Welcome to my new website, www.milkshakezombie.com. I am currently as proficient with html as a retarded drunk mudskipper with a slight concussion, so don't expect too much of the site to be any good. I'll update it over time.

For some reason it displays like crap in Internet Explorer, and I have no idea why. So get Firefox. Sif use IE anyway, noob.

Ok, I think I got the IE problem fixed, so you can go back to your gamen interweb browser. It was a problem with the CSS sheet, I had to change the navigation id link to float: left, rather than whatever I had it as. Thanks Ancient!


21/8/08

Cut out alot of the crap models and useless pages, I'll probably keep scaling the site back until I actually have some content worthy of showing off.

12/8/08

An Opportunity to waffle about a technique I think I invented

As you may have noticed, I make 3d models. Well done. A big part of 3d modelling, especially in games, is the texturing. I want to take this opportunity to write down one of my techniques, in case I forget it later, it will be here for me. It is actually a really simple technique, but it is helpful for shading textures.

A big point in game textures is that they need to have multiple shades and shadows on them before they even get into the engine. This is usually pretty easy with simple textures, you can just draw a slightly transparent dark stroke over the part of your texture and there you have it, shadow. But when it comes to more complex textures, such as wood or stone, the simple dark stripe starts to look awfully tacky. So I managed to devise a simple yet effective way of keeping the details, but still making shadows. The prerequisites of this technique is that you have a base texture making application, such as MapZone, and a 2d image editor which supports the use of layers. I use the GIMP.

First of all, make the base texture. I'll use a wood texture I made in MapZone. Then, still in your texture maker, mess with the saturation and brighness/contrast to make a darker texture that still has the exact same pattern as the other one. A good idea is to make the bright one a little too bright, as it would be in direct sunlight, and the dark one just a tad too dark. You can always blend them later on to equalize them. Although sometimes it is more desireable to have one basic texture and then do a brighter, washed out version of it, and then a darker version of it. Also, you don't have to stop at these two or three colours, sometimes you may want a part that is completely washed out (I have used this for highlights on jeans) and another that is a completely different colour (useful for say, green rot on wood or something). My two wood texture examples are below, click on them to see the original size.

So once you have your base textures, however many you want, import them all into your graphics editor. Have them all overlaying each other in seperate layers so that if you switch quickly from one to another it looks like the texture is just changing colour, and nothing else is happening to the image, no movement or flickering. Then, in the GIMP, put the lightest texture down on the bottom layer, and go into the other layers, ctrl+a to select all, and then delete the texture. Now in order to get the shades, you get your eraser and either hold alt, or select the 'Ant-Erase' checkbox, so that you will effectively be 'drawing' the texture. This way, when you are shading, you are un-erasing the darker or lighter shaded texture, and you are not sacrificing detail or quality for the sake of shading!

That's about it, here's a demo of an axe I textured using this technique:

Told you it was simple! I'm sure someone else can put this to a better use than me, thanks for reading!


25/7/08

Some minor updates

Did up a new page for my mapzone tutorial, can be found here. I also did some other aesthetic changes, I plan on making the site look... remotely attractive... later. Too much hangover right now.

Firefox's World Record

So Firefox download day was a success, it seems that they did get the record, over 8 million in 24 hours or something. I don't see why they were so interested, it's not like they got any money from it or anything. Maybe the goal is just to overthrow the evil Internet Explorer enterprise, and damned if they haven't made at least a poc mark. Anyway, if it interests you, you can read about it here.


Firefox Download day 2008!

It seems that Mozilla Firefox is trying to "create a better web" by getting people to download their program on the release day in order to set a world record. The record doesn't already exist, so really they only need 1, and even then I don't see how them getting a record is going to benefit anyone but themselves... But, I thought I might as well put a link up here as I will be getting firefox 3 as soon as I can since firefox owns IE in all ways, so much so that IE are stealing ideas off it and blaming it on "industry standard". Pfft. So do what you will, the link is there to the right. (I kinda just wanted to see how much of css I had remembered so that I could put up an image, it wasn't much)