Lina, our most beloved cat has turned 4 today.
When she is not playing the harmonica…
…then she’s usually sleeping, preparing for the night shift.
After sunset she starts patrolling the neighborhood to fend off trespassers, mostly cats, mice and the occasional insurgent finch.
Since she became the security officer of our home, there are no more robins stealing grass or tom cats spraying stinky gang tags on the door.
Thank you Lina for keeping us safe!
Phew, I’ve finally finished the object I was working on the last two weeks.
It’s a crane for transferring containers in ports:
It’s roughly 14500 polygons, with instanced bogeys and stair units. It has a 2K diffuse and a 2K normal map.
The machine is 58 meters (190 feet) tall and 104 meters (341 feet) long.
The cab can move back and forth on the boom and carries the spreader which can descend and grab a container.
The spreader itself is around 3 tons (6000 pounds) and can carry cargo up to 26 tons (52000 pounds).
The whole crane weighs around 1200 tons (huge number of pounds).
The past week I took a break from GViz and worked on a paid side project using Unity.
I heard good things about it and indeed it’s a very nicely done software package. Two days after downloading it I already knew everything I’m going to need in this project: project management, asset import, lightmapping/realtime shadows, animation are all very intuitive. It is true what they say: “It just works”.
The shader authoring is text based which is a real pain but fortunately there is an unofficial node based shader editor. I haven’t had the chance to use it extensively but looks well done.
So far it seems to me that Unity is a very adept engine, especially considering its price. The whole architecture is modern and well designed, the Unreal engine could really use a few features from it. (Editor scripting for example…)
The next engine I’d like to work with is Unigine after which I could finally move to engines starting with the letter V.
Here is the concept of another weapon in GViz:
Steele M887 Tactical
This time it’s a 100% Illustrator with a slight Photoshop touch.
