bryce-bucher:

Basidia Post #4

Vintage CGI:

Modus Interactive and I have been spending the last week or so learning how to use Alias Power Animator 9 which is essentially an old version of maya. It was used on sgi workstations back in the day on games like ff7 and mario64 for all the pre-rendered stuff. For a long time Modus and I have been pretty invested in learning how to replicate the look of old pre-rendered stuff, and, as it turns out, the best way was just to do it how they did it. For so long I tried to wrap my head around how old cgi stuff was modeled because the sorts of shapes that were often created seemed like they’d be unnecessarily hard to create with polygons. The thing that specifically stumped me for a while was how they handled wrinkles in clothing and organic shapes. As it turns out, the answer was hidden right under my nose the whole time. They weren’t using polygons at all! Instead they were modeling with NURBS! It seems very obvious in hindsight, but I feel like I deleted the memory of NURBS once I exited highschool, and nobody ever seems to talk about or use them these days. If you don’t know what they are, it’s basically a style of modeling that involves making a bunch of bezier curves and using them to define surfaces. It’s a totally different style of modeling from polygons with a lot of pros and cons, but it achieves that smooth look we’re after extremely well.

Scout Rifle Render:

As shown in the pics above, I decided to make a model of the scout rifle in Basidia so that we could use it for an item icon. The process was definitely a learning experience, and one of the things I learned is that modeling like this is super fun. It’s like creating each shape is a puzzle where you need to theorize what is the best approach to take, and following through is always a multi-step process of defining a surface and slicing it up. I find it super satisfying to pull off, and making slapping materials on it is always fun as well. Moving forward we are probably gonna use this program and/or older versions of maya to create any pre-rendered item icons or backgrounds that we’ll be needing. Modus actually made new versions of the vials in it as well which I will put right here /

Wow there it is would u look at that. Power Animator just has an amazing way of outputting some unique, rich colors that are hard to get in modern software. I mean, just look at that cork. How do you make a cork have such interesting colors? Amazing. Fuck it, I’m gonna show off a little guy I made in power animator that has nothing to do with Basidia. I’ve been hyperfixating on this program since I downloaded it so I owe this to myself.

Here he is! Power animator has this amazing glow effect you can put on any shader that adds this bloom as a post processing layer. I used it on the head in this one, and I think it achieves a particular dreamlike effect really well. The sorts of shapes I can get for cloth out of NURBS is also super fun and rewarding, as shown with the cape here. Character modeling is something I’m always really excited about, and I’ll definitely be modeling some Basidia characters in this thing.

Conclusion:

I am loving this program and I cannot stop thinking about it. Anyway, I have some commissions to take care of before switching back to midwest lost development, so I may or may not be posting about that game next week. I’m trying to buy an old sgi workstation with the commission money, and, if I can pull that off, then I will have access to all the old software they used back then (including the IRIX version of poweranimator). If you want to check out power animator yourself then here is a link to the program, and here is a helpful tutorial. Oke bye take care!