3D Explained a different way

To add to my earlier posts about 3D stereoscopy, this BBC clip compares different ways of perceiving 3D that can all be used by artists and animators.

Game Engines go Free

If you have been tempted to cross the boundary between 2D interactive media or games or 3D animation into 3D games, you will probably know you need to get a decent 3D game physics engine.

That's where my brain has been lately, and consequently I have turned my attention to physics engines. In my mind it was initially a toss-up between Epic's UnrealEd, which comes with Unreal Tournament, or the FPS Creator from The Game Makers.

UnrealEd would have been first choice since I know it is used by a local university on their Game Art degree, on the other hand the FPSC had good features too, and in some ways was less complex and perhaps more suitable for allowing (high school level) students to quickly preview their characters and in-game objects.

However as I did some digging I found that the current plethora of game engines out there, including some open source offerings, has made the area highly competitive. So competitive in fact that well respected commercial engines are now becoming available FREE for personal use, or under developer licenses where you only pay if you make money. This combined with all the free stuff, makes for quite a choice.

Commercial Game Engines for Free

UDK - Unreal have released what they call the Unreal Development Kit, it contains all the tools previously only available to commercial developers or those with a lot of spare cash. This now seems to replace UnrealEd from my point of view.

FPSC - The Game Makers have released a free developers edition of FPSC. It has all the features of the pay for version minus network games and compile - but the pay for is only £30 these days anyway.

Unity - Described as being the best game engine this side of a $million, it normally retailed at about $200, but a free development version is now available too, and looks pretty amazing.

Freeware or Open Source Game Engines

Blender - Has long been capable of producing 3D games made interactive with Python scripting.

Platinum Arts Sandbox 3D Game Maker - purports to be popular with educational environments.

Cheap Game Engines

The 3D Game Maker - I thought I would throw this one in. Although very limited in terms of customisation, for some educational purposes (e.g. Level 1 and 2) this could be ideal. With a bit of technical know how students can include their own 3D models (.x format) in their games.


Well, I already owned FPSC, the 3D Game Maker, and UnrealED, but now I have downloaded Unity and the UDK (be interested to see how UDK is different from UnrealEd). I can hardly wait to get started.

What makes an 'Imax' 3D cinema image 3D?

I was discussing 3D stereograms last year in relation to Channel-4's 3D week, but I came across this interesting video clip on the BBC website when I was looking for information on 'The Pixar Story' a documentary "about the pioneering computer animation studio ".

The 3D shown here does not require coloured filters in the glasses, but does still adhere to the age old principle that 3D is constructed in the brain from seeing two slightly different images with each eye. Rather than coloured filters these use polarising filters. This gives the best colour reproduction of all the 'cheap' glasses methods - but I will let the video tell you more:



Further information may be found here >

Channel-4 3D Week

I was at Sainsbury's today (unusual, but I happened to be near one) and came across a big point-of-sale bin thing with loads of FREE 3D glasses in it. Apparently Channel-4 is hosting a 3D week, which according to my 3D glasses arm will feature "never-seen-before archive footage and continue[s] through the week with loads of awesome 3D films and concerts to enjoy".

Anaglyph TV

Now, the image below (from the C4 website) doesn't look like anything special to the naked eye, but when viewed through the special Sainsbury's glasses will take on a 3D appearance. It is an anaglyph.


To view anaglyphs you need special "3D glasses" that have coloured filters. But there are several different colour combinations around, and you have to make sure you get the right one for what you are watching. You can get Red Blue, Red Cyan (the most popular), Red Green and, as I learned today, Blue Ochre (sometimes called Blue Amber, or Blue Brown).

And guess which ones Channel-4 have opted for?

Blue Ochre of course - which means you probably don't have an old pair of 3D glasses hanging round the house which will work for 3D week. Your "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" glasses will not work, and neither will your "Shark Boy and Lava Girl" pair.

Better get yourself down to Sainsbury's and get some Blue Ochre.

But what's with all the different types?

Why not just stick to one type and have done with it? Simply put, different colour combinations have different benefits. Red Cyan is probably the most popular because it allows the creation of both colour and B&W anaglyphs (as does Red Green). Red Blue only allows B&W and the images are very dark.

But more information on the different types can be found here:
http://nzphoto.tripod.com/sterea/anaglyphs.htm

However, and this was news to me until today, Blue Ochre when viewed in a dark room, has better colour transmission than the others. So this is probably why Channel-4 opted for it. After all, if you want people to think that 3D is more than just a gimmick, it needs to look good.

Blue Ochre not free but very clever

While all the other anaglyph colour methods are pretty much public domain, the Blue Ochre combination is apparently patented. Not the idea of the anaglyph - that has been around for too long, you can't patent that - but according to this website it is the method for converting an image for Blue Ochre is patented:

What makes it patentable (the "secret sauce") is the mathematical formula that modifies the luminance of the right eye record and the luminance and chrominance of the left eye record to best transmit the colour information. The darker brown is necessary for balance, because blue is low luminance.

Whilst I haven't read the patent (http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6687003/fulltext.html) thoroughly, their process doesn't seem to attempt to determine which point in each image represents each point in the three dimensional scene, so it seems to me that they are effectively presenting a luminance-based stereoscopic pair combined with a flat chrominance image based on the average of the two views.

(http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/archive/index.php/t-128661.html)

Apparently this method was invented at the Technical University of Denmark, and has been branded as ColorCode. More information can be found here: http://www.colorcode3d.com/.

What makes it so clever, and therefore worth paying for perhaps, is explained on their website:

The ColorCode 3-D system is the only in the world to reproduce high quality 3-D Stereo images and movies with full color- and depth information on all display types.

(http://www.colorcode3d.dk/group.asp?group=39)

And I can't argue with this claim. I know from experience that Red Cyan may work on a CRT or TFT monitor, but utterly fail on a projector. You can also get a fair amount of ghosting. If ColorCode (Blue Ochre) can crack this, it will be worth the license fees for TV companies who want good quality 3D without a trace of gimmick.

I will test my new Sainsbury's ColorCode glasses on the LCD projector at work, and if the result is good I will be very impressed and let you know.

Let's have some X3D support in browsers, please...

I have just been reading a very interesting article on the future of X3D by Ben Fancis on his blog. Ben suggests that while X3D is already mature as a standard, in terms of adoption it is still in its infancy, and that before it can fully mature we need to see some adoption of the X3D standard into mainstream browsers.

Since I have recently become interested again in Web3D and this time X3D (rather than VRML) I have been frustrated by the lack of support of web3D standards also. I left my own thoughts as a comment on Ben's blog, but just in case it doesn't make it past moderation I include them below for your consideration. It will make more sense if you read Ben's article first.

My Thoughts

I think Ben made some excellent observations on the factors surrounding adoption of X3D. I have been a fan of web based 3D for ages, but even since the VRML days the biggest block was browser support and now that X3D is here this still hasn't really changed.

But think that outside of browser support the other factor is getting the creative community on board. Too often I think that the software engineers and techies think they own the web and that it is all down to them. But in reality, the popularity (and usability) and growth of the internet in its importance with the general public has a lot to do with the creative application of the technology. It is a collaboration between creative designers and techies that will really bring it about. This brings me to the other missing factor for X3D to become popular - tools for designers.

Vivaty Studio (Formerly known as Flux Studio) is the closest to being a decent X3D authoring tool. It's pretty powerful, having used it myself, but still has room to develop in terms of accessibility for beginners. At present a designer familiar with flash and a 3D authoring program could probably figure it out without too much trouble, but the animation and interaction editing could do with some refining to make it easier to use, and the modelling tools could learn a lot from other programs. Having said all that generally it is really good and certainly the best X3D authoring tool I have come across.

Vivaty Studio Screenshot

Authoring tools won't be enough, as we learn from Axel - an excellent authoring tool (vivaty can learn a lot from their animation and interactivity implementation), but lacked plugin penetration. This is where other vendors like Adobe have already got it made.

What concerns me is that while proprietary software vendors like Adobe have their own 3D standard, and push it out to all their current Adobe users in software already familiar to most designers, and nice integration with other Adobe apps, X3D will have a hard time getting a look-in. I for one cannot imagine Microsoft adopting an open standard either, when they no doubt add 3D to their Expression suite in the future.

It is refreshing that Vivaty are using an open standard however (unlike so many others "second life" for instance), and it is decisions like this that are X3Ds greatest hope.

Outside of that, I totally agree, browser implementation is the next step for X3D to come of age. MS will be the last to get on board but Mozilla/Firefox could lead the way closely followed by Chrome or Safari.

What also might help if Vivaty put their plugin source code back into open source. The Flux player used to be Open Source, but a visit to sourceforge now will show that all source files have been removed. Maybe the investors that made Flux into Vivaty want to guard their investment closely (who can blame them), but one wonders if by holding everything too tight X3D might just as well be a proprietary format for all the market penetration it has - and without the customer base of Adobe or MS, Vivaty will slowly dissolve like Axel and nameless others. In my view a better strategy would be to open their plugin source, get it included into a Mozilla release and start seeing popular browsers with built in X3D support. Surely that will help Vivaty's larger business aim (no plugin required) in the longer term, and get them on the market with a good authoring tool. Who knows but Google will buy them out under those conditions and build X3D into Sketchup for some real Web3D competition with Adobe.

Well that didn't take long - Carrara 5 Pro - free on a magazine again!

I'm not saying I was right, but it is pretty well timed. Only a couple of posts ago I was speculating that Caligari's give away of TrueSpace 7.2 might be their answer to Daz giving away Carrara 5 Pro on 3D World magazine, and we should expect the next move from Daz.

Guess what! Daz is giving Carrara 5 Pro away again - this time on Computer Shopper (sold in the UK for the princely sum of £4.99) - a magazine with a massive distribution. They might as well let people download it from the Daz website now, anyone in the UK who ever planned on buying Carrara 5 will just buy Computer Shopper instead. But I suppose there is the bandwidth issue, the download would be so popular it would seriously slow up their servers so this is just another way of getting market penetration.

Read about it on the Computer Shopper website here (Note, the content of the linked page will change next month) >

Meanwhile, where can we expect the next move? I think it's about time Maxon gave something away. I've not seen any offerings from them since Cinema 4D 6SE way back in about 2002. Can they feel their market share shrinking around them? Free is a hard price the compete with, and let's face it, Carrara 5 Pro and TrueSpace 7.2 are both pretty able programs. The workflow, or habit, (or even snobbery) that keeps some users loyal to ridiculously high priced software can only stand up to so much.

As software like Carrara keeps increasing its power it is only a matter of time before the devoted Max user begins to wonder what extra they are getting by paying $3495.00 for their license instead of the $549.00 they could pay for Carrara 6.

I predict that for most users, the added extras that come with Max are of a very niche nature, and lots of people could switch to Carrara and still produce what they want at the end of the day. Blender is in the running too, at an even lower price of free, but its unusual interface would make a quick switch too jarring for most users.

This developing situation reminds me of Quark Xpress. Originally a one product company that dominated the print publication industry as the "standard", sold for a high price and according to an old lecturer of mine didn't offer much of an academic discount. So Adobe launches InDesign with seamless integration with the other Adobe products the designers are already using, at a much lower price, and they practically gave it away for educational purposes. Even little Serif kept building their PagePlus until even that was hailed by industry journals as being a professional level DTP package at a budget price.

The result? Quark gave away a full copy of their Xpress software on a magazine for the first time ever around a year ago (it happened to be Quark Xpress 5). Were they feeling the pinch of shrinking market share? I reckon so. It would be interesting to look at their pricing structure now to see if they charge as much as they did back in their heyday of the mid 1990s.

I use this as an example that, no matter how "industry standard" a product is today, a new product is being developed right now that is just as good, just as powerful for every common application, and it is being sold at a fraction of the price (and in some cases given away).

One day many users will wake up and find that they can use this cheaper product for everything they need, and wonder why they should pay 6 times as much for the niche gizmos they never used anyway. And this is how market share is eroded.

Let the battle continue.

TrueSpace 7.6 FREE?

Occasionally, as I look around at free software for creative purposes, I am genuinely suprised by some amazing give-aways. Usually these freebies come with one of the well known digital design journals like Computer Arts, 3D World or DigitalArts (formerly Digit).

This time though, it is well known 3D Software developer Caligari that is giving away their hard developed wares, and not even limiting it to magazine readers. This time you can download Truespace 7.6, their latest version, absolutely free. All you need to do is click the link on the home page, and set up a free membership account if you don't already have one.

What are you waiting for? Download it now >

Caligari have given away TrueSpace before. V1 and V3 have both been available for a while, but this is the first time they appear to have given away their latest version, and by the looks of things it is pretty powerful.



See how it compares with more well known competitor products:



I actually found out about this amazing offering when reading on the Computer Arts website, what the content of the new 3D World issue was going to be, then promptly zoomed over to Caligari to see for myself.

The reasons for this daring move by Caligari are to be discussed in the new issue of 3D World (which I don't have yet), but I can't help wondering if this has something to do with Daz 3D's move to give away Carrara 5 Pro on a magazine a few months ago. If so, watch Daz, because that is where the next move may be.

Whatever the reason, high competition in the 3D software industry has to be a factor, and so a good thing in the short term. The problem with this type of competition is that there are likely to be casualties, and that may hurt if you have developed a workflow around software from a company that goes under, or stops developing that title.

But while that is largely out of the control of most of us, make hay while the sun shines and download TrueSpace 7.6 today, free.

Parallax Mapping

While we are on the subject of mapping images to 3D meshes, you might want to learn about parallax mapping.

Parallax mapping finally begins to overcome the problem with all the other mappings (texture, bump and normal), which is that they all look painted on and flat when viewed up close, especially at an angle.

That is because they are in effect painted on. Parallax mapping works by actually displacing the coordinates of the texture, so that bumps actually obscure dents as you move round in 3D space. Hoorah.

Comparison of mapping methods (Brown University, Rhode Island) click to enlarge.

Normal Mapping

Just a quickie tonight, I just had to tell you about this great tutorial I found for creating normal maps. A genius called Ryan Clarke is altruistic enough to share his technique free and for nothing on his site here >.

Why do I care? Basically as an interactive media blokey, I am interested in this latest method of adding detail and realism to games.

To begin with 3D games were made using very low res meshes and texture mapping. Bump mapping adds more realism by adding a little height and depth to a surface texture on the polygons - this is done using a grayscale image to represent the height of the bumps, (the lighter the pixel the higher the altitude etc.) but it still looks like blocks with textures. To remove the blockiness of the models you would expect to have to increase the number of polygons they are made up of. This is no good for games where the computer has to render 30+ fps on the fly. This is where normal maps help.

To really grasp this you need to know what a normal is >.

Normal mapping works on a similar principle to bump mapping in that it is essentially a graphic wrapped round a mesh, but it goes much further. Normal maps use an RGB image which instead of containing just height data in each pixel contains the X Y Z 3D orientation of the normal.

These then render much more realistically almost as though they were meshes themselves and have the added bonus of rendering faster. This allows PC's and games consoles to increase the apparent level of detail in the models without increasing the polygon count.

Normal mapping (above) compared to bump mapping (below) - images courtesy of Inagoni makers of a normal mapping plugin for Carrara.

Anyway, I just wanted to bring your attention to the fact that you can make your own normal maps quite easily using a torch, a digital camera, and some image editing software - take a peep >