At Random we worked on a game for www.nederlandveilig.nl. The goal was to bring awareness to the 30 km/h and 50 km/h zones. We created a 3D environment with a unique style. By giving the player limited control of the vehicle, we forced the player to concentrate on maintaining the right speed and look out for obstacles on the road. If you want to experience the game for yourself, check it out here. Or watch the video below.
Finally had a moment to do my own stuff again. And since I like to play around with sound and visuals, this is the result! Be sure to close any other windows of your browser that have video or sound, otherwise it might not work.
Choosing the right platform, tool or engine is essential for the success of your project. Right now I’m working on a 3D game, so naturally I thought of using Papervision3D because I’m familiar with it. Our game however, relies heavily on collision detection and fast rendering, and both are done better by the Alternativa3D engine. The only thing that is missing is any form of lighting the 3D objects dynamically.
We need to dynamically add shadows on our models because baking textures by using 3D studio max is not an option, but the Alternativa platform does not support it (yet). So I had to add it myself. The only problem is that the engine is not open source. I asked if I could get it, but they didn’t give it to me. So I had to decompile the engine first, which presented problem number two: decompiled source code contains lots of errors.
It took me 1 day to fix the source code, and then another day of optimizing the code for Flash player 10. After that was done, adding the flat shading was done in less then an hour. I added flat shading for TextureMaterial and MovieClipMaterial, which are lighted only the first time their surfaces are created. But the FillMaterial has dynamic lighting (only ambient).
Check out the demo here. Click the color pallet to change the color of the light and see how it affects the color of the surfaces of the spheres.
My first experiment with Processing, based on a previous experiment with Flash.
My first month as a partner at Random is over and my first project is finished. We had to make a campaign website for the Philips MSS shaver. The idea was to use your webcam and a face recognition algorithm to “scan” your face so the shaver could attach itself to your face. Shaving your face also triggers panels on the right side to explain the unique features of the shaver. People without a webcam can shave the face of a model instead. Check out the website over here, or watch the video below.
Today I had some time to do some experimenting again. In the Placebo project I used 2D inverse kinematics on the octopus tentacles, so when that project was finished I was curious how that would work in 3D. Turns out not much different then the 2D version. Check out the result over here. I also added a drawing function to the experiment, just click the mouse on the canvas to turn drawing on and off and create your own artwork.
I had the idea for a while to do something with points and lines in 3D space, so yesterday after reading the post of bit-101, I finally started to do some testing. After creating a 3D sphere with lines, a 3D landscape of lines I finally thought it would be more exiting to do something with the web cam.
The idea is simple. Scan an image, in this case the image from the web cam from left to right. The more brightness a pixel has, the more the line gets pushed back at that point (in 3D space), and if it contains no brightness at all, it gets no depth at all. Repeat this process until you covered the whole image from top to bottom. Because flash needs to draw plenty of lines I used the new drawPath function in Flash 10 to speed things up a bit. If you have a webcam you can play around with the result for yourself over here.
A long time ago when Papervision3D was just released, I did some experiments with sound. I used the capabilties of flash to analyze the spectrum of the sound that’s been played back and generated 3D triangles to match the output. I lost the original but I thought it would be fun the remake the demo. You can watch and listen to the result here.
Last year I worked on a project for Cirque du Soleil. The goal was to promote the Quidam show by making a viral website. The idea was to create an endless wall on which visitors can paint a message or just an image. When they are done the could send it to friends. The friends could paint over the received message and send it back or to someone else. You can visit the site by clicking here.
Check out the recorded video for the Quidam grafitti website below.
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