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OrbWeaver

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Posts posted by OrbWeaver

  1. I don't see any fog. You must be a crazy, ectoplasm spewing medium, Sparhawk.

     

    I saw a TV documentary about "mediums" once, and there was once case where a medium had allowed photos to be taken of her during her performance. It was plain to see that the "ectoplasm" was in fact coarse cloth, with visible weave and everything.

  2. That is a shot from blender, but getting it into doom3 has proven very difficult. I have it now in doom3, but the silly thing is transluscent, and I really have no idea how one would texture it, but it is huge... Anyway if someone here could build the terrain easily, I could make the castle exterior, and obviously for a map like that you would have exterior separated from interior so it could truly be epic in scale...

     

    I wouldn't recommend trying to model the entire terrain as one huge object. The amount of overdraw will be phenomenal once you start adding lights, and there will be no occlusion or portalling possible.

     

    Best to draw out the basic spaces in Radiant and then start adding individual models or patches to make it look "natural".

  3. Life drawing will teach you about various muscle and tendon groups; what you can see through the skin in various poses and how the muscles bunch when compressed. Not to mention valuable observations of proportion, balance, etc. I would imagine most of those things are useful when modelling.

     

    Oh, that sort of life drawing.

     

    Yeah, that will definitely be useful for modelling characters etc.

  4. Life drawing helps a lot, because in most cases you want to have a clear image of what you want to model. I strarted to learn drawing a bit just because of that.

     

    Are you referring to drawing an idea you have in your head onto paper before modelling it? That is certainly valuable, but that is not what I understood by Domarius' reference to life drawing.

     

    Based on the few art classes I took a long time ago, life drawing is the technique of looking at a scene you have in front of you, such as a bowl of fruit, and rendering it onto paper. This is quite difficult for many people (including me), because you have to project your 3D view of the scene onto a 2D image, which requires you to disassociate yourself from the objects and symbols in the real-life scene and draw exactly what your eye sees, i.e. areas of colour, darkness and light.

     

    Modelling, by contrast, requires you to consider the 3D structure of the object and duplicate that, irrespective of how the particular view of the object appears to you, or how it is lit or shadowed.

  5. After that, getting a good likeness of anything is just art, so you should look for information on life drawing tutorials or something.

     

    I don't think life drawing techniques would help in 3D modelling. Two-dimensional drawing requires looking at things in a different way - seeing the lighting and shading and 2D shapes, so you can draw them on flat paper as you see them rather than as you think they should be.

     

    This is completely opposed to the technique of modelling, where you are working with 3D shapes with no reference to the 2D appearance.

  6. I read the entire Foundation trilogy in as many days, during a school holiday years ago. If you're not a sci-fi fan you probably won't enjoy it much though.

     

    I prefer to read rather than listen because I read very fast, and listening to a spoken word is much slower.

  7. As far as this or any experience, among all who can lay out a possible cause, those who experience it are usually the most qualified, and all are just speculation.

     

    That is absolutely incorrect. Personal experience is not authoritative as far as explaining the phenomenon goes, because human perception and memory is subjective and easily led astray. The only authority that comes from experience is that fact that you believe you had the experience, not that the experience had any particular cause or even that it was as you remember.

     

    What is SQA by the way?

  8. I wasn't aiming that passage of text at you personally Obscurus - only the people who ignored key details when giving their not-well-thought-out explanations, such as the part about his mum also being there and seeing exactly the same thing.

     

    I am not sure if you were referring to my post or not, but if you are, it was not meant to be an explanation, just an example of a logical error that forms one of many holes in common arguments about the paranormal (not specifically this one).

     

    The fact is that it is impossible to accurately state "we both saw exactly the same thing" unless the experiences were recorded independently. Key details do not override logical mistakes (unless the missing key detail was the fact that they did record their experiences independently).

  9. You can get animated models into Doom 3 from Blender (I did this with a swinging light) but it is a bit more complex. I suggest getting some simple test static models into the game before moving on to animations.

     

    Kat has a good tutorial on this over at Quake3bits - I can't remember the precise link but you should be able to find it in the Blender forum at Doom3World.

  10. You're forgetting that both he and his mother saw the same thing. What are the chances of them experiencing the exact same hallucination?

     

    Very slim. But we don't know they saw exactly the same thing, unless each of them individually described it in detail in a sealed envelope without any prior communication. As soon as people start talking to each other ("Hey Mum, can you see that light shining over there?"), suggestion comes into play and the witnesses are not independent.

     

    Scientific rigour is very important, if extraordinary phenomena are being postulated.

  11. here was no moonlight that night, we lived in the country and there are no outside street lights.

     

    Why was there no moonlight? Was it because the moon was not visible at that time of the month, or because it was a cloudy night (and can you be totally sure you remember)?

     

    If the moon was obscured by clouds, then a brief gap in the cloud could bring about the phenomenon you describe, especially if there was a small gap in the blind somewhere (there are a lot of windows in that room, you cannot be certain every single one was light-tight unless you are a photographer and regularly use it as a darkroom).

  12. I'm not sure why you all want to jump on the blender bandwagon, It's only good point is that it's free.

     

    That's a pretty strong good point for those of us who are unable or unwilling to shell out thousands of $CURRENCY for a professional tool.

     

    Also, as most professional artists do not use free tools such as Blender, your sample is biased in favour of the tools that are used by professionals, who are on average going to be better artists.

  13. Blender rocks. It's free, fast, small and more than capable of any D3-related task you might throw at it. It is also developed very rapidly and it is not uncommon to have major features (such as softbody dynamics) implemented during a single point release.

     

    It's UI also looks very slick if you use the Rounded theme rather than the default (especially with those semi-transparent menus).

  14. ok. But the main thing about this was that it almost doubles the age of the universe ;)

     

    Yep, that's one of the "some scientists" I mentioned...

     

    You are right though in essence, there is an awful lot we don't know about the origin of the universe, and "what came before?" is still an open question. There is plenty of room for the influence of god(s), if you were predisposed to believing in them, which makes me wonder why fundamentalists don't focus their attentions there rather than spouting drivel like "fossils were put there by Satan to test your faith" or whatever pseudo-argument they currently favour.

  15. Anyways, the most interesting thing so far is that the time of the big bang was proven to be false (not the theory mind, just the date). They aimed a telescope (dont know which one) into a dark part of the sky or whatever and found systems there. These systems are of course so far that their distance in relation to us proves them older then the big bang.

     

    The actual date has never been determined with specificity. It all depends on the Hubble constant, for which different cosmologists have different values. I think the generally-accepted range for the age of the universe is between 10 and 15 billion years, although some scientists may assert values outside of that range.

  16. The thing that amuses me about "souls", is that the soul is assumed to have all the same faculties of the physical body. It can see without any eyes, it can hear without any ears, and it can operate in the world without the physical abilities that we possess.

     

    In which case, what is the point of having a body at all?

  17. I'm not going to try and convince anyone that spirits or whatever you want to call them exist but I don't think it's fair to say something someone has experienced is complete crap.

     

    Nobody is saying the experiences are crap, they are saying the conclusions drawn from the experiences are crap.

     

    The witnessing of ghosts that you have described are (amongst other things) consistent with stimulation of the temporal lobe, such as by an electromagnetic source or internally through epilepsy. They can also be explained by self-suggestion or the intake of certain substances, intentionally or otherwise. Many experiments have been performed to successfully induce such experiences in test subjects.

     

    Assuming that any subjective experience is evidence of something strange or supernatural when there is a plethora of tested and well-understood phenomena that would produce that exact same experience is simply irrational.

  18. But why would he have a hinch against Voldermort? He didn't like the Malfoys, though.

     

    I'd be willing to bet that Borgin hated the Death Eaters for some reason or another - you could see that he wasn't exactly friends with them during Malfoy's exchange with him (when Malfoy apparently showed him the Dark Mark as a threat), and as sparhawk pointed out, Voldemort used to work in that shop so there is definitely history between them.

  19. With regard to the portrait, it is interesting that it is described as Dumbledore "slumbering" - unlike all of the other portraits which have animated active wizards in them, Dumbledore's appears to be a normal portrait, which could suggest that whatever condition is required has not in fact been met in his case.

     

    The Unbreakable Vow is also interesting because although one assumes that it was related to Malfoy killing Dumbledore, the precise task was never actually stated during the vow, it was just like "will you carry out the task he has been ordered to perform if he appears likely to fail", which could be just about anything.

     

    Either way, Rowling has left a lot of unanswered questions and open possibilities for almost anything to happen in the final book.

  20. I think that Snape is still good, and that Dumbledore is not dead. There are a number of aspects to the ending with which I am suspicious.

     

    * At no point does Snape fire any curses or hexes at any of the good guys, even though he is a very competent wizard who would have been able to take out most of the children single-handedly. When a Death Eater attempts to perform Cruciatus on Harry, Snape stops them with the excuse "Harry belongs to the Dark Lord, we are to leave him". Even when Harry is attacking Snape, Snape only blocks the curses, he does not return them.

    * Dumbledore says some very strange stuff when drinking the evil potion ("I know I did wrong, please don't hurt them" etc.). He does not explain to Harry what the potion was or what effect it actually had on him. I suspect that drinking the potion caused something "evil" to enter Dumbledore, and Snape actually "killed" the evil thing rather than Dumbledore himself (eariler on in the book we are told that Avada Kedavra does no harm to the physical body).

    * During Dumbledore's "funeral", the magic flames "rise up to obscure the body", and then a large tomb appears. Dumbledore's body is never actually seen to be destroyed. During the funeral Harry thinks he sees a phoenix rise up into the sky, which I am sure is significant (perhaps Dumbledore is an Animagus).

     

    One suggestion I heard was that Dumbledore also had a Horcrux, although I doubt this since it would seem to be against his character to have murdered somebody. I also think we will find that Dumbledore had a much better reason for trusting Snape than is given in the book.

  21. also, demigod has been working on some pretty nifty particle effects, so as a beta mapper you dont just have to map or whatever. im using some of his particles atm hehehe

     

    The division of labour in a mod (or even a full-blown game) like this has always interested me - for example, if a mapper has a need for a new model in his map, does he have to raise a request for a modeller to produce it, or can he just create one himself? I remember oDDity saying that they have loads of modellers but not enough skinners, which I find surprising since to me creating the model and its associated texture are one and the same process.

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