I ran out of webspace on the webhoster where this blog is installed. After nearly 4 years and 177 published blog entries (and 58 drafts, oops).
As I am not so happy anymore about the speed thus I am not going to upgrade here but move back to my old hoster, where I started 10 years ago. This blog is my 4th-generation web-presence. I bought my very first webspace for my first site in feb. 2000 - that's 10 years of "Dom in da web" - a decade already! Oh dear!
They just upgraded my package over there so it has databases, too. Plus plenty more of webspace! Moving everything might take some time, but I hope not.
If you are not following me on Twitter, then you may not know about these links, yet:
PTex, free multi-res UV mapping API from Disney. It also require NO manual UV unwrapping! I guess this tech inside a modeling app or sculpting app with baking to low-res textures ability, would also be a very nice thing for game dev or any other real-time content creation!
Eve Online is a pretty hardcore sci-fi MMO game. The developers sometimes give some 'behind the scenes' on their blogs. Here is one about their recently deployed new planet rendering method.
Until the blog moved, happy 3D !
The Animago Award is a German CGI Award which has become more and more international in the past years. This time it took place in Potsdam, near Berlin at the Babelsberg Studio. This year there was also a conference which was mostly organized by the reseller Lichtblick.
I've to say that I was very positively surprised by the conference, I enjoyed it a lot - therefore thumbs up! It also allowed me to see some people again. For example Hanno who now works for Naughty Dog and previously at CryTek. He did a talk about Uncharted 2, I've a few notes maybe I can remember something from it … hm… I can barely read 'em 
… sorry will be rough!
Creating a Character Driven Game - Hanno Hagedorn, Naughty Dog
- 8000 triangles per hero head
- no manual low-res creation, reduction automated for faster iteration
- Mudbox and Photoshop used (for texturing?)
- I think he sad something about how to have a better look for the skin. I think they controlled the red tones via an extra channel that did the masking. Maybe that was mixing insidea shader via a Fresnel term or so.
- extra ambient lightmap butthat maybe not used in close-up shots (cinematics)
- they used 2 normal maps
- one rough
- one for the skin shader to produce specular highlights
- texture variations for wet/snowy cloths and skin that got blended in dynamically
- dynamic wrinkles using ambient occlusion and normal maps that got dynamically blended in
- hair had around 4000 polygons (i guess triangles)
- per frame light baking for the skin,
- (maybe at 256er resolution)
- which got blurred
- my notes say "red blur edge", not sure what it means
- faces were hand modelled
- audio (voice) and body motion-cap was done at the same time
- better quality of voice acting and sync
- extra cameras to record facial expressions
- facial animation was manually animated using the reference material from the mo-cap sessions
- all deformations with bones no blend shapes (no morphing)
- 76 bones per face
Some more general infos
- level editor and cut scenes inside maya
- pre-process/-production 6 months
- production 1,5 years
- no producers due very experienced and skilled team = flat hierarchy
- PS3 only game
- access to Sony's PS3 expert team
Crowd Simulation - Paul Kanyuk, Pixar
Another interesting talk was from Paul, TD at Pixar. He explained various crowd simulations done for films like Ratatouille, wall•e and Up.
- Secondary animations via signal processing
- creating secondary animations procedurally can become quite processing intensive
- using signal processing on various inputs (transformation, animation etc) creates nice effects at much lesser costs
- example Robots stopping suddenly with spring-like overcompensations
- but phases (i.e sinus phases) should not shift
- massive was used with Maya and Marionette
- flow-fields on terrain to help brains via color maps
- 6 short animation clips
- data transport between different tools (massive, marionette etc) via invisible bones
- different rules combined via weighting
- avoidance
- leader follow
- helps to tweak, fine tune behavior
- 200 to 1000 rules for foreground actors (? hm not sure about my notes here!)
Well, so far for now. These were the highlights. As said a bit rough but maybe you got one or another thing for you out of it.
Happy new year to you all !!
I hope you had a nice transition and a rather relaxing than stressful Christmas time!
2009 was an interesting year. After 4 1/2 years I stopped working at bogengang. As the Unity authoring environment finally became available for PC, I upgraded to the Pro version and did an interesting project with it during the summer. I'll blog about that at a later time, too. Currently I am working with engineers and psychologist who are researching usability, stress and distraction topics for industries like automotive, aviation, logistics etc. I've already created 3D simulations for them in the past and hopefully we can start this year to bring it to a new level. I've tons of ideas … !!
Another good news is that my girl friend and I got - after 8 1/2 years - engaged, yay! It started in France on the great Dune of Pyla and last week we've been there again and went for the next step! The dune is a nice place at the west coast of France - out of the sudden there is this 105 meters high dune. It was very windy but we enjoyed it a lot. Of course we ran down the steep side and we all fell down and then rolled down rest of the 'sandy hill'. After that we had sand everywhere ….
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