Saturday, December 24, 2005

Rise and Snooze.

I recently installed 3D Studio Max 8 and wanted to test drive the new version of Mental Ray renderer. It's supposed to produce better quality renders even with a low samples setting (compared to the previous versions), and faster. So I took my Bedroom scene, which I call "Rise and Snooze" just to explain away the young lady's laziness, and tried my rusty rendering skills on it.

For the renderer, I set the settings thus:
-GI: 500 Photons/sample, 100000 Photons/light, Max 2 Reflections, Max 2 Refractions;
-Final Gather: 50 Samples, Max 2 Relections, Max 2 Refractions, Max 1 Bounces;
-Renderer: Mitchell 4x4, Min 1 Samples/pixel, Max 4 Samples/pixel;

(Max. Bounces is new to this version and it controls the maximum number of times a difuse ray is bounced in the scene.)

The angle below took 40 minutes to render. I don't have the figures with 3DS Max 7 to compare this with. Nor can they be compared because of the relatively small number of samples required to acheive the same result in 3DS Max 8.

Click for slightly larger version


The lady is 'Jessi', a biped from Poser6, made to lie in that pose. Making her was easy, importing her to Max was, to say the least, tough. And the bed spread is my first Reactor cloth. Other than these, the room's pretty basic. When I say basic, I mean that it is made of cuboids and cones. I am a simple man.

;;

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Semper fi? Don't think so.

I had high hopes for Doom the movie when it was announced almost an year ago. Sure, the cast was only mediocre (except for The Rock, of course), and so far no video-game-to-movie movies were effective in acheiving their intention.
But this is *Doom*. How can anyone mess up? So, my expectation for this film was quite high. I had kept away from spoilers for this movie, and the only spoil I heard was of the short FPS sequence that was supposed to be included in the film. If anything, my anticipation went only higher with this news.

I finally got to watch the movie on DVD. Even just a few minutes into the movie, I could tell that none in the production department had played Doom or even knew its storyline. That, or they simply thought that the tried and tested plot of gene mutation monsters was better than Doom's hell portal theory. Sure, there were a couple recognizable Doom creatures like the zombies, the Imp, the Hell knight aka the Baron, and everyone's favorite Pinky, and the story takes place in Mars. But apart from that, it's definetly not Doom.

The main story in Doom, or atleast Doom 3, is about an ancient civilization on mars who research and succeed in inter-dimentional travel via teleportation. But they find that they had opened a portal to actual Hell. Hell demons start to invade mars. The martians create an artifact called the 'Soul Cube' through sacrifice of almost all of the mars population and arming their strongest warrior with it. The legions from hell were beaten back by the warrior. The remainder of the Martian population teleported to another dimension/galaxy, while a few others teleported over to Earth and became the first humans. The martians leave behind a detailed documentary on stone tablets, of their opening of the portal, the evil that followed, the usage of the soul cube, it's location and how they advise other civilizations not to try this in their backyard. The Union AeroSpace Corporation, UAC, establishes a research facility on Mars and contemporary scientists, upon finding the tablets, attempt to recreate the portal opening. They succeed but they are not aware of the Hell-concept. So, many scout teams and researchers, no matter what they are armed with, return either as dead bodies, lobotomized zombies with extra-large blood lust or as a giberring wrecks. Dr.Bertruger, the lead Evil scientist at the base, leads on the research no matter what the body count. This is when you get enter the UAC facility. You were a Marine who disobeyed a direct order to gun down innocent civilians. Giving a fatal punch to your CO is not a very good way of disobeying. The CO gets military burial while you get your can kicked over to Mars (on the theory that your body will naturally follow it). Dr. Bertruger has plans of his own. He goes through to hell, gives the soul cube to the Devil there and reaches a pact with them.
From here on, though the game becomes schwarchenegger-style-kill'em-all, it's the attention to detail on the horror element in Doom that really makes it Doom. For exampe, I remember one time when the light flickers for a few second and then ther's an Imp just behind the iron staircase. But when the light came back on, there wasn't anything there or behind me. All this I noticed on the corner of my eye. I still have't worked out if that was actually scripted, my hallucination or a bug in the game's clipping code. (Actually, I replayed the game and saw the Imp again. So it *was* a scripted event :) )
All along the way, you hear distant voices of your fellow marines getting acquainted with the demons, see things that aren't there, witness giant bloody growth all over the base, humans, disfigured and dismembered, arranged in some satanic art, cries of babies and women pleading you or beckoning you. There's just too many scare devices to count. And then there's the no-scotch-tape-on-mars syndrome, which means you can't mount the infinite battery-life flashlight on your weapon. A shame when you consider that powercuts are virtually permanant on the base. The creatures from Hell are a bit too demanding on the maintenance crew, I guess.

I don't expect a Fraped version of the game play relesed as movie, (Mainly because it would be nauseating and boring without the interactablity of the game, but actually because there are such videos of Doom3 and other games on the net. They are called SpeedRuns of the game. But unless you've played the game well, you can't follow the video or it's intent. 100% runs, in which the gamer finishes the game as fast as possible while collecting all the collectibles and killing all the killable NPCs, are hard to come by. But they would give you some idea of what the Doom experience is all about. VisualWalkthroughs is a great site for those who want a low bandwidth Doom experience), but I certainly expected the movie to exceed my expectations. You know, get creative and novel and stuff.
But no. There's the old gene mutation theory in cloak, the human genome containing the 'blueprint' of the soul (?), cliched one-liner dialogues, despicable characters whom we don't care if they rot in, well, mars, a heroine (is she?) who can do autopsy on hellish monstors but annoys viewers by her constant screams upon viewing a zombie lobotomizing itself on the other side of a bullet-proof glass, a civilization that can travel at the speed of light but still uses guns and metal bullets, ...

The movie in question is not bad at all, as a movie. It has a weak-but-OK storyline of the kind you would expect of an action movie, an OK cast (The Rock only sways rather than rock in this movie), an occasional nod to FPS gamers (Dr.Cormack, BFG, the FPS mode), couple of catchy one-lines ("Semper fi, mofo!", "Kill them all, let God sort them out."). I did root, root when the FPS mode started (About 3 minutes long), and I did watch the movie about four times. Infact, if they had named the movie something along the lines of 'non-Resident Evil' or 'YARE (Yet Another Resident Evil)' or 'Resident Evil in Mars', then I am sure that the movie wouldn't have recieved so many sighs from gamers and film critics.

Being a marine, Dwayne Johnson flouts the US Marine corps motto, "Semper Fi" (actually, "Semper fidelis") all over the place; whether it be on his extra wide shoulder tattoo or when talking down his adversary in the final boss-fight ("Semper fi, mofo!"). The exact meaning of the word is "always faithful", but, as Sarge, The Rock translates it as "Faithful to the core". But well, I don't think this movie is faithful to the core at all. It just isn't Doom.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

WTF - Event 2

Well it seems that my problem may be caused by Tune up utilities 2006. It was probably messing some registry value, which I found the hard way. And since Windows is a tangle of inter-dependencies at the level of the (badly designed) monolithic kernel, it became inexplicably crippled. But since I wasn't wise about the TuneUp Utilities causing trouble, I installed the software again after Event 1 and restarted Windows. There was the same olde problem staring bleakly at me. So I just popped-in the XP boot CD and started the installation.

But hey, if the setup was uneventful, there's no point in the post! All for no (obvious) reason, I had to restart the setup forever because of an angelic error dialog (more like a monologue) :

Fatal error:
Setup failed to install the product catalogs.
The signature for Windows XP professional upgrade is invalid. The error code is 426. The service has not been started.


Microsoft support site reckons that it’s cause by a catalog folder left behind by the previous OS installation. So the support article asked me to press SHIFT+F10 at the error message to get a cmd prompt window. From here I am supposed to cd to windows\System32 and rename â€ï¿½Catroot2’ to â€ï¿½catold’. It’s cool to know that you can access cmd prompt from here. It isn’t very useful but at least it’s more functional and workable than the recovery console.

But the thing is, the time between the start of the â€ï¿½Installing windows’ mode (the shift+F10 trick starts to work only in this mode) and the appearance of the error dialog is about 10 seconds. I raced against the clock to delete/rename the damn catroot folder, but it was a no-go situation.

Tired of doing the catroot thing, I ran bootcfg.exe and lowered the amount of RAM visible to windows to only 128MB of the 1GB. Of course, I know this was a long shot and won’t work, but some setup related problems with lower versions of windows go away with this trick.

I tried to move some important files to my other partition. Next I tried running the setup.exe in the Windows setup CD from within the cmd window. And it launched the setup! But, unfortunately, the “child setupâ€ï¿½ also stopped at the same spot as it’s “parentâ€ï¿½, with the same error message.
In the end I had to do a quick format and fresh install like I did in my previous post. I could’ve avoided this format by deleting the entire partition of Windows related files, but it would’ve smelled like a boat-load of bilge water to find some file I forgot or something. This time around, I've steered clear of tuneup utilities. But how I miss it! But hopefully, this the end of my 'formatathon'.

PS: On google, as of this writing, my blog is the only hit for the word 'Formatathon' :)