Ambient occlusion is really cool. Yeah, precalculated occlusion for animating objects is fake, but with some hacks it’s still very cool. Why I didn’t use it before? :)Here, a small shot comparing no-AO with AO (super small because it’s still work-in-progress, I’m not sure if my teammates would be very happy with me showing big screens :)).

Ah, at the bottom there are “my” soft shadows that I’ve written about earlier, but nothing can be seen in such a small shot. Oh well; shadows will be the story for another day.

They suck! Well, this probably isn’t fresh news to anyone, but right now I’m working with code where basically everything includes everything else. The code is template-heavy so that makes things even worse. Try changing that file without 20 minute rebuild later - good luck!

Yeah, I know, the code is a product of 2 years of wandering in the darkness :) - prototyping, adding something and removing something, and when you constantly have to actually produce “working demos” in short timeframes, it ain’t easy to actually sit down and refactor whole thing. Oh well, the reality…

Still, code with lots of dependencies does suck of course.

On the other hand, I’m pretty happy with the module I’m writing. All the outside just needs one header file that’s right now 76 lines long and that includes only very basic “resource id” header file. The insides of my module also need some of the outside functionality; I’ve written some “outside interface” for that - a header file with something like 50 lines and also absolutely no includes.

That’s what I consider to be a low-dependency interface. That’s good. That doesn’t suck :)

[EDIT] The code I was referring to isn’t so bad (e.g. it really doesn’t “includes everything else”, but “includes quite large amount of stuff”). I’m just somewhat frustrated at the moment, and anything that’s not very ideal in the codebase irritates me.

Some time ago I thought that 3dsMax had pretty bad usability (hey, it doesn’t even do real hit testing :)). 3dsMax is nothing compared to one certain CAD package that I’m writing customizations for at work!

There’s one conceptual problem that Paulius told me the other day: imagine that you have a white sheet of paper and a black pencil. How would you draw an object that emits light? It’s puzzling at first, but surely it can be done :)

I’m facing with the same problem in our next demo: we have a white character in a white, brightly lit room. Even more, there will be some light emitting “stuff” in there. Now, how to render all this so that it’s not “washed out”, too bright and with no contrast?

I’m not happy with the way it looks right now, but we’re heading there.

Woohoo! My demogroup is nominated to scene.org awards 2004, in ‘breakthrough performance’! Pretty cool, considering that Syntonic Dentiforms, which we got nominated for, is my first ‘real’ attempt at making a demo… Well, there were other attempts before, but they were really lame and childish :)

I was pretty happy with my demo-related performance last year. Three demos in half a year (ok, one of them was crappy). Now it’s already half a year with no demos, and I already want to make one. Well, I’m already trying to make one, but so far there’s lots of higher priority stuff surrounding me.