A few weeks ago, I got back from another trip to Japan, and no less than two typhoons ripped through the country during my wonderful vacation. Thankfully I had a friend who lives in Japan, so I could use his place to keep my stuff.... Such…

Well, my imitation DFM didn't turn out the way I thought it would, but I was still able to figure out why my original idea didn't work and why. And once I did, all it took was a bit of a spin on the concept and I was mostly able to use it …

My final stab at this all was taking the spring forces I used earlier, but using them differently. Before, I used them to tweak the position of the ship, then fudged its heading to make things look right... but this made my plane behave so…

The next thing I tried to do to make one plane follow another was to base its movement off the same sort of movement a chase camera does. It didn't turn out as expected, though.Previous Post:Basic Dogfight Mode (1): Basic Yaw/Pitch Adjustm…

The simplest way you can do DFM is... honestly not that difficult, as long as you know some basic vector math.Previous Post:Basic Dogfight Mode (0): Overview - Memories of Melon PanIn Assault Horizon, there was that circle in your HUD, and…

If any of you have played Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, you'll know that you're forced into this thing called Dogfight Mode (DFM) every so often to take out enemy aces and such. I'm not gonna get into whether or not it was good for the seri…

So, it looks like the MIQ concert at AWA is happening at the same time as the Idolm@ster panel. Dang it, now I gotta choose, but... well, sorry guys, I'm leaning towards the concert.On the other hand, I have three or four costumes to take …

Ever had one of those moments where you puzzle over something hard, then let sit for a while because you can't figure it out, then eventually forget about it?Around nine months ago, I started on a singable translation of Uzuki Shimamura's …

After a good nine months of these lyrics being complete but for two lines, I finally had a bolt of inspiration for them today. There are some places that I feel could be improved, but I feel good about the lyrics as a whole. I'll save why …

Uuuuuuugh...So like, the Suzumiya Haruhi series is being taken off Crunchyroll in... 17 hours, so I felt the need to watch the second season since I have yet to do it. But how's it been going?Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody: Interesting enough.Endles…

Oh, my little con has grown up to be a real con.Some of my friends were banking on AWA this year to be a real con again, and reserved hotel rooms early. I'm glad I decided to get in on it too, since now we've got real guests. For a long ti…

Previous Post:Imitating the Canvas Engine (12): Applying the Shadow Fill Effect - Memories of Melon PanGeez, so that was a lot of stuff I wrote about shader programming. What all did we go over? Depth blur, using a Gaussian blur Nonphotore…

Previous Post:Imitating the Canvas Engine (11): Directional and Gaussian Blur - Memories of Melon PanWe're down to the last and final step!Right now, our rendered scene has a canvas texture on it, it's framed like it was drawn in a sketchb…

Previous Post:Imitating the Canvas Engine (10): Light Direction Transformations - Memories of Melon PanUltimately, our scene shadow mask will tell us where to put shadows and how much. Since we want to have the shadows bleed off the edges …

Previous Post:Imitating the Canvas Engine (9): Transforming the Shadow Map to Screen Space - Memories of Melon PanThe shadow bleed effect makes use of some simple blurs, but before we get into them, let's start thinking about what we want …

Previous Post:Imitating the Canvas Engine (8): Constructing the Shadow Map - Memories of Melon PanThe way most shadow maps work, they do a simple calculation to find a pixel in screen space. If it's in shadow, darken the pixel.But the Canv…

Previous Post:Imitating the Canvas Engine (7): Basic Shadow Mapping - Memories of Melon PanThe first thing to do is to render the scene from the point of view of the light. We've got everything in the scene in world space already, but we'r…

Previous Post:Imitating the Canvas Engine (6): Edge Rendering - Memories of Melon PanOkay... now for the hard part.If you look at the shadows in Valkyria Chronicles, they all have a penciled-in effect going on. By all appearances, shadows …

Previous Post:Imitating the Canvas Engine (5): Basic Edge Detection - Memories of Melon PanNow, I've written a lot about detecting edges, and working with a texture that only contains the normal and depth information in the scene, so it's …

Previous Post:Imitating the Canvas Engine (5): Basic Edge Detection - Memories of Melon PanThe edge detection algorithm I used is pretty basic. You could use any number of ways to make your edges, some more complex than others, but for sim…

Previous Post:Imitating the Canvas Engine (3): The Canvas Effect - Memories of Melon PanNow that we've got what color the pixel's supposed to be, we can do the little uncolored border effect that Valkyria Chronicles uses. This brings us to…

Previous Post:Imitating the Canvas Engine (2): Normal Maps and Depth Blur - Memories of Melon PanNow we're at the point where we take the scene and make it look like it's been drawn in one of Welkin's sketchbooks. Honestly, I may have been…

Previous Post:Imitating the Canvas Engine (1): Basic Shading Effects - Memories of Melon PanMy depth blurring algorithm is exceedingly simple, like a lot of the parts of my imitation canvas renderer. Some people might be more familiar with…

Previous Post:Imitating the Canvas Engine (0): Overview - Memories of Melon PanNow I'm coming to realize, I already made a post about basic cel shading and how I used it.Giving Haku a little light - Memories of Melon PanThe version used in…

I think I'm at the point where I can share what I've been doing over the past few months, amid figuring out how to convert models from MikuMikuDance to XNA and writing these posts.Yeah, that title is a pretty bold statement, so let me just…

Before I actually complete what I was doing before with the new Haku model, I decided to fit in lighting calculations to see what the model looked like if lighting was applied. It changes a few things.First, the model again without any lig…

This has been a bit of a mystery for me for a while.Everyone knows MikuMikuDance, right? That program that people make Vocaloid and Idolm@ster dance routines with? You can convert all the PMD models that are made for it to other formats. X…

I've had her for a while, but I've been slacking on making this post.It's Uzuki! Following in the footsteps of Rin, the Cute iconic Cinderella Girl has a figure now too!She actually comes with an exchangeable face part, and the figure has …

With the demo of Freedom Wars out, I figured I'd give it a spin to see how it played. The game could be pretty good, but there's some things that based on what I saw, could make me enjoy the game more.First off, the game plays... well, you…