Blogs

As part of the work for the START, EU-funded project, we did a quick prototype for how that OpenSim-based project could be moved over to Unity3D. There are a lot of advantages to working and deploying in Unity3D and this was a test to see how we could handle collaborative content creation. You can see in the image below that I added the "Love" for today. 

Now, I may just be an old fool, but I've been looking at games like World of Warcraft, Rifts, Eve online, and the rest, and have to ask: Where did the story go?

We recently completed the first phase of work for the Royal Opera House Education team which consists of a set of 3D, interactive learning games, new videos and a content management system (watch the showcase video clip below).

Welcome to the first in what I hope will be a series of tutorials on a wide range of subjects. From here, I will discuss the how and why of my own professional dev processes, and try to share them with others so they can see how I do my own work.

How do you make a 3D digital character look human real enough online? You first need to know what you are aiming for and then how much effort is needed to get there. In trying to break-down the key factors in avatar/NPC human character realism we can look at 4 major approaches to digital realism:

I sometimes forget that non-technical people just don't always immediately know why Drupal is so cool.  

Explaining that it is opensource and has an energized community living and loving it, doesn't necessarily spark excitement to people that just want a great website.  

Well, after taking an extended break, I have tackled the goal of learning enough C# to be functional. 

Sunday, I was trying to get a bunch of text files into a usable format for my Kindle.  I grabbed Calibre from  http://calibre-ebook.com/ and tried it, but could not easilly get a good index from it to use for easy referance.

Monday morning, I grabbed a book on C# for my Kindle, read a chunk of it, and then proceded to build TextToHtml.  It has one function:  It takes a bunch of text files, combines them into an HTML document, and adds an Index at the beginning with all the textfile names and hyperlinks to them on the same page. 

Our team is starting to use 3D-Coat V3 as part of the 3D online content creation workflow in conjunction with Blender, Photoshop and Unity3D. I think this is particularly interesting (maybe) as 3D-Coat has a primitive building mode which is something sort of famillar to us from OpenSim and Second Life content creation. This tool though appears to be a lot more powerful than the OpenSim viewer based building tools as it will render the prims out into standard meshes. 

3D-Coat has tons of features including voxel sculpting, auto-retopology (useful to get models down in complexity = shorter downloading) and layered painting. It looks like it will complement Blender very nicely and allow us to work faster on certain tasks.