Maya CGFX Shader : Inspired by Guilty Gear Xrd GDC Presentation

Junya C Motomura's gave an amazing GDC presentation of how Guilty Gear Xrd achieved it's incredible 2D look.  And I was inspired to write a variant of what Junya presented as a Maya Cgfx Shader.  Check it out, it's available on Github:

https://github.com/miketon/Maya_Tools/tree/master/Shaders/Toon_xrd

Notable differences :

  * Team Red appears to be straight up using a dot product.  This shader uses a dot product to do a uv lookup on a 1D ramp texture.  Affords more flexibility with changing light-to-shadow palette via texture edit.  Tradeoff is lower perf

  * Team Red actually altered the normals, I'm using vertex color (red channel) to alter the uv lookup.

Future improvements could include other 2D effects such as ziptone and crosshatch shading.


Vim : Modal Text Editor

This post over at Hacker News: Vim the Six Billion Dollar Editor reminded me of just how much I love Vim.  If your day to day involves text-slinging, Vim is a bionic weapon that'll return the investment in understanding it many times over.      

It's modal nature is somewhat astonishing at first : Why would a text editor have a mode that does not input text?  The reason becomes a bit more clear when you consider that about half the time of an average text editing session is spent tumbling to and from characters/words.  And by separating those two modes, Vim effectively doubles the available keystroke space.

Originally, I struggled with a number of false starts with picking up Vim.  Persistance paid off.  And the resources that helped me most were:

  • The built in vimtutor or the browser based openvim .
  • The videos at vimcast.org are a gentle, practical introduction to Vim's day to day use.  These videos got me to the critical point of applying Vim idioms to my real world projects.
  • Beautiful wallpaper by Ted Naleid. (My personal variant is attached.)

I also recommend finding a nice .vimrc :

(The jj macro to switch modes will be kinder on your fingers than having to reach for the escape key.)

Vim is ~20 years old, yet IMHO manages to feel ahead of the curve.