The work of others brings free goodies for those willing to exploit another person's work. Some guy figured out how to exploit several companies for some free stuff. Then he put his results up on the web so likely, anyone should be able to get free stuff based on his findings.
I just thought I'd share this wealth further.
The $39 Experiment: Asking Random Companies for Free Stuff
Bow down to my awesome-ness for I am nifty!
Musings on Appleseed
Last night, I watched a movie called
Appleseed. The movie entertained me with its plot and well-developed main character. It also entertained me with its superfluous cliched scenes and the suddenness at which a previously unknown character can become important to the plot of the movie. I was also enteretained by the fact that Briareos died like three times over the course of the movie and most of the times, he was all, "Oh! I'm not actually dead." However, what about the movie most thrilled me was the visuals.
Appleseed used CGI to imitate the look of hand-drawn animation through the use of cel-shaders. I happen to have experimented a little with cel-shaders in Blender so I can pinpoint almost exactly how this whole movie was done. I could see every mistake they made and so forth so I just had to talk about it. I think I will do a postmortem on the movie's visuals.
The mech's when brought out to simple light (daylight) and shaded subtly looked incredibly good. They had an almost painterly look as though each frame had been painstakingly airbrushed to perfection. Unfortunately, they let all the exlplosions act as zealous lights which through off the simplicity in the color and the brightness destroyed visibility of the texture.
THe shots of the film which didn't have the camera move looked great. Whenever something stayed totally still you were able to buy that this was hand-drawn and you could admire the frame as though it were a drawing. Whenever the camera moved, the shading would go wacky and you'd be sucked back into the idea that you're watching a CGI movie rather than an animated one. I would have tried to solve this problem by not putting my details into the geometry and rather putting them in a texture which would then be shaded in a way that maintains the hand-drawn look. The effects of movement on the shading would be far less dramatic.
There was something that annoyed me abotu the way they had the characters talk. They underdid the lipsync's effectiveness with mouth-movements that didn't seem realistic. Instead, they had the character's head move and all of those little rotations and movements happening quickly made the shader go wild. Also, the characters mainly expressed emotions with their eyes and eyelids which weren't totally effective. I'd have made the mouth movements bigger if it were my choice so that they could compliment the eyelids for proper emotional delivery.
There were also some moments where the background CGI was sub-par and it looked as though it was rendered in Bryce 3D or some other 3D rendering suite that tends to have an extremely fake and 3D look.
Another problem was that they had a tendency to pull the camera far away from the cel-shaded subject and then move the camera. This ended up looking much like a video game rendered in real time and not like a movie that was probably the product of year's of work.
There was one other thing that bothered me that would have easily be been fixed had they thought of it. They apparently wanted to keep the scene's lighting consistent for all characters and this really isn't a good idea. They way they have it, the light starts affecting the characters in the same ways as a camera-rotation. The shader goes crazy. It would've been better to have each character rendered on a seperate image with a light-source of their own that didn't necessarily match the one in the rest of the scene perfectly.
The film however has some moments where the animation doesn't really look 2D but it just looks incredible and cool. At times it even looks, "trippy." The incredibly realistic movements on the cartoony main character in the first action sequence for instance are incredibly neat to watch.
I had a lot of fun watching the movie and then dissecting the visuals. I kinda recomend it. However, if you have an irrational dislike for Japanese anime, you probably won't like it because despite its CGI undercoatings, they try to keep the veneer of anime intact.
And the plot is kind of thinky too. Just because I didn't talk about it doesn't mean I didn't like it. The plot is multilayered and political with a lot of emphasis on people betraying each other. But like
Stranger in a Strange Land the meat of the movie is not the plot but rather something brought up in the course of the plot. I don't want to explain it. Any eplanation I could give without thinking about it much in advance would ruin it.
But seriously, if you can, you should try to see this movie. I borrowed this copy from the local library.
Bow down to my awesome-ness for I am nifty!
More Vagrant Story Screenshots
For my readers, I have now added
more Vagrant Story Screenshots! Hopefully, this is entertaining enough for my readers. Also, I managed to cheaply get a copy of the game and am going through it in an emulater. As soon as I figure out how to take screenshots using this emulater, I'll be taking plenty more of them.
I like to game's battle system. Its a little bit cumbersome but there is apparently some real strategy going on because it lets you choose which body part to target in your attacks. I assume that a headshot does most damage but attacking legs, or arms will reduce the effectiveness of running or attacking. I'm not sure what attacking the body does though. I guess you just have a really good chance of not missing.
Bow down to my awesome-ness for I am nifty!
