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This page is supposed to be a place where I can display all of my cool 3D objects, animations, and other neat multimediatrical stuff. So I'll need to make most of it first. So sue me. But in the meantime, I do have a few examples for you to look at. The first is actually a simple loft mesh, but I think it looks like red licorice. < -- Check it out to the left. |
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| I recently downloaded the newest Lite version of Presenter, which has a lot more
features, and less glitches than did the old version. In this one, rendering actually
works... a plus if you want to do things with lights and texture mapping. Anyhow,
these are my first attempts at assigning various porperties... starting with texture
mapping, or wrapping a bitmapped or other flat picture around a 3D model: --> The first is two shapes, a sphere and a teardrop, against a background I threw together in 20 seconds. The second is a single sphere with different colored lights shining on it. |
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This next pair is the kind of imaging I am most interested in...making things look
shiny or metallic. I couldn't get ahold of any decent metal shaders, so I'm working
purely from the reflection/glare/transparency settings that are basic to all models
in Presenter. The far left picture is brighter and includes an opaque shpere set inside a semi-transparent one. On the near left is a darker, more matte finish of sphere. |
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Oh yeah. A spline is a line with extra information attached to it. It has points and draglines to help show where the curves and bends go, and they're used a great deal in high-quality 3d work. Most 3d computer animation uses a method described as "polygonal-based", using polygons to make shapes. For example, it'll use a whole bunch of triangles to make a cone, and a polygon for the bottom of the cone. This results in our smooth shapes not being so nicely round and seamless as we'd like them. VIDI uses spline-based modeling, which has less edges. In fact, the only place you'll have edges is where you want them :) not to mention spline-based models take up much less memory, too. To make a cone with spline-based modeling, the computer uses a point for the top, a circle in the middle, and a circle for the bottom. Then it just connects the circles, and voila. Not an edge in sight. Pretty nifty. And it's a Macs-only program, too. Gloat, gloat. :) Their link again is www.vidi.com...pay them a visit. Click here to see an animated gif of Pixar's
logo.... If you're a little brain-dead at the moment, Pixar is the company which
did the Toy Story movies. |
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