machai-umno

Casting took considerably longer than planned, two days of fussing with new molds and adjusting vent and sprue size. I suppose it’s to be expected but it sure is frustrating. Because of the current production rate, I have concluded that I need to move this out of house sooner than later and will be working toward that end. Until then I had to choose a way to sell, that would allow the greatest number of people a shot at purchasing a kit... I settled on the auction format. I know it’s not ideal and bidding may go over the suggested retail but the market supply and demand will set the price and if there is extra profit, it will go straight to the contract caster to get that end rolling. I refuse to take pre-orders because I will not sell something that is not in a box and ready to ship.... Been there, done that, and won’t do it again. There are just too many things that can go wrong, and I would prefer not to anger my customers with unreasonable wait times. I apologiz...

I will have two and possibly three Leviathan Mortis available by the 31st. When they are packed and ready to go I will make an announcement here. I may list one of them on eBay in auction format, to allow those who may have missed the chance at the first run to purchase a kit if they feel they cannot wait until the production rate is up. The first few models will be a Limited Release Edition, and will include the Crusader Head and a right hand Vulkan Cannon in addition to the normal Mortis head, Scythe and Claw. The limited Edition Mortis will only be available for a short time, likely five kits. After that the Vulkan and Crusader head will be available separately. Total Package Value: $400.00  ($350.00 Mortis/ $45.00 Vulkan/ $5.00 Crusader head) Limited Edition Price: $375.00 Production will be rather spotty; I need to cast up two for Pat over at Senji Studios, a Mortis and when the molds are done, a Crusader, to take care of a trade for the wonderful buildings he made....

While I was waiting for the re-printed part, I took the time to hack and slash through the website. It is still not completely done, the Game page needs a lot of work and I threw together the pics for the Vulcan Cannon page. All in all, it loads faster and is far kinder to maneuver through. You still cannot buy anything; I have the PayPal buttons set so it will not complete the transaction without stock on hand. No rest for the wicked... I start benching the re-print tomorrow and molds to follow. Stay tuned! I will update the Blog with a final release date when I have it... Just keep in mind there may only be a couple of kits available on the day of release.

Instructions for the first release are complete. That was about as much fun as a root canal, but at least its done.... Enjoy! Just click on the images below

My go-to guy for prints, Moddler , is out of the office for the next couple of days and slammed with work. I will likely have the re-printed part on Friday. I will need to bench the part and make a new family mold. Unfortunately, this will slightly delay the first release. It will take approximately 10 days to get everything done once I have the item in my grubby little hands. Rest assured, workers in my high tech production facility will be flogged daily until this problem has been resolved.

In a recently released paper, Jeroen D. Stout (creator of Dinner Date ) proposes an interesting theory on the relashionship between player and avatar. It is related to the things that have been discussed previous post about immersion, so I felt it was relevant to bring it up. The full paper can be gotten from here . I will summarize the ideas a bit below, but I still suggest all to read the actual paper for more info! Most modern theorists of the mind agree that it is not single thing, but a collection of processes working in unison. What this means is that there is no exact place where everything comes together, but instead the interaction between many sub-systems give rise to what we call consciousness. The most clear evidence of this is in split brain patients , where the two brain-halves pretty much form two different personalities when unable to communicate. This image of a self is a not fixed thing though and it is possible to change. When using a tool for a while it often begin...

It has been quite the journey getting here, but it is very satisfying to hold the final model. Please accept my apologies about the website, I know it's broken... I just have not had time to get to it. It's on the to-do list. I keep the blog up to date so this is where you can find all updates until I can sort out the website. As expected, it has been many long days to prep the molds for production. I had really hoped to show a nicely painted model on Pat's wonderful diorama but time will not allow that right now, I’ll have to come back to it when the Crusader is ready for the build. I wanted to make sure my customers could see a real world model and not just a CAD render, so primer will have to do for now.   Although I prefer to take my time on a build, I assembled this kit in just a few hours, skimping on much of the pre prep work and clean up so I could get cracking on the instructions. I did find one part that will need to be re-printed and new molds made so there may ...

So just wanted to give a quick info on a brand new feature: light box masks. When placing lights in some rooms, it is common that light bleeds through walls, and show up in other rooms close by. The obvious way to fix this is to add shadows, but shadows can be pretty expensive (especially for point lights), so it is not often a viable solution. In Amnesia we solved this through careful placement, yet bleeding can be seen in some places. To fix this I added a new feature that is able to limit the lights range with a box. This way the light can cast light as normal but is cut off before reaching an adjacent area. This pretty much does the job of shadows, but is much cheaper. It turned out to be pretty simple to implement as well. In the renderer, different geometrical shapes are used to render lights (spheres for point lights and pyramids for spots) which make sure the light only affects needed pixels. To implement the masking, these shapes where simply exchanged for a box and then with ...

I have an announcement to make. I am dumping pre-pass lighting. A couple of weeks ago I started to remaking the renderer from a deferred shader to a pre-pass lighting one. Directly after implementing it, I wrote this post . At first, pre-pass lighting sounded great: faster light rendering and more variation in materials. Having seen that companies such as Crytek and Insomniac Games used it, I thought it would be the next logical step to take. However, even as implemented it, the problems began. The first one was that specular lighting has to be made through hacks or something that makes it closer to deferred lighting. The next was that implementation become more messy. I suddenly needed to redraw all objects in two separate passes and this made the material and shader code harder to maintain. Normal deferred shading has this nice design where all material info is rendered in one pass to one buffer. But in pre-pass lighting, this spread out and makes more annoying to add new stuff and ...