friend, he asked me "Did you see the video review of Lore?", which of course peeked my interest since I had never heard of it till now.

The video review comes from some cool bloggers called IndieSuperstar.com, whom I am sad to say I have never heard of till now because they do some pretty awesome work, and to be quite honest it fucking rules. These guys did a great job at making such a hilarious and enjoyable review of the game! Way to go guys!

Go check the video out for yourself.

Why Do Indies Always Want A Discount?

This is a personal pet peeve of mine, but there seems to be two camps when it comes to Independent Game Developers such as myself. There is the camp that makes due with what they got and utilizes the resources at their disposal, and there is the camp that constantly complains that they should be given a better deal on something because they are a low-budget, struggling Indie.

I don't know if its just something that society has started, blaming someone else for your problems or the rut that you are in, or just people being cheap with dreams bigger than their abilities can take them at this time, but why the hell should Indies be given a break?

Honestly.

I cannot give you a good reason. Not one single one. Why? Because to be brutally honest, it doesn't matter if you are an Indie or a funded AAA studio, you do what you can with what you have and no additional access to some tool that was outside of your reach will make your product any better.

It's all based on the talent that you and your team have and that is the most important thing that you can ever remember. It doesn't matter if you have access to the latest iD or Unreal engine or if you are using some open-source engine, it doesn't matter if you are using Blender or Maya, Max, Lightwave or XSI. If you lack the talent you will still fail, and if you have the talent you will succeed irregardless and be able to turn your investment in these tools or technologies into a profitable venture.

So to all you Indies out there take this as a word of advice. Quit wishing for something to happen, quit blaming the man for making the tools and technologies too expensive for your dream game, quit making excuses and just make a god dammed game already. Sure you will probably fail, but you learn from your mistakes and try again and eventually you will succeed.

Misc Updates - Part 2

This past weekend my Sister, Lindsay, finally got married. Her and her boyfriend, Sheldon, had been long engaged, coincidentally enough when they found out that she was pregnent ;)

Thankfully though this wedding was held locally so there was no need to do any long distance drives to the land of the orcs and back again. Instead the wedding was held outdoors in my parents yard.

As brother of the bride I had some pretty simple roles here. Help setup the chairs, get the music setup to be played, buy some extra liquor and other essentials, things like that.



The day before the wedding I had a few things to do, one of which was watching my nephew for a few hours while my sister was out doing some wedding things. Sadly the little guy didn't want to be departed and began to howl for an hour.



Things soon got better for Hawke though once he calmed down and realized that Ceili is about the right size, though definately not the right speed, for him to play with.



The wedding itself luckily went off without a hitch as we caught a break during 5 days of heavy rain to hold the ceremony although everyoen hid inside the tent just in case mother nature decided to be a cruel bitch.



Here Lindsay and Sheldon, now happily married, stroll down the isle of folding chairs as the ceremony wrapped up.



Little Hawke was the Ring Bearer for the wedding, sadly the little guy looked pretty confused all day long.

Misc Updates - Part 1

I have been a bit lazy and fell behind on making some updates to this site in regards to what is going on. As such here is the first of what will probably be many updates in the next few days with regards to comings and unfortunately goings.

These first couple of updates have to do with weddings, one of my good friends Dan & Heidi and the other of my sister. Let's start off with Dan & Heidi though since it was the first wedding of the season for me to attend...

Dan & Heidi had an outdoor wedding in a place called Morden, Manitoba. The town itself is a small farming community of about 5,000 people located about 100km south of Winnipeg and just barely above the US border to Minnesota. For the most part it is a nice quiet little town that you could mistake for any town from the US midwest (especially with all the US flags flying about).

I and my friends who attended had two options to head out to Morden for the wedding. Fly to Winnipeg for $600, rent a car and then hotel it (which would probably take about 8 hours out of our day) or save some cash and do a 14 hour road trip some 1600kms (thats 1000 miles to you Imperial people). We all voted on the road trip and as such Neil, Tim, Jeremie, Brad and myself hopped into a large cargo van and made our way out to Morden. Sadly though we couldn't remember the name of the place we were going until we started to call it Mordor (as in Lord of the Rings). The trip itself was fairly uneventful, we didn't hit any animals or kill anything and for the most part spent the time joking around or watching various movies and all of seaons 2 of Battlestar Galactica on the portable DVS players. (Note to Ronald Moore & the BSG cast, you have made one hell of a god dammed addictive TV show... Why do we have to wait till October 6th! Curse you!)

Arriving in Morden we were treated to a BBQ at Heidi's parents house and got to meet everyone from the friends and family out in Manitoba as we prepared for the wedding, which was to be held outdoors.



On the big day, things went fairly smoothly with only a few mishaps, such as the groom not styling his hair and as such his bride took some time out of her schedule to help him.



During the photoshoot, which preceeded the wedding, we found a baseball bat out in the gardens where the wedding was taking place. It was rather odd to find something like this out there but it made for an eventful photo opportunity none the less.



One of the joys of being in the wedding party, I was one of the groomsmen, is the fact that you don't have to help setup or take down things once you are dressed up. Sadly my friends could not say the same thing and were volunteered ahead of time to setup chairs.



The happy couple after the ceremony is all over and done with along with their wedding party.



Dan & Heidi made the mistake of making it an open and free bar. I am told the reason was that Heidi's family was fairly religious and did not drink and Dan's family is from out East and mostly could not be in attendance. Fortunately though we did our part to ensure that the liquor bill was used.

Here you can see Brad, who was so drunk when I took this picture he kept falling out of his chair (and yet was a dancing maniac), and Neil have had an exceptional time with the open bar, like the rest of us did. Sadly none of us felt too well the next morning and caused one hell of a ruckus when we got back to our hotel... but thats another story and someone else's camera with the photo evidence.



My friend Tim caught the garder. We figured that this was a good sign since we were trying to set him up with a particular girl all night long, but a garder was about as close as he got this night.



Lastly, here is a picture of Chad who was Dan's best man at the wedding. Chad was incredibly nevous, probably more so than Dan & Heidi at the wedding but did a darned good job at his duties.

Sadly Chad passed away last weekend due to some medical complications that he had been suffering through his whole life. So this is probably one of the last pictures taken of the guy and I figured well worth adding to the post to give him his dues.