JsARCLIGHT

I always thought Rainbow Brite was a weird amalgamum of Strawberry Shortcake and the Care Bears... I mean, it has a bunch of color/theme co-ordinated little girls ala Strawberry Shortcake that also have their weird cloud/sky motif ala the Care Bears. Seeing as Rainbow Brite was around to do battle with the Care Bears (said bears having mopped the floor with her ass in both TV ratings and toy sales) well after Strawberry Shortcake was molding in her grave I'd say she bears (pun intended) more resemblance to her arch nemesis the bears. ... and for anyone who may ask the only "girly" cartoon I ever watched that was on TV in the '80s was Beverly Hills Teens... and I felt totally gay watching it... yet I could not look away... and I was a senior in freaking high school when that show was on! I watched it in the mornings eating breakfast in the kitchen on our small sanyo "kitchen TV"... ... just remembering this has made me shudder... what the hell was I thinking!?! That show was the Sailor Moon of the '80s! AAARRRGGGHHH!!! (runs to lock gun safe in case the urge to shoot that part out of my brain arises again) ... oh and here is a little something to scare the rest of you away from that damn show:

As I said I apologize for escallating this thread, I was just making jokes. I meant no harm. Edit: Shelly's car was a 1992 RX-7 and that is as much as I know about it, I was never that close to the car to know a lot about it's propper workings... only that her father bought it for her new in 91 and like 20,000 miles later something massive went wrong with it requiring all the seals and most of the tranny to be replaced (it was a manual). Then around 30K the electrical system went tits up and a few months later the tranny blew again and after that it had some fuel system problems and that is when she sold it. I remember seeing it sit on the dealer's lot for weeks before someone bought it... and then when we were going somewhere a few months later we saw it back at the dealer's in the service area. That particular car was a total lemon and I have no clue how it got past quality control... but then after picking her up from the dealership time and again getting that thing fixed I talked to the mechanics in the bay one time and they said that those cars (the RX-7's from the late '80s through the early '90s) were notorious for the problems she was having and that led myself and all the people that knew Shelly and her car to have a very poor opinion of the RX-7. I do know that everyone has said the new RX-8's engine is totally different and improved but I don't know anyone that has one... that and the "reliability myth" is so heavy here in the midwest that those cars might not sell well around these parts. When the new ones showed up the guys in my office were talking about them... not how cool they were or what they could do, they were talking about the rotary engine and how unreliable it was. Seems everyone knows a "Shelly" with one of those cars that had a bad time with it... or at least they think they do.

Obviously I hit a nerve (like I thought I would) with my jokes. Did I say anything to what you are going on about? No. I simply stated a fact as a joke... Here is the reference for my factual joke in case anyone wants to know the facts about it: Mazda offers Buy Back on 2004 RX-8 cars due to "misleading" horsepower listings As for the reliability issue I know a girl who owned an RX-7 in college and that car ate her out of more money than any vehicle I have ever had the misfourtue to see. She and her friends could not work on it in their garage like my obviously inferior classic american V8 and she had to repeatedly take it to the dealer for even minor things that ended up costing her tons of money. The car she had was a lemon and I have heard of many people who had the same experinences... yes those are the rare occasion. But I WAS MAKING JOKES! All I did was make two simple goofy jokes (am I the only one who notices the smilies and things in a post?) and I get my crap jumped by people who are just too touchy. Well I'm not looking for a fight on this issue, all I wanted to do was make a joke. Admittedly it was a joke that I knew someone would have a coronary about and take waaaaaaaaaaaay out of context as me bashing imports. Guess what? I drive an import as a daily car. Guess what else? I just bought another import for my fiancee to drive. I apologize if my simple jokes insulted your deep respect for this car. From now on I will start all my jokes with this listing: I AM MAKING JOKES HERE, THIS IS HUMOR MEANT TO BE FUNNY.

So will the transformer also have incorrect horsepower ratings followed by an admittance of printing false performance numbers with an offer to buy back all the toys from unhappy owners? Will it also come with ten sets of engine seals so every 30,000 miles you can do a massive engine overhaul on that wankel to keep it running? ... if I were a trans-fan or a Mazda fan these jokes might be seen as insulting... ... oh well, the truth hurts!

The only things I can say as advice then is to play with it very carefully and buy it from a reputable source like Valkyrie Exchange, who will ensure you get a good quality piece... and fellow MW members are here to help you out if you get in a jam.

Reading the "worst of" experiences on products is never the best way to form an opinion of them... if I had read anything negative and nothing positive about the car I own I probably never would have bought it. You can't judge something based soley on the negative press... unless the negative press is totally landslide overwhelming like for Lawn Darts or Ford Pintos. It's been my experience that faulty issues with Yamatos are on par with most QC issues for other toy companies... just because one or two people had a problem does not mean everyone did. The "silent majority" of satisfied customers should be the people to listen to first and foremost. But your decision on the matter is yours to make in the end.

Perhaps that is the reason you can't find any copies of the old TV mini series "The Blue and The Grey"... Bandai sued to supress any and all civil war based story material that did not have their seal of approval. Either that or people remembered Patrick Swayze was in it and locked all the copies in a safe on board a rocket shot into the sun...

Bsu legato's been hanging around Ewan McGreggor too long... (goes to put in the dance mix song I have of that scene)

Ouch. Can you even attempt to imagine Shatner of all people trying to ham his way through Japanese dialogue? Now can you imagine the subtitles for that dialogue? They would have... to... include... all the... dramatic... pauses that... he... makes while... acting!

yeah, but this would be macross and hopefully not suck.

This is most likely going to be taken the wrong way, but here it is anyway: What if a new Macross took a totally different take on the world of Macross (like Kawamori seems to do every time) and this time around had nothing to do with war or fighting? I've always imagined a macross series where the main cast are explorers travelling a few years ahead of a Megaroad colony ship scouting out the solar system and potential planets to colonize. You can still have Valkyries but they would be of the variety of Elintseekers and Super Ostritches, but outfitted with long range scanners and cameras that relay back to their small carrier that sends the info back to the Megaroad far behind them... You could take that situation in one of many different ways: the scout team could get sucked into a black hole or something and they have to find their way back to their Megaroad fleet... they could encounter remnants of the protoculture who have evolved into an entirely new species... or (horror of horrors) they could discover the truth of what happened to the Megaroad 01 and only they know and the brass make them cover it up (for whatever reason)... Macross does not always have to be about war and hostility... but at the same time it needs to be engaging and "smart" with no hoaky singing idiots or sailor moon bad guys. I would like to see a macross show like that, that delves deep into the personal relationships and plots rather than using them as string to knit together a bunch of robot action.

I'm just going to stop adding my opinion on things on this thread as it is blatantly obvious that "I don't know what I'm talking about" and my opinions have no merit compared to those of others as my standards are just "random". My parting thoughts on SH will be what Max posted: YAWN.

Because some idiot at Gamestop talked me into buying it on the promise that it was nothing like the original one... needless to say like all Gamestop employees he was full of crap and I was cussing his name minutes after starting the game. Nope. No second chances. The only games I play a second time through are games that left me wanting more in a "positive" way. The Silent Hill games left me wanting so much more that a complete redesign of the game would have been needed. It was NOT the lack of action or the ploddingly slow and annoying pace of the games... it was those things coupled with everything else that made the games a real drag on the senses to me. You have to admit that the games are terribly slow and about as exciting as stamp collecting. The only thing to draw people into the game was the story and it failed to even make me sit up and notice. Video game stories are there for one reason: to hold together the loose scope of pushing buttons to make the little man on the screen do something... there are no aspects of Silent Hill's story that other games do not possess on some other level as well, it's just that other games that I have liked have had better execution of the game involved in the story and that made me like them more. If I want a good spooky story I'll read a book or watch a movie, some genre in which the story is the make it or break it point of the endevor. Our tastes in games are obviously different. I don't like Silent Hill and you obviously do. Other people see it my way and others see it yours. My comments in this thread can be simply summed up like Max said: YAWN. Next time I'll just sneak in, sucker punch it and sneak out rather than trying to explain my distaste for these games.

What I was referring to was the way game graphics and content get "knee-capped" so they can run on a console. The way game makers use lower res textures, less polys and dodgy tactics like trying to hide the load screens to make the game capable of running on the console. I know they try their best to make the games both visually appealing and immersive but sometimes you get levels, play elements, context, enemies and items like the ones in Silent Hill that just have too few of polys and really bad low res textures to were they loose a lot of their possible "scariness". Most of the enemies in Silent Hill 1 and 2 were messy, their textures looked like someone took a generic rust or bloody glop texture, reduced it to 256x and randomly applied it to the model. I mean, compare the detail of the lead character in SH to the enemies... the difference in quality is noticeable. Also another production thing that irked me about SH 1 and 2 was that they never showed anything really "horrifying". Yes they had some images that went that direction but the poor textures on the "scary" things always made them look goofy to me. Here is an example: compare the zombies in resident evil 2 or 3 to the critters in Silent Hill 1... the RE zombies were bloody, barfing, blood spewing, decaying messes that looked scary to me... even though they had low res textures and low poly counts they still "read" as scary. On the flip side of that coin the shambling weirdness that were the enemies in Silent Hill 1 were just rusty looking... things... that were very ill-defined and not very scary at all. Most of them like those things that crawled around on the ground and the dog-like things to me were more funny than scary... but it was in a "look how stupid that thing is" funny rather than a "it amuses me" funny. But then again like I say every time I critique a game: my standards for games are rediculously high. Very few games I play I actually enjoy. It is not the graphics or the story or the character or the type of game that it is... it's just that undefined "thing" that makes a game special and entertaining to me that I look for, the other things like graphics and sounds and story are just pieces in the puzzle. But all those things need to work together to make a game a great game... if a game faulters in one of those areas it can make up for it in another. But some games just get a lot of stuff "wrong" in my eyes and I tend to have a very negative reaction to those games... Silent Hill 1 and 2 were some of those. The trouble I have is that I have found some games that everyone hates I simply love and vice versa so I sort of need to play some games just to see what they are like... occasionally I'll love something that I never in a million years would have thought of playing (GTA: Vice City) and other times I'll hate the living guts of a game that seemed tailor made for my tastes (BF:1942). It's just who I am.

Because I kept thinking the games would get better in just a few more minutes... they never did. I did not keep them that long because I liked them... actually now that I think about it it was only #1 that I kept for a few months, I got rid of #2 in like a week... and if I remember correctly the games cost me like $49.99 each and had jack for trade-in worth, something like $10 each if I remember right again.

The textures are all 100% scratch, with the only elements that are pre-exsisting are the skull and crossed sabers emblem and the raw materials used to sample to paint the textures with. I'm using Deep Paint to paint the textures, if you are familiar with that software it basically allows you to "paint" your models using a wacom or tablet just as you would draw them by hand. The way I made the textures was to start with oblique angle views of the model (perfect front, top, sides, etc.) and map the model so the major parts all use the same texture map file. Then in Deep Paint you can paint bump maps, specularity, reflectivity, transmissivity of light and other crazy things that Maya/Mental Ray use to render the polys. The texture maps are handled like photoshop files in that they have "layers", I started with the base blue metal layer and added pannel lines, weathering, chips, scorch marks, insignias and other details on top. When you finish with the map in Deep Paint it exports it back to Maya as six special mixmaps (color, transparentcy, diffusion, bump, specularity and reflectivity) which it automaps to the polys you painted. If you ask me the power is in the software not in the skills of the user... you should see some of the stuff our real Maya monkeys turn out around here. Their stuff will turn you white, man.

To update the thread and answer some questions: 1) I'm the boss so I get to goof off when I want 2) I didn't get much done today other than start on the leg armor... had some meetings to go to 3) I'm purposefully trying to go as low a polycount as possible (and I'll run the final model through a reducer to see how it looks) in the hopes that I might be able to use the model for something real-time in the future... but as for right now it is just a hobby on the side. 4) the Valkyrie is going to be built (I hope) to be three mode convertable. Seeing as this is being done in the computer I can get away with fudging some things and faking others. I plan to make multiple objects for certain things like the arms, legs and torso parts so the model can blendshape between geometry to achieve a more "correct" look in all it's modes. I even have the crazy idea to SDK the entire transformation sequence so all I need to do is "flip a switch" in Maya and it would automatically convert. 5) one of my friends in the office who is a Maya animator and fellow macross fan is going to make me a custom skeleton and IK rig for the battroid that will allow me to dump the mocap our office has from filmbox onto it. Someday I could have a valkyrie doing soccer goalie stuff! 6) the Valk I intend to make is my own warped version of Hikaru's Super VF-1A from DYRL, hence the flight number "11" on the booster... which means no strike cannon. If the model turns out well I'll go back and make a 1J and a 1S head and alter the map colors to make more units. Perhaps then I'll make a strike cannon for a possible future Focker unit... who knows. I'd also like to say thanks for all the praise. It has been years since I sat down and hammered something out in something other than Photoshop or CADD and this has been a fun two days for me. I also intend to make the model, rigging and shader network for my final model available to anyone who asks for it... but it will be in Maya 5 and have write ability locked out on it (like we supply all our models to clients with) so if you want the model you can play with it and see how it is built and how it works but you cannot alter anything in the scene. Let me know ahead of time if anyone is interested.

No, I "got it" allright... and yes I played 1 and 2 all the way through to the end (even though it took me months because I kept getting sick of the games and leaving them for days at a time before going back to them). Silent Hill's story and characters were no different than poorly written Twilight Zone material... I kept waiting for a chain smoking man in a suit to pop up and give me a diatribe about the game's moral compass. Video games have never had very good characters or stories aside from one or two really genre busting titles... video games are like movies in that they need fast story movement, fast character development and shallow element progression so even the dimmest bulb in the audience can say "huh-huh... this game is fun..." IMHO those two games suffer from "great idea, poor execution" syndrome. They had a nice idea about how to make a game but they rushed through it and most likely cut out all interesting things in order to focus on the not creepy "creepy" look, get the games out on time and able to run on a console. But as I always say, I only actually enjoy like five percent of the games on the market and it takes a real doozie of a game to get me to do anything but yawn and trade it in a week later... that being the main reason I sold off all my consoles.

When I started texturing the booster, I originally left it completely "clean"... but it looked -too clean- if you know what I mean... too "fake" and "CG-ish" (even thought it still looks fake and CG-ish). When I started adding wear and scorches to the boosters I started very light and small. They looked good from (what would be in the computer) five feet away but from a distance they got lost in the overall color and layout of the booster. I decided to make that sucker cooked like a chicken at that point and the look actually reads very well from a good distance away. It's my plan to do up the rest of the armor and the valk in the same "worn and used" grungy fashion. I like the look of heavily used military things. I'm debating going back in and adding another layer to the mixmap shaders to add "chips, dings and scratches" to the armor pannels to give them an even more used and abused look... but first and foremost I need to get more of the actual model done before I keep upgrading one piece of it. Edit: what the hell... half my post went missing! There, now it's back...

I played Silent Hill 1 expecting a Resident Evil ripoff... I was unimpressed. I played Silent Hill 2 thinking it could not be as annoying as the first one... I was wrong. My play-by-play feelings while playing those games: "What is the deal with this game? Why is it so slow and plodding?" "What the hell? You call that scary?" "Alright! Finally I got a freaking gun!... WHAT?! Only ten rounds of ammo and they don't kill jack?!?" With Resident Evil getting tired out and repeatative and Silent Hill needing a more appropriate name like "Walk around and do nothing for ten hours while getting killed by weird ass "jacob's ladder" ripoff badguys as you try to solve some stuid riddle that is more or less one long annoying series of happenstance Hill"... I'm jonesin' for a decent zombie/horror/spooky game to show up.

Macross World is one stop on my daily journey around the internet and back. I'm more of an internet junkie than a MW junkie, MW is just one ingreedient in my pipe.

And lastly for today the forward nasalle missle pod... I'll add more when more is done, this piece took me most of today to make and texture. I just wonder how much more free time I'll have to work on it this month as my only access to Maya and Deep Paint is at work. Oh well, here is the last image. And if the resident CG gods would please let me know if I'm doing anything wrong or screwing stuff up... the CG gurus at work are basically treating me like "the boss thinks he can do my job" sort of thing so they are not too helpful on things.

If anyone actually reads this thread, I'll answer any questions you might have about the model. I'm fully "Maya fluent" so I can "speak geek" if need be. Some specifics about the model: it is less than 400 poly faces, it is modeled and textured in Maya 5... the textures are mainly 512x multimaps through Deep Paint (I can actually use that stylus for something other than page layouts!). Here is a close-up of the booster frame. As you can see I'm trying to "grunge" the look to make it appear used and abused rather than showroom new like most model kits. I'm also personalizing a lot of the features to the way I think they should look rather than the way they actually look...

As most pros can tell, this model is very, very low poly compared to what it could be. All of the detail is in the textures and not the model. I can paint purdy pichers but not make nice models. Here is the reverse angle shot.

Hey gang, Work has been slow in this post christmas period (as it always is at my office) so between the wining and dining of clients to try and eek some second quarter cash out of them I've been finally getting around to actually making that new CG valkyrie that I've been putting off for years. I must say that I am not a pro CG person, my skills are in 2D layout and line work so my models are all very low poly and mainly rely on texture/shader/lighting to work... hence most of you CG pros will see these renders and think they were made by someone wil no CG skills. Because they basically are... I learned power animator back in the '90s in college and that was about it, in the mean time I have picked up rudimentary Maya skills due to the number of people at work that use the software. I know my stuff is not that good compared to other people's things and what is out there on the market so I'm not looking for critiques or praise, I just want to post my renders and be counted as one of the several Macross World CG neophites building a valkyrie. I'm also a retard... everyone else starts with the actual valkyrie, usually the cockpit... I started with the FAST packs. I just like FAST packs, what can I say? I'm also making my model to be fully rigged and animateable... and it is also being made in bizzarro JsARCLIGHT world, which means the looks may be similair but the end product will be very different... I'm basically "personalizing" the super Valkyrie to my own tastes, adding things and removing other things in the design. Oh well, enough talk. Here is the first piece of the puzzle: the FAST pack booster pods. I'll keep building and adding to this thread if there is interest... if not then I'll just keep to myself because there are lots of other CGers on here that have much better skills than I.