Yuri Pridestar

<-- Meorw? But if they add Khajiit they'd have to put Skooma into the game as well! =^.-= May your road lead you to warm sands.

I've never really noticed a huge price difference between hotels in Austin TX and Dallas TX; however that being said, the way to get the cost of that down is to see if you can arrange a room block deal with the hotel. Basically if you can (roughly) grantee that you can fill X number of rooms they'll reduce the cost of those rooms for you. Here's some basic info on it (yes its for wedding planning, but the information is still relevant): https://www.theknot.com/content/hotel-room-blocks-101 For a smaller gathering I'd stick with a smaller hotel in one of the suburbs, they're going to be more accommodating for something like this.

You can also get a lighter weight, but free, program called Sculptris from the same people who make ZBrush: http://pixologic.com/sculptris/

Already planning a trip to Japan in early April; so I suspect my travel budget will be all but tapped by that point. Thus, my vote falls squarely in the realm of places I can easily drive to. ^^;

I think it would indeed fall into that category, esp if you want to just project the bitmap of a rendered font. I see where you are talking about, from what it looks like they basically just painted the letters with the normal voxel coloring tool they've demonstrated in other videos. Obviously, you could use the painting tool just like that; but yea, something a bit nicer. And perhaps a bit less frustrating than: *Find single voxel in 3D space, click to color...* *Find single voxel in 3D space, slowly drag mouse to color a line....* *Find single voxel in 3D space, click to color...* .... (ad nauseum) Repeat for other side of ship.... Decide you want to change the color....

Thinking on this further it would be possible to design a system such that you could use a graphics API (GDI+, FreeType, whatever) to write the full text and then extrude the pixels to voxels. Sense this is a mostly one time op, the API need not be super speedy. It isn't drawing the text every frame after all, its just being used to compute a voxel displacement that would just become set once the builder was done. I'm not sure I see the difference between having to come up with the resources for elements vs. having to come up with some for voxels. The elements would be something you could quickly pick from a list as opposed to having to manually build something from voxels. (Maybe there's something about building elements that I'm not aware of?) You are correct in that you likely you couldn't resize an element to be some arbitrary size, but I see nothing that says that having some elements as shortcuts would prevent people from making their own fonts via voxels if they are so inclined. Indeed, I'm sure people would do this regardless; and I don't doubt those will look absolutely amazing. From what I'm gathering that you're suggesting we should be able to project a bitmap of text onto the voxel. Which is also a fine idea. Summary, I would like to be able to quickly decorate a ship with some text w/o having to do lots of fiddly voxel work if I don't have to.

A bitmap for fonts is pretty simple, but unfortunately just making lookup table from the UTF-8 space doesn't do some languages justice. Many of those characters are actually modifiers that modify other characters, and don't print anything at all; also, some languages (e.g. Arabic) work best if you can support ligatures. Also, I was thinking something with a bit more depth and weight to it than a simple bitmap. True, it could; but there's nothing stopping NQ from adding more fonts in the future. There would also be nothing, at least as far as I can tell, that would keep an industrious user from making their own with voxels. I'm thinking more for those folks who just want to save a bit of time and headache from having do it that way. Ideally (to both points), it would be nice if there was a way of typing out letters in voxels with whatever font you wanted. But dealing with fonts outside of bitmaps with simple kerning rules can be a bit of a nightmare.

I think some decorative letter elements, even if it was just the basic Latin alphabet and some additional diacritic marks, would be extremely useful without having to go through the fiddly process of doing this with voxels.