What have I been doing?

I have:

• started several small projects that died very quickly
  
• gone to school
  
• learned a bunch (not from school, though)
  
• made my first meager contributions to the Unify Community wiki
  
• learned a bit of ShaderLab and CG
• dabbled in C++
  

Most importantly, I also got a job! That's right, I will be working for Jeff at Visual Inspirations Inc for the next five months. I'm (obviously) very excited about this! Unfortunately, this means I won't be able to work on anything else, especially Off Roadin', for a while. I probably won't be posting here much, either.

See you then!

This is what happens when I'm bored

Long story short, I made a very rough draft of a format for storing 3D mesh info. This is the data for a single cube:

vertices [
0 [-1.0,-1.0,1.0]
1 [-1.0,1.0,1.0]
2 [1.0,1.0,1.0]
3 [1.0,-1.0,1.0]
4 [-1.0,-1.0,-1.0]
5 [-1.0,1.0,-1.0]
6 [1.0,1.0,-1.0]
7 [1.0,-1.0,-1.0]
]
object [
worldPosition [0,0,0]
face 0 [0,1,2,3]
face 1 [3,2,6,7]
face 2 [4,0,3,7]
face 3 [2,1,5,6]
face 4 [7,6,5,4]
face 5 [4,5,1,0]
]

Next step: write a simple importer/exporter!
Admittedly, this won't be very useful, but it was a very good learning experience, at least so far.

Tree Generator Started

On top of all of my other projects (a whopping 2!), I recently started working on a random tree generator tool, which will hopefully be standalone and export trees ready to use with Unity's terrain engine. My first not-so-hot tree was generated today:

More to come! (Hopefully)

Off Roadin' Alpha download available

It's here, what you've all been waiting for...

Download Off Roadin' Alpha now!

Now features:

- Dynamic Cloud generation and atmosphere simulator (thanks especially to Alpha-Loup, who designed the system)

- Basic engine sounds

- Many other small features and improvements

Enjoy,  and feel free to leave constructive criticism/give me money. (Please?)

Thanks,

Danny L.

Off Roadin' Alpha available *soon*

NOTE: Alpha now available. See above post.

Off Roadin' currently features:

- Interactive AI car control systems

- Dirt trail particle systems

- Functional menus

- Realistic physics - uses PhysX engine

- FPS counter

- Terrain made with Unity 3d terrain engine

- And much more!

Soon to come:

- Checkpoints

- Lap counters

- Graphical improvements

- And more!

Thank you!

Rendering is suddenly a lot more fun

I used Wings 3D to create car models for a long time. While I still prefer this to any other program I've seen so far, its rendering capabilities are awful. I was able to purchase Cheetah 3D recently, and I've been playing around with its raytracing features. I rendered this image of a model created in Wings:

- A Pagani Zonda F, probably my favorite car ever.

Looks like a lot of fun will be had over here.

Cheers,

Danny

School Sucks

The first school day of '08 is tomorrow.
That's messed up. The twelve days of Christmas aren't even over! I wanted to skip tomorrow and Friday and say it was against my religion to go to school because they were fast days... or something. I can't wait for summer vacation.

I especially wish school was less jumping through hoops and more relevant learning. As it is, most of my classes seem to be set up to punish every mistake of every student. Everything is hopelessly quantitized and numbered. There seems to be no room for abstract thought... but I suppose that's what blogs are for!

I also wish we got more than five minutes between classes. There is no way someone can walk between the farthest ends of the campus with a locker stop in the middle. Total BS.

In closing, Happy New Year.