 Last month authors ventured across the pond to attend a booth at this year’s Siggraph expo in San Diego, California. It was really great meeting all who visited the 3DTotal booth, especially our readers and contributors alike. We also hope that this month there are some new readers joining us, as we certainly saw a lot of interest in the magazines and a lot of surprised faces when we explained exactly what you get in this mag every month for just four dollars! It’s nice to know that we are at least doing something right! San Diego was a magnificent place and the perfect venue for Siggraph 2007. A week before, the same convention centre hosted the world famous Comic-Con expo, which we now think would be great to attend next year! Siggraph however, although smaller than Comic-Con, really did put on a good show: booths displaying everything CG from books to emerging technologies; virtual headsets to Minority Report style interfaces which work on the principles of light and movement. You can view the full report of what went on in this magazine. Be first to comment this article | Views: 2465
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 Bucharest, Europe, August 22, 2007 – Quad Software announced today the release of version 1.1 of Grome graphical editing application. Product of more than two years of development and refinements, Grome is versatile terrain and game level modeler targeted towards professional game developers and companies from 3D simulation industry.
Since its commercial release, 6 months ago, Grome was widely adopted by professional game studios as a valuable tool inside the game production pipelines. Used in AAA game titles for consoles and PC, by well known studios like Ubisoft and Eidos and in 3D simulation software by companies like Saab Bofors Dynamics and IFAD TS, Grome proved itself as an easy to learn tool that increases user creativity and productivity. Be first to comment this article | Views: 2161 |
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 EarthSculptor is a realtime heighmap editor and paint program featuring an easy to use interface with immediate feedback editing designed exclusively for rapid development of 3D landscapes for visualization, multimedia and game development
Features: Fast 3D hardware accelerated terrain rendering;Automatic lighting and shadow map rendering;High resolution Light, Color and Detail texture maps
Map sizes up to 4097x4097;Real time reflecting water 8 terrain tools: raise, lower, level, grab, smooth, erode, push and ramp; Plug In System
Multiple undo/redo editing; Outputs heightmaps as 16-bit PNG textures, no proprietary formats; Advanced .OBJ exporter outputs optimized meshes
Edit textures and heightmaps externally; Developed for Windows® and OpenGL® hardware.Comments (1) | Views: 2239 |
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 You can ask: “Why is 3D-brush program necessary when there are such programs as Zbrush or Mudbox?” 3D-brush is not intended to make a man out of sphere or cub. The main aim of the program is detailing and texturing the object already shaped in other 3D-packet. You work on detailing level equal to 3 to 5 millions of polygons. Operating speed of editing and viewing objects has grown bigger because of using a map of normals instead of geometrical splitting. It is well-known that it is easy to shape the object – it takes several hours. But detailing and texturing is long process taking 3 to 10 times more time then modeling a draft itself. 3D-brush is made to make this part of technological process faster. The program contains options for sculptural modeling so that change of shape could also be possible. But the main function is detailing
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 INTERVIEWS with digital artists: Joshua Caez
MAKING of’s: The Jungle - by Radoslav Zilinsky
Down The River Arend - by Christian "Tigaer" Hecker
Long Jorney Home - by Nathaniel West
Chosen Artists: Bechira Sorin, Sergey Musin, Phil Mcdarby, Toni Bratincevic
2D GALLERY: Christian Hecker, Dan Blomberg, Frederic St-Arnaud, Gerardo de Gerardo, Nathaniel West, Raluca Iosifescu, Valentin Petrov
3D GALLERY:Eugenio Garcia, Geofrey White, Jason Godbey, Michel Lanoie, Radoslav Zilinsky
Price: FREEBe first to comment this article | Views: 2358 |
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 Autodesk on SofTool 2007Be first to comment this article | Views: 1852 |
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 Swift 3D provides unrivaled vector rendering quality and output styles and is the only 3D technology to offer direct integration with Adobe Flash®. Swift 3D's toolset and interface allow anyone to quickly create 3D content while providing a full set of advanced tools to grow into. With vector, raster and video export capabilities, Swift 3D provides the Flash and motion graphics design industry with a powerful and easy-to-use 3D solution that delivers high quality results for an affordable price.
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 Making MD2 models used to be so much fun... You'd become an expert in at least 3 different programs, all with different interfaces, different functionality, and usually with lousy documentation. You'd struggle with mapping coordinates, frame names, skin linking, and frequent crashes. It was truly an adventure.
QTiP is so easy, it's almost boring. If you know 3D Studio Max, or even if you don't but can get models from your preferred package into Max, prepare yourself for seamless transfer of .md2 files into the game of your choice! Be first to comment this article | Views: 2801 |
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 Simple, easy to use, powerful, based on the latest hardware and software technologies, fully integrated in the most commonly used 3D software of the market, Nova 5.9 real-time 3D engine allows to display high quality virtual scenes.
This engine is running under Microsoft Windows environments and is based on DirectX 8.1 and 9.0c technology. As in a video game, it allows you to get into its virtual environment in order to discover it or to interact with its content.
Application fields are numerous: Architecture, civilian or military simulation, installation, car industry, train industry, aviation, manufacturing industry, virtual presentations, products marketing, etc.
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 GroundWiz is a plug-in for 3ds max/VIZ for making nature scenes with ease and precision.
GroundWiz consists of two main parts: GroundWiz Procedural Terrain Map and GroundWiz Planter for 3ds max/VIZ.
Currently GroundWiz supports 3ds max versions 6, 7, 8, 9 / VIZ 2005, 2006, 2007.
GroundWiz Terrain Map, easy to use yet powerful procedural 3d terrain map for 3ds max/VIZ, will bring you much power and control for generating realistic terrain textures.
Furthermore, GroundWiz Planter, a mass placement and instancing tool, handles millions of objects in 3ds max/VIZ. It will help you merge vegetation, rocks and other nature elements and quickly create realistic interactive scenes of nature/landscape. Be first to comment this article | Views: 2420 |
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 These course notes cover new tools, processes and pipelines that were developed to make Surf ’s Up a reality. These course notes are intended to serve as a reference for some of the more unique aspects of the Surf ’s Up production pipeline. Many aspects of the production of the film share a lot in common with other CG feature films and have been intentionally omitted.
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 Silo 2 is a focused 3D modeling application with the ability to effortlessly switch between organically sculpting high-polygon models and precisely controlling hard-edged surfaces. It can be used for anything from creating 3D characters for video games and movies to quickly exploring 3D architectural ideas.
Silo is currently being used at top studios worldwide as both a stand-alone design tool and as a versatile element of a multi-software 3D graphics workflow. It is available for both Windows and Mac OS.
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 Kray Open Beta 3 released. Kray is not just a plug-in. It is a complete rendering system that can render even if you don't have LightWave installed on your computer. Kray reads LightWave scene/object files directly. That means not all of the original LightWave features will work. You also can't expect that all LightWave's plug-ins will work with Kray, especially plug-ins LW uses at rendering time. However, such solution has many advantages as well. Kray is not limited to LW architecture and provides you powerful features not to be found in LW.
Plug-in for LightWave is only an interface between Kray and LW. It allows you to set all Kray's specific rendering parameters from LW and just click to start rendering.Be first to comment this article | Views: 2036 |
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 Click-VR Visualizer is a next generation realtime rendering plugin for Autodesk 3ds Max. Max users can instantly explore their scenes in realtime and create interactive 3D presentations and visualizations by bringing their projects to life with animations, sounds, videos and advanced user interactions.Comments (2) | Views: 2321 |
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 Flask based exporter/importer plugins for the SAM file format - being a sample file format mainly for demonstration purposes.
SAM files are basically simple ASCII files storing meshes and bones/joints. On the bone/joint side, the format stores the joint's unique name (if not unique in the 3D editor, it will be made unique), the parent joint's name (or "" if it's a root joint) and its inverse base matrix (being the inverse of the bind pose matrix).
Stored mesh data consists of the name of the mesh, vertices, normals, texture coordinates (with any number of coordinate sets), names of applied materials (per polygon), number of vertices per polygon, indices per polygon for all this data, and skin weights.
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