Painting: I’m not sure who the artist is, but its rough, unfinished look doesn’t appeal to me and the overall image isn’t that interesting.

John Stanko: I’m just not a fan. I think the work looks like someone took a photo then painted over it. Add bad composition and you have art similar to the 2E Dark Sun expanded edition covers which I think has no place in D&D products. I really like his work on the Shadar-kai though.

Zoltan Boros & Gabor Szikszai: They’ve done good work for D&D 4E, but in Dark Sun their style is drab and more akin to bible story illustrations (since the sudjects’ dress looks like they’re from Judea). The colors aren’t vibrant and there’s nothing telling the viewer that they are looking at a Dark Sun image (even when the second image is suppose to be the death of Kalak).

Kerem Beyit: Karem’s work is detailed, no doubt about it. He brings real looking images to the table which really draws in the viewer. The second one really shows his talent off and of the two is the only work that says it’s Dark Sun to me despite the first one having a braxat. Maybe other subject matter might bring the Dark Sun feel to his images.

William O’Conner: He’s done a lot of the work for the character races and classes and I like the image he’s done for this particular Dark Sun image. I think having him do the race and class illustrations for Dark Sun will give some good artistic continuity with the other 4E D&D books.

Wayne Reynolds: If I was to pick one artist that was the Dark Sun 4E artist it would be Wayne Reynolds. His work tells you that you are looking at a Dark Sun image. His style is sharp, dare I say spikey, and his subjects are always unique and imposing. His work draws me into the world and shows me what I think Dark Sun should play like. It’s no small wonder then why his work was chosen for the covers of the Dark Sun campaign setting and creature catalog.

I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve fallen into the social networking trap. Am I one step away from telling the world on Facebook what I’m doing any given day? Am I on the verge of commenting on photos of people I haven’t thought of in decades? Social networking in any form is a slippery slope to playing Farmville all day. So in order to bolster my commitment to my own site I think I’ll start posting in both places, the WotC site for the social user’s benefit, and on geneome.com for my own.

The Encounters concept is a good one and conducive to how I like to play: very structured story, short game once a week, game is on rain or shine, and an ample supply of people wanting to play. Of course, the main reason I liked it was because it was set in Dark Sun, so I’m uncertain if I will continue after the 15 week season unless there are more Dark Sun adventures available. The way Encounters is set up allows for people to be able to miss games and not be out of the loop, which is good because it’s hard to imagine being available for all 15 sessions. I also got a DCI number (formerly the RPGA number) so I can feel extra cool/foolish. I say foolish because it is a strange concept to me that playing an rpg needs an organizational structure that warrants numeric identification.

I started playing D&D again specifically because of Dark Sun being announced as a 4E campaign setting. It is my hope that these Dark Sun Encounter sessions will be an nice bridge until the main campaign setting comes, allowing players to get into the setting and bettering the chances of a regular Dark Sun group being established.

With this method I was able to collect every Dark Sun game product produced for 2E even including the books that had small references to Dark Sun (Ravenloft’s Domains of Dread and the Book of Artifacts). I even got the extended and revised Dark Sun books. Not because they were good in anyway, but I wanted to complete collection just in case I had need for them as a reference in the future. Additionally, along with all the Dark Sun novels published during the 2E days, during my last gaming material clean-up I took out all the Dark Sun related articles from the old print Dragon magazines I had (I took a picture of them for all to see!).

Dark Sun 2E articles from the in-print Dragon Magazine.

I still get a nice feeling that I have them since they are hard to come buy and hold fond reminders of the Dark Sun setting.  However, with 4E Dark Sun coming, my possession of these books takes on new meaning. Since new material for the 4E setting won’t be readily available, if I need a map of Tyr, Ur Draxa, some interesting weapons, monsters or adventures, I’ll certainly have a good source of references.

The hip file I’m using is actually based on a workshop that used to be online (but doesn’t appear to be anymore). I used it because it had the exact components to demonstrate everything.

Also, I’m sure my friend Jason will say that he is in no way regal when it comes to compositing, but seeing what he’s been up to lately certainly indicates that he knows what he’s doing .

You can find it on my Houdini page or you can get the asset directly from here.

For those interested, here are the attributes you need to get sprites on points:

1. spriterot: class: point, type: float, size: 1
2. spritescale: class: point, type: float, size: 2
3. spriteuv: class: point, type: float, size: 4 (spriteuv[0] = U-offset; spriteuv[1] = V-offset; spriteuv[2] = U-scale; spriteuv[3] = V-scale)
4. spriteshop: class: point, type: string

Note: Video re-done on 5/25/2009. I thought it could be cleaner and more focused on production nuances so I re-recorded it.

1. The operators at the geometry level (the Python operator and Script SOP) are unable to poll the data. This seems to be due to cooking issues as well as the geometry operators using the hou module only to create/manipulate data.
2. The operator at the object level (the Python operator) does poll the data, however it seems that this polling becomes the dominant process in Houdini and you can do nothing else or stop the polling.

So the conlcusion that can be drawn is that the Python COM method for polling data is not a viable one. The idea of having Houdini write the values of the device to certain parameters and see the results in real-time just doesn’t seem to work. It is certainly possible I am overlooking something however I’ve spent a lot of time on this and with a working and better alternative out there now there isn’t a pressing need to continue. This project has helped me learn a lot about Python in Houdini as well as the common object model so the effort wasn’t entirely without gain. Now it’s time to move on and continue to learn more about Houdini!