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Experiments in 3D March 2, 2011

Posted by Jesse in : Game Development , 1 comment so far

Work continues on various projects, but I’m having too much fun experimenting to focus on any one project for long. Here’s my favorite two.

  1. Applying motion capture to Xbox Live avatars
  2. It took me a very long time, with many failures, but I’ve successfully managed to apply animations from the Carnegie Mellon motion capture database onto Xbox Live avatars. In the end, I had to rebuild portions of the avatar rig from Microsoft, and it’s still a manual process with lots of annoying steps. If I get much interest, I’ll put together a tutorial and release my modified rig.

  3. Sunburn
  4. I bought a license to the professional edition of the Sunburn Game Engine.Everything I try looks really pretty, because Sunburn adds badass lighting and shadows without much work from me. Of course, I’m still learning about general 3d basics. For example, here’s the results of playing around with normal maps. They seem to make a huge, huge difference. (Click to see the full resolution screens.)

    Without normal maps:

    With normal maps:

That’s it for now. I have no idea how I’m going to use what I’m learning, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something wacky.