Wow, Ali just sent me this, amazing…

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vimeo Direkthttp://vimeo.com/4167288

So I was cleaning out my RIT CIAS server because of the move, and sumbled across this gem. A little over a year ago I took a MAYA class because I was bored. What better reason, no?

Here was le result:

I’m not usually up for high poly modeling, but this guy was pretty fun to make.

Well its that time again. Time to start lookin for one of those fancypants “jobs” everyone is goin on about. Who woulda thought that the trudge through the academic trenches would only take… 16 years? >.> Anyways, Its about time I got one of those new ‘portfolio sites’ up.

This guy is an early version of the Daedalus engine Matt Bruce, Andy Mindler and I are currently working on for that odd game project that involves booze, Forrest spirits and shitting on the world. Moving on, this project was to be both a portfolio site, as well as a proof of concept of the Daedalus engine.

I’m a big fan of making realtime 3D models in ye olde 3ds max. Its always been a side hobby, so I figured a portfolio site that exemplifies my strangeness, and love of the 3rd dimension would be perfect. I sat down and sketched up some digital paintings of what this guy could look like. Here’s what came of it after the all mighty Adam Smith had his way with my Brain:

So this would be the home view, the camera would pan down to see the avatar standing there and maybe he’d start talkin to ya in his (my) own little crass way.

Contact page, the avatar would kick he olde box, and some of those critters would come skuttlin out from underneath it like cockroaches. Others would pop out from inside the box and hold it up with their creepy leg things. They’d have these weird wings that flap super fast like humming birds. Strange, no?

Work page, the avatar would go and kick that old box yet again, and what do ya know… more weird ass critters would shoot out holding onto animated thumbnails of my work. I thought origonally that I would like to have short fullmotion video in there as thumbnails. I did that a while back for my folio site and I kinda liked the way it looked to have animated thumbnails.

My dicking around with papervision for both Jeep game, and the earth is Fckd had informed me that I was looking at about 2500~3000 triangles onscreen at once to perform ‘alright’ on most computers. ( the avatar model turned out to be just over 700 triangles.  ) This means that I would have to be super sparce with my polygon counts. To put this into perspective, a single Character model from say Half-Life 2 has around 5000 triangles in it. This is why 3d in flash sucks. No hardware acceleration. As much as I hate director, and god, I really hate director, the 3d power of shockwave wipes the poop deck with papervision, away3d, or ANY 3d library in flash for that matter. Seems that everyone forgot about all those neat 3D games back when shockwave was around.

After all was said and done, I had to scale back my ideas a bit. There were no critters holding up the contact page, and I could only have up to 3 items of work onscreen at once. Having any more than that severely hampered performance. The animated textures really take a baseball bat to the face of poor little papervision.

Any~ways, I was willing to bite the bullet to have 3D on the web. Flash is the way to go, because nobody likes to install browser plugins, and everyone has flash.

The biggest things I had to deal with when I went to actually build this thing was of course loading in all of the files for papervision to have its way with. I wound up writing a very robust loading engine that queues up all of the files from XML, loads em in one at a time, and associates the proper skins with the proper models. ( Im using the MD2 model format so I can pull in model animations, Woo ye olde Quake 2 format… Brings me back to the days when I made silly character models for unreal tournament and half-life… )

For the MD2 format to work, you have to have your texture loaded in, and put into a MaterialObject3D in papervision first. So the loader associates the skin and the Model based on some stuff and loads up the skin first, then slaps it on all associated models. For this engine, I decided to go with one MD2 file for each practical animation ( run, idle, kick, etc… ) to make it unbreakable. I noticed some trouble with picking up what ‘keyframe’ the animation was if the frame rate dropped, and it couldn’t render anything during that time.

( Yes yes, for this particular project, I didn’t implement a CPU clock system as the update call, I did wind up using the silly old enter frame )

Also on a side note, I was using the demo version of the export plugin for 3ds max, which only allows you to export 20 key frames in a sin gle model. Hey, im a RIT student (well, not for much longer, but still) I don’t have all the money.

Regardless, the multi-model system was decided to be the best way to go from here. So the loader wins yet again! It queues up all of those models and chugs through em one at a time. Hurrah.

After the loader problem was solved. It was a fairly simple matter of taking the Earth is Fckd engine that I had spent a full 10 weeks making and modifying it into something that was actually workable into this here 3d Site.

One frustrating side note, button mode doesn’t really work with either interactive materials rendered on 3d Objects or on 3d Objects with mouse interaction applied to them ( thanks papervision. ) so I had to throw some annoying code in there to handle that. So Enjoy those button modes kids! They made me want to pull my hair out at one point.

well Id post some snapshots of the real site, but why not just check it out for yourself! at my NEW AND FANCY media temple location: mroushey.com

Apparently one of my old teachers from high school posted this ancient gem. God, this thing has to be 5 or 6 years old by now. One of my friends just happened to come across it on youtube the other day. Enjoy ( and don’t worry if you start to giggle, its horrible. )

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so almost 30-weeks ago, ayaka Ito, Jared Dominell and myself embarked on the epic project that was to be called EcoHero. After all this time, its still under le development. We’re getting pretty damned close this time though. Just a comple comments on this guy for now. Ima have to make a horrificly long rant later…

But right now, im gonna talk about THEM PAINTINS I put together for EcoHero’s  intro and ending cutscenes.

We wanted to have some sort of ‘presentation’ in the beginning that would tell the story and setup the game for the user. ( The project consists of 4 minigames. ) The basic storyline is that you’re just chillin at home with your ladyfriend, when a pollution monster busts into town wreckin everythin in sight and steals your girl. You gotta then saev the girl, and save the world! AWESOME.

This image was the very first one to be painted, it was more or less a ‘proof of concept’ for the rest of em.

Here are just a few excerpts from the intro/ ending cutscenes to wet yer pallette while I prepare ‘the big-one’.

Interesting side note, the image above was the very last one I painted, turns out there were 28 paintings in the whole series including the intro, “good” ending, and “bad” ending. Turns out doin that many… takes a long time.   *_*

more on EcoHero later!

So Andy Minder, Matt Bruce and myself have been working on a project called “Apotheosis” formerly “The Rape of the Natural World” which we chose to, sorta leave as a subtitle, as designin a logo for somethin that long would be un-fun.

I’ve been workin on modifying the unfinished engine from “The earth is Fckd” project into something workable for this guy. Which shall we say is considerably more complicated. The team and I have come up with this new papervision-powered engine I wrote: the Daedalus Engine. oooOOoooOo.

So the basics of what im tryin to do here is to expand the engine made for my portfolio site into something that can accept ever expanding content. Andy has been churning out the content like a champ while Matt has been workin on the UI / hud / php-izzle ( for savin user accounts etc )

Essentially, we’re tryin to make it so all your hard-earned diablo-style grinding doesnt go to waste.

I’ve been doin some of those fancy 3d-models as well.

Avatar ( female version )

Emo Girl ( fast food store attendant )

Fats ( liquor store attendant )

Mail Box ( monster )

Cardboard Box ( monster )

TV ( monster )

The tech demo for the engine really isnt display-able yet, but its gettin close. I’ll post more about that later. Matt setup a blog for this guy at http://apotheosis.cias.rit.edu/wordpress/ enjoy.

So I took that fancypants particle thinger in the Virtual Entertainment post, and took’er a bit farther. Andrew Ford, a good ol buddy o mine Made this here song ‘chronos’ and it turned out pretty interesting. Music Visualization GO!

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So another one of those 10-week class projects came and went. ( It seems that I have many things to chronicle as I have just now gotten this heap of a [as much as I hate the word] blog up and running. ) My original plan was to make something fanciful in processing, but of course I really didn’t like the direction that project was heading in so I gave’er the chop. A wonderful way to eat up the first few weeks of that guy. While this was happening I was developing a cheeky game for release on the internets where you drive what I lovingly call JTS , or Jeep the Stampede. JTS was of course my first car, a trash heap of a 1995 jeep grand Cherokee with an exceptionally high market value of 600 dollars.

The idea for this game came to me in a disturbing, and not totally un-enjoyable dream that involved me hurtling down a street where I discover that my breaks do not work and wind up power-sliding into many unfortunate cancer ridden children while some disembodied voice shouts “they were so young” over and over. Needless to say, a game where you run over children in a jeep sounded like fun to me!

After I got that far, I had taken a look at that project, looked at my processing project, and decided that this would be a much more fun engine to work with.

I began to work on how I could take this engine and warp it into something that could work within the project’s guidelines. ( Make an informative site/ project about an environmental issue ) *cringe* Why do professors always toss those kinds of projects out. >.> s’gonna make me look like a tree huggin hippie when I graduate and look for a goddamned job. Also, we had two concurrent 10-week projects ABOUT THE SAME THING! Balls.

Anyways,  I my original plan was to make a full 3D game where you drive some manner of eco-friendly car around and shoot flower beams at a broken down city and blast them into submission. Some of the concepts included: a giant factory with legs and evil eyes that could stop on you:

<insert sketchbook images that I’m too lazy to scan>

Hookers that walked the street, that when blasted would turn into schoolteachers.

Trash monsters that would hop around and attempt to bite you. The list goes on, but I decided to evolve the idea a bit more.

Seeing as how I am a recovering Ragnarok Online addict, I wanted to make something that kinda felt like a Diablo / RO game. Where you are some dude in an isometric view that thwacks the shit out of tons of baddies. So I came to the final incarnation of this game:  the Earth is Fckd

The general outline of the original idea for TEF is that you play a mild mannered middle class office worker armed with a baseball bat that is given the task of beating the shit out of the unsuspecting trash monsters throughout the world.

This task is given to you by old, senile and totally crass earth.

I wanted the earth’s dialogue to be as harsh and terrible as possible to exaggerate my extreme indifference towards these environmental topics. The quarter came to an end, and In accordance with my personality the project was waaay to over ambitious. This was as far as I got. As depressing as that is.

Controls are really simple: Just use the mouse. Click around to move like Diablo, and click on something to kill it.

After getting a particularly harsh grade and enduring some rather unpleasant events, I am currently trying to finagle my way into completing this here project for another class. I’ve brought my buddy Andy Mindler on as a writer, artist, and secondary developer. His retarded disposition and incredible ability to weave epic nonsensical stories has also proven helpful. He’s going to be spending the next 6 weeks on planning out the art direction and story. We sat down and brainstormed out a new storyline and let me say it certainly is… well we’re not sure what it is but its crude and lude in all the right places.

More updates as we work more on this guy. Should be a project to remember.

I worked for Dumbwaiter Design for the last two summers, and let me say, DW rocks. The last thing I’ve done for them was develop this guy. The ZZZ site was really fun to work on. Dumbwaiter spent most of the summer working on their internal makeover, this was one of the sites that they made to showcase their services.

Since there was no client, we had complete creative control. My buddy Kevin and I were in charge of making this site happen. Kevin made a fancypants design, and I was lead developer. My boss Miguel gave me a hand with the final tweaks.  He is more or less always obsessed with performance and optimization. I did use DW’s proprietary video player which he developed too. I had complete control over the game too. That was quite fun as I do so enjoy makin thems video games.

The best part of this site, is that it keeps popping up on showcase sites. Ive seen it at quite a few now. A definate ego boost. ZZZ For the win.

So I sat down bright and early in the afternoon in this class called Virtual Entertainment. Being that I am irresponsible, I had not read the course description, but I had assumed that it had something to do with creating games n’ the like. Much to my surprise, it was a class geared towards experimentation, leaning more towards generative art, and all things processing.

I set out to make some fancypants generative art for my first project. This was to be a rather quick project with a time line of  ~3 weeks. I dug up some old code I had made last year. I had begun to experiment with processing, directly after seeing my idol Robert Hodgin present at Flash in the Can. Here was of my Initial Tests:

If you want a crappy javas applet version you can see it here.

(read the source at your own risk, its really quite unkempt )

So this was a simple test of drawing particles, based on a system called “Polar Turtle” That a couple of my professors developed here at RIT ( Nancy Doubleday, and Steeve Kurtz ) That i’ve modified to my own end. These simple turtles track a target, and are constricted by a maximum turning value per frame. Having the constraints on the turning creates some really slick looking turning. It also creates the framework for more complicated behaviors.

So, this was a nice test, but it has no meat. I began to experiment with other kinds of stuff i could do with the polar tutle in processing. I was very much interested in it’s ability to tap into OpenGL, as coming from a flash background… hardware acceleration is something dreams are made of.

I took these guys into faux 3D and added some nifty OpenGL additive blending and came up with some interesting results.

This was all well in good, but it really wasn’t what i was looking for. I went back to the drawing board, and remembered some nifty stuff I’d seen at FITC, namely Hodgin’s particle test he had shown. He had uploaded the source of it to his blog, so naturally I downloaded that guy and took a peek. I stripped down his engine, and rebuilt a similar system, except instead of Hodgin’s simple particles I implemented an upgraded version of the Polar Turtle. This time I had added an obstacle avoidance skill to their repertoire. So the particles, try to track the mouse, but they also try to avoid each other. That created some really nice looking motion.

The trails added a nice effect, but they were, still rather lame. It really needed to have a much better visual payoff.  I started to play around with, drawing a new image after all of the particles had died. creating a “big bang” effect. I logged all of the positions from every particle  in a massive array and then after all the particles had died, I would draw some new art based on that data. After some tinkering, the results would look something like this:

The general theory behind this ‘after image’ is that I throw all of the positions of every particle in order of their birth into an array on every frame.  For example, if you have 10 particles, 0-9 in the array would be frame 1, 10-19 would be frame 2 etc. I then take that bigass array and draw triangles between all of the points in that order, and texture them with a larger version of the particle texture. This gives the triangles a transparent edge, so you don’t see where they connect to the particles. The end result looks pretty neat. Interestingly enough processing can handle those guys like a champ. It only started to get slowdown if I went above 8,000~10,000 positions. ( Each position consisted of the x /y positions of each particle and their age at the time. )

Since the afterimage was based on the positions of the particles, you were essentially drawing with your mouse. Which is surprisingly entertaining. I’m not quite sure How much time I’ve spent just playing with the pretty flashing lights, but I’m sure I’d rather not know. I was a big fan of how the afterimages turned out, but I thought I could push it a bit further. I decided to try and generate the afterimage in realtime, while I was displaying the particles. Turns out that looks pretty sweet.

Here are some more renders that I pulled from the most current version:

All in all, the renders don’t really do it Justice. If you want to download the application and fool around with it, be my guest. I certainly have quite a bit of fun playing with it.

Windowz / OS X

I’ve included some hotkeys for the application:

C: clear screen

1 - 0: set the length of positions recorded for the after image rendering.

1 = 2000 positions,  0 = 100,000 positions.

I plan to take this little application further in the next 7 or so weeks. Next on my agenda is to rewrite the particle engine for 3D. My 3D math is a bit limited, but I should be able to figure something out.