This is an interesting music video.
Link (YouTube) |
I can’t believe how many dice are used for these images. Why, there’s probably very nearly enough for a round of Battletech.
I kid. I’m sure it was all CGI. Still, it appealed to my dice fetish.
Autoblography
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
Quakecon 2012 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Raytracing
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
Grand Theft Railroad
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
Not that battletech needs that many dice (I know someone who refuses to use more than 2 for battletech…). 40k needs far more. Up to 120 at the same time.
I don’t think it’s the number of dice that is the problem, but the work needed that would make it seem CGI. If you watch closely, you’ll see that the largest shot doesn’t contain as many dice as one might expect. Past that, you just need the colors, which there were only a few of.
The whole thing might be doable with thirty dollars for the dice and enough time/determination.
It’s not the quantity of dice that makes me suspicious – I just know how easy it would be to reduce a picture to X number of pixels with 1-6 brightness, then replace the pixels with pictures of dice. You’d only need real dice for the close-up shots, which are maybe 36 dice.
I agree with Robyrt: close ups are probably old-fashioned stop-motion with real dice. Wider shots are CGI.
That’s how the White Stripes video for Fell In Love With A Girl was done, except using Lego instead of dice. It’s the video I immediately thought of when viewing the above.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzebYFxuB-A
Mediocrity of the music? Wow, that’s kind for that song.
This is a favorite video of mine – the music, I imagine, was more intended as background than anything you’d listen to and pay full attention to. Either way, I happen to like it, but then I’m the kind of person that can put up with a 45 second song playing on full repeat for an hour. =P
Didn’t care much for the music, but the imagery was fantastic. Very cool.
Some of the dice pixel art I could see being real dice, but the video of people?
Not so much.
A nice causal groove.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, it has been a long while since i played battletech, but when did you need more than 2 dice? I recall 2d6 for the toHit roll and 2d6/1d6 again for hit location with weapons dealing fixed points of damage. What have i missed?
I always thought it was Shadowrun that was the seven pounds of d6 system, although Burning Wheel seems to use a lot of d6s as well…
Lovely video, I think that it could very easily not be cgi at all, just because some people have way too much time on their hands. And well, they do things like this.
In other news, you use 4d6 for battletech, you roll all 4 at the same time (this is assuming you care to have a fast game)
2d6 for the to hit roll, and 2d6 for where it hit. That is all.
@Colonel Slate:
If the Internet has taught me anything, it is that the best things here are the unique efforts of lonely people with far too much time on their hands.
There’s no such thing as “too much time on their hands”.
Colonel Slate: those would be two different pairs of dice, pre-designated as to which is which, right? Otherwise, there’ll be more fudge going on than at a chocolate store owners’ convention…
As a funny followup to this, I was at one of the local non-chain music stores yesterday and I saw a Fujiya & Miyagi record while perusing the fairly small LP section. I found that kind of funny, really. I didn’t pick it up, I just throught it was kinda strange that I saw it after watching this video earlier in the day. Had I not seen the video I wouldn’t have paid it any mind. Life’s little silly moments.
40k dosn’t use THAT many d6s. That is, until that unit of Ork Nobs hits your line.
“Lets see…2 attacks base, plus one for charging, plus one for two weapons, plus one for awesome, x 30 models = HOW MANY DICE!?!”
ehlijen:
There are some situations in Battletech that having a lot of dice really helps to speed up – specifically, things like the Arctic Wolf that fire large numbers of SRMs, or any other weapons that require rolling a zillion hit locations. I thought it was a pretty fair (and funny) statement, although as you mentioned, Warhammer 40k is a much worse offender in this regard.
Hm. Reminds me a bit of the caca-lib, which is a library that converts pictures to ASCII-art (even using color). It might be possible to build a plugin for this lib usind dice…
It’s been many years since the first applications came out that you could feed an image and a number of other images of your choice, and it would automatically create a mosaic of the first picture. I suppose today these programs can do this to whole movies.
The author would just have to find or photographs of dice in the proper angle and feed them to the program, which does the rest.
The video is awesome anyway.
Yes, 40K makes Battletech look like a diceless system. And yes, Orks are probably the worst offenders… but not by much. A properly done Tyranid army is almost as bad…
Oh, and the answer would be 150 dice. Personally, I think the most I’ve seen is just over 100, but 150 at least used to be possible (didn’t they remove the “mob up” rule?).
I’m amused at how quickly the human brain assigns meaning to the pixelated dice images.
That’s a gymnastics chick
Doing a back flip
In a white leotard
She’s totally HAWT
…oops, I think that last part was my own “dice fetish” kicking in…
Zukhramm: “There's no such thing as “too much time on their hands”.”
I’m pretty sure it’s ticking away with their sanity … one might almost say that it’s hard to believe such a calamity.