January 16, 2006
Creating a Shockwave 3D Game Level in 30 Minutes
Hey folks, just a quick heads up to alert folks to the fact that a good new article has just been posted to the Director Developer Center that focuses on 3D content development. Mal Duffin of CanDo Interactive wrote up a great article on how you can use their 3D Modeling Training Tool to achieve a playable 3D game level in well under an hour. Give it a read:
Creating a Shockwave 3D Game Level in 30 Minutes
Enjoy!
Posted by thiggins at 02:55 PM
November 02, 2005
3D photo gallery? Once again, you CanDo it!
Ok, I've used that "you CanDo it" twice now so I promise I'll stop that. But while I've got your attention you might want to have a look at CanDo Interactive's latest offering, their Visual Art Gallery Creator. As of today the creator application is Windows-only but the resulting gallery is viewable by users on both Macintosh and Windows machines. It's currently beta-software and free for you to test drive, give it a look:
If you'd first prefer to view an example gallery then take a look at this one created by Mal at CanDo Interactive, it's his two-minute special (his words!):
Enjoy!
Posted by thiggins at 03:26 PM
October 31, 2005
Shockwave 3D Offset in Safari - Fixed!
Hey all, just a quick note covering some great news for today: the long-standing 3D offset bug in Safari on OSX has been fixed! Here are a few important links to look at:
About the Mac OS X 10.4.3 Update (Delta)
About the Mac OS X 10.4.3 Update (Combo)
Released just today, come get some!
Posted by thiggins at 02:56 PM
August 05, 2005
The simple way to make a 3D driving game, you CanDo it...
Developing a 3D game is undeniably difficult, often most people are either unable to do the modeling work required as they're a programmer and not an artist, or conversely they're a 3D artist but aren't familiar with how to code the necessary elements in a run-time engine like the Shockwave Player. For years folks have been working on ease of use technologies and recently I've spent some time looking at one in particular that's been created by the folks at CanDo Interactive.
The tool I'm referring to is their 3D Training Toolkit that is targeted at those new to developing 3D content, primarily via educational institutions. This toolkit allows a novice 3D artist and/or novice developer a chance to quickly create a 3D driving game and include within that the use of the Havok physics engine (rigid body dynamics only) to provide a quality driving experience. The idea is that one can go from modeling a very basic scene, through exporting to the W3D file format and on to playing a working 3D driving game in a matter of minutes as opposed to hours or days. Have a look for yourself and enjoy:
If you'd like to see some example levels built using this tool then have a look at these:
Example levels built using the 3D Training Toolkit
Have a look and enjoy, I think Mal and his cohorts of done a great job of making 3D a bit more accessible to artists and developers alike.
Edit: sorry this wasn't posted originally but I'd also like to alert folks to the fact that CanDo Interactive is also hosting a development contest to try and promote usage of their training toolkit, have a look:
3D Training Toolkit Competition (ends November 2005)
No purchase required and prizes are offered, good luck to all those that enter!
Posted by thiggins at 12:16 PM
May 24, 2005
Tree Scattering Across a 3D Terrain
Recently on one of the Director mailing lists (dir3D-l) a developer asked some questions relating to problems he was having in "scattering" trees across a terrain surfce within a 3D scene in Director. He was able to randomly scatter the trees by coming up with random faces, but then the questions arose when trying to determine the location of that face as well as the "up" direction to be used in orienting the tree. In the initial demo the developer used the first vertex listed for the particular face as the position, then used the shading normal vector for that vertex as the "up" direction in order to properly place and orient each of the scattered tree models. But I offered a slightly different technique...
I suggested that instead of placing the tree model at the same location as a vertex of the particular face, he determine where the center of that face is and place the tree there. That introduced a wee bit of complexity as there are many ways to define where the "center" of a triangle ought to be, in my case I suggested using the incenter of the triangle instead (draw an angle bisector for each angle in the triangle, the point at which the bisector lines intersect with each other is the incenter position). In addition I suggested that instead of using the shading normal for any vertex (as it might not be truly perpendicular to the face) he should use the vectors defining the three sides of the triangular face and the cross product result to compute a truly normal vector, one that is specifically perpendicular to the face.
It all started as an email exchange between myself and the developer off-list but then we both decided the samples I created and the brief articles/write-ups I shared with him were worth posting for others to see. So please feel free to have a look at the following two articles as both Marty and I hope that our off-list conversations have produced some helpfull information:
Finding a Triangle's Incenter
Scattering
Please note that it is my intention to formalize these a bit and then look to post them either to DirectorDev.com or to the Director Developer Center.
Enjoy! Comments appreciated. :)
Posted by thiggins at 04:04 PM | TrackBack
December 16, 2004
New W3D Exporter SDK Libraries Posted
Our engineering department has recently completed an update to the W3D Exporter SDK Libraries so that developers can create exporters for Mach-O based applications on OSX. Prior to this update we only provided Carbon libraries for the Macintosh platform and that fact proved limiting as of late. For each sample application in the SDK there are now the following projects:
Mac Classic (Codewarrior)
Carbon PEF (Codewarrior)
Mach-O (Codewarrior)
Mach-O (XCode)
Of course you can see by the above that this update targets Macintosh development only, and to be clear the update doesn't involve new exporter capabilities. The update is intended to allow continued developer of W3D exporters in modern and current modeling applications on Mac OSX.
To learn more about the W3D Exporter SDK please visit the W3D SDK Program page on our website.
Enjoy.
Posted by thiggins at 02:11 PM