Snow HDR once again

Today I once again tried to take some HDR photos with snow and ice as the main subject. Click the link below to open Picasa album or "read more" to view embedded slideshow:

Snow HDR - another attempt

Today I had very good day. Not only I finally finished studies but also had a chance to capture some very nice photos. It was a sunny day and as there is a lot of snow and ice it was a promise of great pictures. For the very first time I was shooting HDRs using 3 RAWs (up to now I used 3 JPGs). There is some difference I must admit. One of the photos I consider my best HDR so far (guess which one :) ).

So here are the results (click the link to visit Picasa or "read more" to view slideshow here):

Tiny planet technique

This is my first attempt at photography/postprocessing technique known as tiny planet (aka small planet).

Pixelize effect

Remember the times of the first 3D games on PC? Remember that photorealistic graphics? Yeah sure... now run your favorite game from the 90's... not looking good anymore, I guess :) ? About two years back I found an interesting effect on gamedev.net in some of the projects (don't remember the title unfortunately). The game was pretty modern, used all those fancy shaders but it looked as if it was from the times I'm writing about. Huge pixels were virtually everywhere! I decided to implement similar effect in nGENE and did it long time ago. I've never described it here so I'm doing it know. For your information - I'm not the author of the algorithm. I found it somewhere (book or article). Here is the result:

Too much functionality evil

There is one common thing to all game designers of the world I think - they have this very tendency to put all their brightest ideas into the game. Or at least they want to... but luckily sometimes it is possible to force them not to do so (by telling them something is impossible for instance :) ). But lets put jokes aside and talk about this problem seriously. For many a designer, especially beginner ones, putting a lot of functionality and features into the game sounds and is cool. They claim: who wouldn't want to have a choice of 32 character classes, 200 spells and to have 100 enemies to fight with? When I was making my first game (cRPG) several years back I made the same mistake and after nearly 3 years of development decided to abandon the project.

Needs-driven AI

I'm recently putting some serious effort to deepen my knowledge of AI and techniques used for it in games as I came up with some interesting idea for a simple game (of course to be created using nGENE) and at first have to create simple prototype to see if it is playable at all or if it only my wrong impression. So from now on I'll write not only about 3D graphics, effects, photography and diving but also random thoughts and ideas on artificial intelligence :) Of course my concepts may seem a bit immature for regular AI developers so I'm open for suggestions.

Shaped Bokeh photography

During last weekend I decided to try yet another technique of taking photos, known as shaped bokeh. You can read about it in a number of places, eg. here.

Bokeh in general is a term (originating from Japanese) meaning artistic blur in out of focus areas. This effect is achieved by pure photography - post-processing is not necessary.

It looks especially well for weak light sources like lamps on the christmas tree which turn into circles.

Here is an example photo I took:

Water splashes

Yesterday I took some photos of fruit being dropped into the jug filled with water to capture splashes which it causes. The link to the Picasa album is below:

Water splashes

The idea was based on the article I've recently read.