getting FMV-s on wz 2100 ressurection project

[Olrox]

  Sure, that's the point of the whole thing. But if one intends to learn a program, and have to choose between 3DSM, Blender and Maya, I would reccomend Maya, because Maya has lotta more features. I dunno if that's the case of our friend here, but surely it's worthy learning Maya, if you're employed into that sort of of thing.

[DFStormbringer]

pixar uses maya AND lightwave AND as all other main studios a variant of thier own engenering to produce certain effects they need for a particilar movie..

your headline animation studios use these programs as base starting points and thin often build thier own engines to branch off from it.  monsters inc is a great example as they talk about all teh coding they had to do to get the hair and fur to flow they way they wanted it to..

or the series of shrek.. how they had to encode thier own muscle rigging for the characters as well as a variant of thier own fluid animations for some scenes.

Weta international did a MASSIVE amount of their own coding for the lord of the rings trilogy..
simply put..3D Studios.. Maya.. Bryce.. Lightwave.. are all just stepeing stones twards their final product which they then further modify to suit their own needs..  something that takes a great deal of man hours and funding.. neither of which we really have

as for 3DS max being the BEST..  ill stop that flame war right now...
NONE of them are the "best"  NONE!
not one single program can do EVERYTHING that a person would need.. they all have a few areas which they excell over the others.. and have areas they just flat out blow compared to other programs.. which is why most companies get a couple of each program and swap the files from each program.. focusing and utilizing each program to its strength and using the other programs to cover for thier weaknesses.

3ds is 4000$
maya is 5k
lightwave and bryce is 6k
blender is FREE.

for most that cant afford the real programs.. blender does wonders.. and ill admit to using it.. and for free i cant complain and love the program.. but its got limitations galore.. especially its lighting.. its got by far the worst lighting programming out of any of the 3d programs by leaps and bounds..

imo.. i call blender.. the "gimp" of the 3d world...  its free and covers the basics.. and is ever getting better.. but can never in the end compare to the support and functionality of photoshop or the other paied programs...
but as stated.. i cant complain as blender is one of the FEW instances where you get ALOT more then what you pay for.

[Olrox]

  Hey, if anyone said 3DS max is the best, it waan't me. I meant that 3DS max is a lot easier to learn than Maya. I've seen blender only a few times and didn't waste much time trying to learn it because I had 3DS max already (it wasn't me who bought it, and I wouldn't for 4000$). I'm just saying that if you have access to 3DS max, you should learn it. Same for maya. You can earn lots of money working with Maya and 3DS max, because they are pro. I know nothing about blander and so I'm not ever comparing it with other programs. And everything I'm saying about maya, I've HEARD of it, as I've said on my last post. No flame wars intended.

[Olrox]

   Why don't you do slideshows with sound? It would be much easier than making full animations and would not have the problem of "copying others work". The sound would only give necessary briefing, and the slideshow would bring maps, bases sattelite photos, enemy's new units and the like.

   P.S.: It's easier although not easy

   That's my real point although.

[GiGaBaNE]

ok i have made up my mind. im gonna learn blender and download maya also, but ill only use that to try and replicate what i have achieved in blender, that way once its time to use maya or other premium software i have less to learn.

as to slideshow. yes that would really be the easiest option, however im sure some here will agree. when i played the campaign for the first time, y'know getting right into it as the sun goes up then down then back up in the real world...youve just dived in and saved beta base from sure destruction, and youve decided its time for some payback and.....incoming intelligence report!

BAM: edge of the seat stuff. especailly with the artifical map zooming stuff they did in the original fmv's you could suspend disbelief.

a cheesy slide show would somehow leave me feeling cheated.

[Kamaze]

Well, Blender is a very fine program. But you must learn how to use it.
It got many missed features in the last versions. And what is missed about lightning in Blender?

http://www.yafray.org/index.php?s=10

Integrates very fine in Blender.

[DFStormbringer]

whats wrong with the lighting in blender???
it CANNOT  render meshes or objects as a lightsource.. only an invisible pinpoint which makes making things like actual lighting thats SEEN in your image look ungodly realistic.. the glow of a lightbulb.. forget about it.. blender cant do it.. make a nice neon sign with acurate shadows..  impossible.. proper glowing for that neon?  nope that cant be done either.. people have tried FAKING the effect with post production and halo effects.. but its still very unrealistic looking.. especially when you still have to rely on that pinpoint light source for the shadows..

ow about a nice stained glass with ambient light shining through it onto the floor??  eh.. not really.. the particle interaction scripting is still in its infancy and causes a great deal of problems.. so a nice ambient scene with thigns like stained glass or through water effects require several overly complex "fake" work arounds that end up not being able to be used in things like animations.. which in time ruins the point of it all.

biggest kicker is that certain partical settings requied for the fake glowand other lighting effects your trying to use to achieve realisim end up failing because the more realistic transparencie settings arent even compatable with  halos and blender ends up not rendering them in that setting to begin with.

sure blender has come a LONG way in the past 2-3 years.. but they havent even TOUCHED on the light sourcing problems or even worried about trying to improve it... which is why after all its advancements has become its biggest flaw.


as for USING blender.. its a CONSTANT learning process.. as every very majior update.. so many new features come out and the button layout changes enough where you find yourself having to relearn alot of things all over again just to get used to things.

http://www.blender.org/ to get blender
http://blenderartists.org/forum/ blenders official user run forum aka user manual
http://forums.cgsociety.org/ 3d artists forum of all programs of professional caliber but often also very helpfull

yafray was already posted.. its not NEEDED.. but its a free "alternate" rendering program that intergrates into blender.. and for a while was the superior to blenedrs built in rendering engine.. but the past few updates have really started to blur the gap between the 2.

note there is no OFFICIAL guide to blender.. there "is" a book thats sold on teh website.. but the program literally changes SO fast and SO much.. that its imo a waste of your money.. as he info is already smothered all over the net and those forums in tutorials and guides.

Just be forewarned.. this is a COMPLEX program as is an 3d program and unlike paint, gimp, or photoshop even, you cant just tinker and click a few buttons to experement for a day or two then have the basics down.. it will take you MONTHS to get the absolute basics down if  you have never dealt wiht 3d before. So keep this in mind before jumping in as it will require a fair ammount of dedication to get going.

[kage]

i'd never dealt with a full fledged 3d program before and i was up and running with 70% capability in two days after watching the video tutorials... it's not that hard.

[GiGaBaNE]

hehe, nice to see so much passion over drwaing pretty pictures 

all i can say is, i have months. i have an IQ of at least a hundred, i have all the hardware i need and most importantly i have you lot. So as soon as i have set up my upstairs computer with a clean install of xp, im gonna install blender and maya, and just dive in.

question: i heard its not a bad idea to grab auto cad also...can i use that in conjunction with blender???

[kage]

a quick look through blender's import options says it can import ac3d files, which i'm guessing is short for "autocad 3d", so maybe.

[GiGaBaNE]

not exactly..
ac3d = http://www.inivis.com/

[kage]

was worth a shot. perhaps whatever cad soft you use can export a standard model format.

[Olrox]

  Autocad is wothy for modelling, I think. you can make things with surgical precision very fast and have the ancient command line, wich, by my opinion, is what makes it worthy (you type the command to the tools you want to use with one hand and uses it with the other: there's no need to keep clicking on the menus. And you can customize your interface by selecting what tool bars appear on the hud and which keep waiting, if you don't like the command line).
  Autocad can export models (from the original .DWG) to .3DS and then you can import them from Blender, 3DSmax and, I believe, Maya. The main problem of Autocad in these matters is importing files, actually.

[wardog]

its a good thing you guys know all this legal stuff im useless at it :-[

[J.Vaughan]

Now forgive me for taking a back step here... I know the topic has moved on but didn't we push for the WZ Source Code? Is there anyway that we can push for the FMV's? I know Pumpkin isn't around anymore and although I don't believe Edios, itself, is around anymore but merged or was bought out by some British company. Those group developers and artists are still around aren't they?

I don't think that we should completely give up because don't copyrights expire? I'm not to familiar with the subject but removing support completely right now might be too quick. Even if the RPLs aren't released. Anyways I guess nothing like a petition would work would it? This is "art" were talking about...

I know my questions have already been both asked and answered before but I don't like the feeling of being helpless (I'm too optimistic .)  I remember when the source code was being pushed and it was either N.E.W.E.S.T. or some people from here who actually spoke to a representative or game artists and I'm sure they got very annoyed, Seems like they've run out of time but I don't get why they would be so stubborn on something they don't care about anymore. What did they say about the FMV's?

I believe that there are quite a few people finding WZ2100.net completely new to WZ and downloading the source and finding that the single player version has nothing interesting, no eye candy, no story line. I think it really does a dis-service to the game not having the movies integrated. It kills me the people I know who can't watch the movies, they're missing so much. I came from the PSX version... There was no single player skirmish, I lived on the story line!

As a solution though, I agree with Olrox... I've seen full blown RPG war games that use nothing but pretty much sideshows (pictures and maps) and voice to explain storylines.

Thats my $0.02