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So...I promised myself to never include any personal bs posts, or anything that might be perceived as "unprofessional" but I have to vent a little...

So I have tons of personal projects that desperately need my attention, but after putting in 8-9 hours at work every day, and sitting in traffic for another 30-40 min. by the time I get home, there is barely any time to do anything.

I have to sacrifice some of these things:

-playing TF2 (which I love)
-cooking (so I can eat healthy and avoid junk-food)
-working out (since I sit at work all day long)
-making TF2 items (tons of fun, plus I have a gzillion ideas)
-working on personal shorts (this is a 1-2 year process at the very least...full time)
-learning and improving as an artist
-drawing
-reading
-writing
-sleep

I understand that it's all about priorities, but all these things are connected. I know right about now, this is starting to sound like a first world problem. But I can't believe we're so weak that we need to sleep every single day...I have tried those different sleep for x hours/min. wake up, take a power nap, wake up, go to sleep...but after the first week I was so weak and exhausted that I wasted more time recovering. Plus, it's extremely impractical and unrealistic.

I really really wish that I was able to draw 10 hours a day, or write, or model but...
I am however, trying to take every other Friday off from work, so I can have a long weekend and accomplish something.

What sucks, is that it seems like no one cares about anything these days. There is so much content out there, and all people want to do is consume consume consume. No one wants to listen to anyone, or "stop and smell the flowers" as they say. It's just m0ar m0ar m0ar....and, what's the next big thing.

...and yes, I know that I'm not sitting in traffic, that I AM traffic. But what am I supposed to do?
Pretty lost right now...which is actually a lot better than being depressed. : )

Booboo pack

oh hai,

Just made a mini pack. Balloon+Bandaid+Lollipop/pinwheel

-Slowly realizing what is going on with VMTs, groups and hit boxes...this is good.
-I still refuse to burn any calories on lods until I find a "suggested lod chart" from Valve that says something like lod1=75% lod2=60% (of original, or an actual count)...
Besides these ones are pretty low poly. (and you should have a powerful pc)

I'm 'kinda' happy with the rope physics, needs more tweaking and an extra bone + adjustments.
The pinwheel slowly spins + extra bone for ...jiggle, very subtle.

Seems like all the physics stop working the second I start to record anything. No solution yet.
The balloon looks weird after landing or punching, not sure if the attack could be changed to a straight punch, or disabled completely. The balloon looks good in some areas and bad in others, still no idea which VMT settings are mandatory vs. optional..but got the gist.

Overall it was a fun little project, learning more and more with each one.
Was planning to do a couple of flash animations for possible taunts (for fun) but got mad after the bones/physics stopped working w/the video capture. (I might bust out my flip next time)
It was going to be the heavy licking the lollipop while making a loud obnoxious "LAAAHHHHHH" sound and shaking/twitching. And the other one was gonna be him letting go of the balloon and changing his expression form happy to a scary death stare.

Also some lines I REALLY wanted to "perform", and test my mic, but it's way too late to record anything at this hour : (
I'll just leave them here:

Custom medic call: (baby like, sad/almost crying voice)
Doctor! I got booboo. 
Doctor! They did booboo. 

When going up against enemy/after kills:
You did booboo, I return favor.
You did booboo, now you go mimiz.
You gave me booboo, I give you bullets.
Tiny booboo for your life*, I take deal.
(*lives if multiple enemies are killed)

That is all
Thank you for reading and oh yea, thanks for the positive Jar Jitsu feedback. Got my first ever fan mail, definitely saving that one. :)

New Item "Jar Jitsu" [basically bees]

Short Video:

 

For the  2 people that scrolled down; hi.
Budget: 6,500 (actually says 8,000 on another page, not sure which one is correct)
Used: 6,436
Bones: 25
Animation: 48 frames at 30 fps
Time spent: about 2 day

In Flash, there is this thing called symbols, which lets you use the same...basically it's like calling an item from a library to use without duplicating/recreating it. Save on memory, speed etc. I have no idea if Source has something like that, could have cloned bees. The budget per bee would have been 8 times more. Also, I think I saw a "loop individual bone animation" function somewhere on the Valve Developer page. The way I duplicated the wing keyframes is pretty bush league. For the wings I kind of cheated and used the glass material, I wasn't sure how may texture maps I could include per item. the Jarate uses 2 main ones, I was going to add one more at maybe 128x128 to make the wings nicer.

If there is any interest in the item, I'll make some updates/tweaks.
About the actual look, at first I went with wasps, since the sniper is from Australia. But I didn't like the look, so I switched it to a realistic looking bee, then tried a fatter version and really liked the cartoony look. As far as the urine animation, throwing, and "BLEED FOR 6 SECONDS", I'm assuming that'd be a Valve thing.

Due to the modified first/3rd person POV in games, the orientation of items are always off, I was actually really impressed on how they faked the pee being leveled. But I think the "physics" are "turned off" when you are in 1st person, if you look around, the pee will not always look leveled. I think that might have something to do with the dead bee not wanting to bounce up/down when jumping, but I could be wrong.

Overall, an okay weekend. Oh also, the audio [buzzing sound] in the video is something I just got for like $3, I'm sure if Valve were to do it, they'd do it in different languages also since it's a global thing...

Last thing, I was gonna list a bunch of puns or "possible dialogue" for the sniper w/a nice background and TF2 font, but it's 3:22 am and I got work in less than 4 hours, so: "Behave", or "go to your queen" as he's throwing it. ...also really wanted to use like twice as many bones to make the bees look more natural, but that's really easy to do, I'm just not sure if using this may bones is actually acceptable

Thanks for reading. I'm gonna go crawl inside my sleeping bag now.

Workshop link