Wednesday, October 29, 2008

First Ideas


An area of study that I am interested in due to the release of games like Spore, is Procedural animation and environments in 3D. I did some research into a number of programming languages (C++, XnA, processing). After some experience programming in XnA I realized that there was no support for bone/mesh animation. So I looked into direct x which is extremely complicated but does provided the necessary framework for handling models and animation DXUT. This seemed promising but a daunting prospect to attempt to create something with it.

During one of my tutorials my lecturer showed me max-script, which I have already had some experience but hadn’t thought about using it for this line of thought. I found some tutorials on the subject below. I started to experiment with some of the ideas in the tutorials and developed a very simplistic building creation and placement tool.


video tutorials for maxscript: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max-main

I experimented with the methods of placement and created more controls for it and also developed ways of modeling primarily through code.

I found max-script fairly easy to use and produced some surprisingly good results. I have experimented with texturing through the code and have created some interesting effects as in the images above. I also noted the powerful difference that good textures make on low poly geometry. I would like to further develop this idea into a functional tool for 3dsmax to help with creating buildings that have an amount of variability built in. I would like the user to be able to create a few different types of buildings that can varied through the code to be used to build a city that represents his/her tastes or choices.

http://www.ninjavideo.net/video/10890

http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=IrQZbmZ5zg4C&oi=fnd&pg=PA65&dq=procedural+animation&ots=seA4s2sGIy&sig=PH9APudlqytifIic0GfPfAa4stE#PPP1,M1

http://www.centralpictures.com/ce/tpapers.html

https://svn.sable.mcgill.ca/sable/courses/COMP763/oldpapers/greuter-03-real-time.pdf

http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/publications.html

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