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.
Sorry, didn't find a better title :P
It's starting to gett difficult for me to track all the real-time 3d technologies market. The things in the real-time 3d market is evolving faster and faster … I suddenly see products I haven't seen before etc … but about this maybe more at another time.
Torque from GarageGames is well known. It initially started with the Tribes Engine and Tools for indies. In recent years more products came up like the 2D engine and editor called TGB (Torque Game Builder). A further developed version of the TGE (Torque Game Engine) is called TGEA (Torque Game Engine Advanced).
On their blog they announced that they are focusing on bringing TGEA to a new level with:
- improved art pipeline
- new editors and tools
- web publishing
- improved scripting
- new "starter kits" i.e. for Racing or FPS games
- etc
Sounds interesting, doesn't it? They will name the new version "Torque 3D". The 2D product will be renamed to "Torque 2D". The current TGEA 1.8 beta adds OpenGL support, I guess it's the first step for cross-platform web publishing. If web publishing is going to be free, is not clear yet … maybe not. You can read about it here.
They also announced that the price for Torque 3D will be higher but it's not yet set too:
So what price makes sense? What's commensurate with the value Torque provides? Again, I don't know the answer to this yet. It's not $150 / seat and it's not $295 / seat. Perhaps it's $1000. Perhaps it's more. I look at products like Flash ($699) or 3ds Max ($3495) / Maya ($4995) and compare them with Torque.
TGE never attracted me seriously. But maybe with their next generation of tools, it might become an interesting alternative too.
Aw, this was getting another draft starting to remain forever a draft. So certainly no news for many of you, but for the rest, here we go:
More and more people are involved into interactive real-time 3D. Actually not so few articles of mine (like this one here) are dealing with this aspect, so I am kinda repeating myself … I hope you don't mind too much, hehe
Interactive real-time 3D is getting easier to use and even produce - games are driving the hardware and software industry intensively. Like other technologies that are initially only affordable for few, over years things may become part of the everyday life of many people.
Besides products and platforms of big companies, solutions like Torque and Unity3D from smaller companies are playing an interesting role in all this …
Gamasutra reported early this month that Criterion Co-Founder Lau-Kee joined the Unity3D team as adviser. He says:
The last several years has brought a plethora of entrants into the video game tools & middleware sector, but Unity is the only company I have found that has the technology, the people and the strategy to be truly transformational
Moreover
Mark my words, the democratization of the games industry has begun
For additional information you can read this interview or David's blog, where he also states
[...] our userbase tripled, there’s probably more than 10 times more games out with Unity now than in 2007 [...] we could afford to more than double the team [...]
There is another interesting interview at developmag, entitled 3D ehr One-For-All.
I like this passage:
[...] they absolutely understand that they are answerable to the community of Unity users. You just need to take a look at the Unity forums – what you see there is a true community, vibrant, thriving and creative. [...]
[...] in this sense Unity is more like using, say, Photoshop than a game engine [...]
This is also visible in Unity3D IRC user channel as it peaks now at 50 people! Compare this to #virtoolsdev's peak which was around 16!
On Virtools forum someone once said, that real-time 3d tech is not like i.e. photoshop. But if you consider where Autodesk is aiming for, we will probably have more real-time 3d applications that will be like i.e. photshop! In Silverlight/Blend 3D is one type of asset like any other. Real-time 3D slowly becomes a standard media asset like video or photos!
Harrison from Atari said last year:
[...] from an Atari perspective… I think we would want to work with creators of all types, and that's why I'm so interested in Unity, because it does democratize development
He also says:
Managing the funnel of recruitment, training, educating, and getting the skills shortage, skills gap closed, is kind of an industry-wide problem…
This is interesting, because I had the same idea for a while about Virtools as I thought that Virtools once was in the position to do the same. Although I intentionally started to post less suggestions, feedbacks, bug-reports etc. - due my frustrations of how one-sided this all turned out to be - I still suggested Dassault Systemes on their board last summer to use Virtools to get people in the boat, for that there is a recruitment pool for 3DVia mp!
You know, just the idea of democratizing 3D via mass and not premium markets - basically what the user-base actually understood under 3D-For-All!
The GarageGame guys share the vision:
In 1999, myself and my partners started GarageGames with the goal of democratizing development, and brought a low cost game engine to market. We started calling shareware authors Indies, and changed the landscape of Indie and low end development.
I already mentioned InstantAction, the web3D game portal. It's something that once would have been possible with Virtools too - in theory - but the vision lacked and pricing model was not permitting 3rd party teams to do so. Now InstantAction has
[...] managed to cross the 1 million members mark only 9 months after we covered their launch [...]
[...] 2009 will be a big year for this service. IA will increasingly become a great place for Indies to make money
This posting could be considered to be a response to this comment of RS. He mentions esperient Creator and Maya Real-Time SDK and asks for opinions… here we go:
Maya's Real-Time SDK
I remember the news about Maya's Real-Time SDK but I never had a look at it in order to see what actually it is, at that time. After so many years (6 - 8?) it doesn't seem to have had any impact or long-term visibility. I guess it's ok to say, that today it's not a real option. A good documentation and a good online community helps a lot during production, thus these are things to consider. So let's have loot at the other product mentioned …
esperient Creator - intro
esperient Creator actually was once Cosmos Creator by Radish Works ( in 2003?). I remember that I once downloaded a trial and had a look at it. I felt more comfortable with Virtools therefore I never dived deeper into it. Already at that time it had plenty of toolbars! Here's a screenshot from it that I found on the old Radish Works site. Compared to the actual version, it looks nearly the same:
Later it became acquired my Righthemisphere in 2004 and renamed to Deep Creator. I think they raised the prices, too. GameDev.com has a little review about it: Deep Creator 2.2
In 2007 rights were transfered back to the original author(s) and they released in 2008 esperient Creator 3.0. Recently they released 3.5. So this thing is under active development.
Here, a part of the little story behind the name (taken from their blog):
The name is based on the Latin, Spero, meaning ‘I hope’ that has come into present day French as ‘Espere’ (vb) and Italian as ‘Speranza’ (n). So, in addition to meaning that we provide hope to our customers that we can solve their content and publishing problems, it also has the similarity to the word ‘Experience’ which is a great reflection of the team!
Now let's go into product details, we start with the …
Impressions from the online marketing material
Interesting aspects extracted from the available online material
- cheap seat prices (currently around 500 US $)
- free runtime viewer (no additional publishing fees): PC and webplayer (IE only)
- C-like scripting
- looks like it has break points (p.s. I was wrong, it's macro recording)
- syntax highlighting
- powerwall support
- built-in physics (Newton engine)
- upcoming feature: procedural image creation ( with CUDA support?)
- built-in primitives
- real time reflections, SSAO, advanced render to texture, object grips on 2D and 3D objects
- HLSL Shaders
- Animation Timeline Editor
Ok so far for the theory and the promotion material. Let's have a hands-on their demo!
Editor Window Management
The GUI has a standard windows look. It uses a couple of toolbars, that are rearrangeable. Very nice is that it uses docking panes, so you can arrange your layout like in Visual Studio and other modern application. Right-click on the title region of a pane allows to convert it to a register tab, a floating pane or a docked pane. Making there the pane to tab, puts it into the main, central position as tab. But you can also manually drag a pane into a center of another pane in order to add it there as tab. Tearing off docked panes requires a long drag off, which is a bit less intuitive.
On the left side you have a docked toolbar that allows to show/hide specific panes like script editor, scene materials etc.
The modified layout is automatically saved and used on the next startup. Moreover you can save and load UI layouts to/from files. In addition to that you can use different MS Office themes. I guess it's using a 3rd party MFC extension that brings all this functionality. Unfortunately none of the themes is really appealing to me. The grey of the default theme is not dark enough (I guess especially here under vista). The "Office 2007 Obsidian" style is dark but the toolbars are using a brighter background colour and therefore pop into your eyes - distracting. I guess adding a couple of variations around this theme might be very satisfying.
Viewport Navigation
The viewport navigation is pretty easy:
MMB = Pan
Alt+MMB = Rotate
RMB = Zoom
I like it. In addition to these there navigation icons are on the right top corner of the 3D window. You hold LMB on such an icon in order to do the viewport translation. Similar to Lightwave and maybe also Cinema4d (?).
To change the view to another perspective you can use 3ds max like shortcuts like (P)erspective and (F)ront. The viewport can be switched to a 4-view mode using the space key. Dragging the middle of the 4 views allows to resize the views on the fly. You can also easily drag them to a border and get 2 views this way - works better than in 3ds max, hehehe
I haven't found a "rotate around selection" mode. There is a "focus/zoom on selection" command but it's not bound to any key. You can define it via the settings, though you don't have total liberty of what key (-combo) to use. But CTRL+F, as example, works.
Selections
There are several selection modes like single-object, rectangle, cycle, polygon etc. Using the 'q' keyboard key, you can toggle between the currently active transformation tool and the selection mode, but you can also select while using the transformation too.
Area selection tools seem a bit hard to use because if they hit an object right on the first click, they select that one and ignore the dragged area. If you are in transformation mode you actually start i.e. moving the object under the mouse. Thus it makes area selections not that solid.
Selections can also be done in the "Secene Objects" window. Selections in the Viewport and the "Scene Objects" window are in sync.
Transformations inside the Viewport
The editor has 3d gizmos for doing in place transformation like scale, rotate and translate. The gizmo itself acts a bit like a "universal gizmo" - arrow-heads do translations, dragging the white connectors enables the rotation mode and using the center does a uniform scaling. Something very good is, that they have handles for 2-axis manipulation, too. I think it's save to say that it's more like "3ds max" than Maya.
There is also something called "grippers" and which are similar to 3ds max's "manipulators". They are gizmos that allow to modify object properties inside the viewport. For example the angle of a sliced sphere or it's resolution/tessellation.
Several snapping modes are available: grid, face, edge, vertex, pivot, angle etc. When snapping to a face or edge, it's not always clear what's going on - some visual cues would help.
Changing between different modes otherwise is not always intuitive. Sometimes I got into the pivot-move mode although it was not intended.
There are two coordinate-systems: world and local. Local transformations via the gizmo seem not always to work properly.
Material Editor
The material editor allows you to edit and create new materials. On the left side there is the list of materials and on the right side are the properties of the selected material. Unfortunately is the right side not scrollable, so if you dock that window at the bottom with not much height, you won't be able to access all the properties.
Nice is that you have a quick access to the textures via a texture-browse. Unfortunately it seems a bit slow and there is no mechanism to classify your texture content (which could speed up loading times, too). It combines all texture directories, i guess. Using the asset browser you have a better overview and control.
A material consists of several "stages" which can be added at will (up to 8). This is nice because if gives probably more flexibility and control than i.e. the old Virtools Texture-Effect approach.
Something that I do not understand is why they use biiig buttons for the colours. There is a coloured, filled rectangle showing the actual colour, why not use that as button and have this big thingy taking screen space? Also, choosing a colour inside the colour-picker dialog does not change the colour of the material immediately, one has to close the dialog with OK. Interactive colour tweaking is thus not possible and makes adjustments more time-consuming.
Final words on the editor
The editor has some strong points: transformations gizmos, layout and theme customisation etc. Although they have a pop-up slider widget for interactive number adjustings, colour adjusting is not interactive. Moreover some areas require a minimum space which reduces the editor layout flexibility artificially. Funnily, there is no "recent files" list. On the other hand there light-setups presets! Thus "not perfect, but the overall impression of the editor GUI is good!".
Ok, that was a lot of talk about the GUI editor itself. But this is how I approach such products. If you are under time pressure, you need solid tools and workflows. Best is, if you can "re-use" some of your knowledge from other tools. In this case being 3ds-max-like or Maya-like, in some areas, helps
Scripting
I am kinda sorry, but this section is going to be very short.
There is an interesting looking script editor. I think it uses the free source code editing widget called Scintilla. Thus it's probably going to be a smooth editing experience. Scripting can be done in Lisp or CScript. If you look at the image below, you can see in the top left corner a list of callbacks. On the top right, there are global variables. For example you can reset your variables inside the the "SceneBegin" callback.
I was looking for a way to add "custom scripts" to objects but it seems that there is no such concept like attachable scripts or components. Besides using the callbacks, you can add something called "animations". Here, animations are not only keyed transformation data, but also "behaviour" code. For each scene object, there is an "animation" register tab. You can add new 'animation behaviours' from a list of pre-made behaviours.
I am not sure, but it seems that you cannot script custom 'animation behaviours'. Thus you need to combine callback scripts with the pre-made animation scripts. In addition to that you can add "separators" to divide the list into sections, but not do any real grouping to create re-usable components.
If you look at the scripts you may notice that there is a lot of state checking going on. This clearly shows the problem of not having a higher level logic-management, or not being able to attach custom behaviours that can be enabled or disabled from a 3rd, a 'managing', component.
Non-programmers probably can create some basic interaction without the need of programming knowledge as the 'animation behaviour' parameters allow to select events and targets. But I guess at some moment things can get a bit messy. For scripters, the environment looks a bit inflexible, restricted. You can add custom c++ plugins, but I don't know how much this helps.
Please note, that all these are personal impression - I might be wrong OR the way it works is just fine for you,
Resume
I am not sure for what kind of target audience this is aiming for. It's a bit of everything: a bit of 3D DCC (Digital Content Creation) like 3ds max and a bit of interactivity authoring. It certainly a couple of times cheaper than Quest3D or Unity3D and plenty times cheaper than Virtools. Thus it might be a solution for little projects that only need basic interactions.
If I made mistakes, please correct me. If you are producing with this product, please feel free to tell us about your experiences. For all the others, I hope was an interesting read and helps.
Autodesk seems to follow a strategy to go deeper into the "real-time, interactive 3D authoring tools" market.
The acquisition of Softimage was completed before yesterday (18th Nov.). In a public FAQ it says the following (emphasis added):
[..] It is hoped that this acquisition will promote Autodesk’s growth in the fastgrowing games market, and accelerate its strategy to deliver real-time, interactive 3D authoring tools for games, film and television. As well, it is hoped that the acquisition will broaden the appeal of Autodesk products into the hobbyist/game ‘modder’ segment. [...]
[...] it is hoped that the acquisition will accelerate Autodesk’s effort to build the next-generation of real-time, interactive 3D authoring tools.[...]
One of the key competitors is Dassault Systemes. But also the overall evolution is that interactive 3D becomes part of other products - as seen in Photoshop or Microsofts XAML/WPF. Autodesk clearly mention this in that FAQ too:
[...] The 3D competitive landscape is fast evolving. Relatively new competitors, from Google to Adobe, are entering the 3D market, and others such as Dassault Systèmes are reinforcing their position. The production pipeline is rapidly expanding beyond simple digital content creation (DCC) tools. [...]
A bit strange is this statement:
The Softimage product line will benefit from Autodesk’s scale and research and development (R&D) investment capabilities, providing new opportunities for innovation and interoperability
It is said that XSI 7 with it's new ICE technology, was a nice release. Do they really need the R&D teams of 3ds max and Maya? They probably wanted to say that they can now do a big remix with the hope of heavy synergies.
So we have some big key players going into interactive 3D, but what about the smaller ones? Gamebryo expands to the casual game market … and tiny Unity3D expands to the MMO market. CryEngine2 goes into architecture and public viewing. Interesting times, everybody expands to other market-segments.
Some random 3d related things:
a low cost 3D paint package is 3D-Coat. It's a bit like an indie version of Z-Brush oder Mudbox. Some people on CGTalk were very sceptic but after giving it a test-drive many of them like it. Some even love it's retopology feature and use 3D-Coat complementary to Z-Brush.
This procedurally animated 3D spider in flash is very nice! I guess in the next years there will be more and more 3D in flash.
The results of the Ogre3D user survey 2008 has been released. Here is one quote of it
Just over 63% of the respondents were using OGRE either for their own enjoyment or as part of their studies, with just over 50% of that group intending to go commercial with their products later. 29% of respondents were using OGRE for commercial products, with 83% of that group producing closed source products. The remaining 8% of OGRE users were mostly dominated by Academic / Scientific users, with a small handful of government users.
Zign Track is a low-cost facial tracking software. It exports to BVH. No idea how well it works but for that price it might worth an evaluation. The following picture is from a demo video:
Unity Technologies has released extensive statistics from user's hardware where the Unity3D webplayer installation was successfull. They say that it's based on 3 millions data entries. The target audience is the 'casual gamer. It has already been said that this group has older, low-end hardware and usually do not update their system (like drivers etc). Aras (the main guy behind this) resume is:
Casual machines: capabilities quite okay, performance low, low, low. That’s life.
Something that surprised me is, that Mac is still a tiny market share (~ 2.6%). In Berlin's Bars and Cafés I mainly see people with Macbooks - it really increased a lot in the past years. On the other hand, in July, at the Paris airport I mainly saw PC-based notebooks. Their owners were mostly business men.
Blade3D is a XNA based authoring tool. I had a look at - i think over a year ago. It seems to do nice progress and they are currently working on a webplayer. In addition to that it also has a visual scripting system which you can use i.e. to define particle-behaviours. Besides this there are some nice feature like: PSSM shadows, spline-based roads and rivers, terrain engine, foliage rendering and physics.
Very interesting is their pricing model - it's a monthly fee per seat - without any up-front fee. I wonder if you can pause payment for a couple of months - i.e. between two Blade3D projects - and resume later when required.
There is another tool that is XNA based, but last time I checked I really didn't like the usability: Visual3D.Net. Something interesting though might be it's globe-like terrain engine.
Some more general infos
