[45] L'lasons de Aether ver Beinags #27

Working within the paradigm of tracker software, I began more seriously learning OpenMPT, which is the most popular one, given its compatibility and export capability with old/obscure formats. I wasn't able to make anything substantive sequence-wise, but I did do some stuff I can show regarding samples.

Whereas Famitracker uses automated soundchip instruction settings for its instrument, OpenMPT uses wave data as a part of its instrument structure. Because the wave data used in most popular tracker formats is uncompressed, the song can grow in size pretty quickly if you aren't careful.

My favorite example that I've done so far is recording a sample from meowsynth (middle C note), resampling it, clipping it, and reducing its bit depth to wring as much data out of it as I can. This results in a literal 1kB file, which is surprisingly versatile and faithful to the original, without sacrificing efficiency.

This is that sample.

It's really, really short.

However, I can employ a this technique, where I only need to preserve the start of the sample, and some of its mid section.

The trick is isolating the pattern the synth makes once it starts going.

You can see quite clearly that there's a pattern.

And by using the magic of tracker instruments, I can make that sample sound like this:

It doesn't sound unnatural, save for the bit depth reduction artifacts.

As for 3d stuff, I was able to do the preliminary modeling for doing the texturing, but not the texturing itself. The reason for this is that I didn't know the tutorial for texturing I was watching included the reference image shown in the video. So I basically just modeled my own based on a reference image I found of a kitchen knife.

I started with a plane and carefully extruded, merged, cut, and warped vertices until I traced a good outline of the reference image:

Once that was done, I needed to add some depth to it, as at this point it was paper thin:

And so I did:

And here's a more detailed view of the area I spent the most time working on:

Finally, here's a diagram that helped be better understand the shape of a kitchen knife, as I couldn't find any good reference images that showcased the specific design concept I was looking to know more about (it's the distal taper one.)

The knife would look a lot worse if I didn't know this was a thing.