3D Dimensions

Examples and Previous Works

• Bryce 2
  • Fifteen minutes in Bryce means this "Water Spheres" (129K JPEG) and another 5 gets you this "Water Spheres II" (194K JPEG).
  • Water Spheres makes it to QuicktimeVR (258K). I've done a couple of other QuicktimeVR movies. They're on my Perth site that was done for another assignment.
  • My very first scene done in Bryce2. It's called "Arizona II" (25Kb JPEG).
  • I attempted to import a DXF that was exported from Imagine 3. It's an F16 (23Kb JPEG) that has some strange texture mapping.
• 3D Studio Max
  • My very first animation from Tutorial 1 (645K AVI) of the 3D Studio Max manual.
  • My very last animation (for the unit, CSD5403 - Computer Animation) called "Kip Goes for a Walk" (16Mb AVI) . It's nothing fantastic but I did manage to use inverse kinematics, paths, camera tracking and reasonably complex image and transparency mapping. If you can't be bothered downloading the anim (and I wouldn't blame you) then checkout some character development screengrabs: Kip01 (14Kb, JPEG), Kip02 (17Kb, JPEG), Kip03 (23Kb, JPEG), Kip04 (21Kb, JPEG) and Kip05 (8Kb, JPEG).
  • This one I did for another unit. It's called "Typography" and the final product was used in Director. Choose Quicktime (194Kb) or AVI (129Kb).
  • Here's (381Kb AVI) another animation from the Max tutorials book called "Conehead".
• Strata Studio Pro
  I fooled around with the 3dmf file format for a while and converted Kip (187Kb ZIP) into a 3DMF. The viewer is available from the QuickTime home page not that the QuickDraw 3D home page is defunct. Instead of a 600kb viewer you have to download at least 5Mbs of QuickTime. Enjoy.

Techniques

Good Books

I found that while I had access to a copy of 3D Studio Max that the best books to use to learn Max were the manuals that came with it. I seem to get a huge number of requests from 'owners' of Max that seem to have bought a budget copy that comes without manuals. Please don't ask me how to perform some basic operation that is fully described in the manual. If you really need a good book that goes beyond the manual then I recommend that you check out Amazon.com

Software Availability

I don't believe how many requests I've had for 'evaluation' copies of Bryce, Max, etc. If you don't know how to find a good warez site or two then I'm not about to tell you here. You might even have to go out and buy a copy of the software you want to use. I created the 3D Studio Max images and anims as part of a degree I did and used a University copy of Max to do so. The Bryce images were created on a friends Mac. I do own a copy of Imagine 3.0 for the Amiga but don't go anywhere near it nowadays. It's way too slow but did help me learn the basics of computer generated animation.

Quicktime VR

When I created the VRs on this and the Perth pages I used a utility called "Make Panorama" that I found on Apple's site. It's beta and free for download here. I don't have a copy of it anymore and it was Mac only anyways. These days if you want to create a Quicktime VR world you need the Quicktime VR Authoring Studio. I saw it demonstrated at an Apple roadshow in February 98. It did everything. It joined images together to create the 360 degree view, it provided a point and click interface to join multiple VRs together and insert navigation hotspots between. It was particularly cool and very expensive.

Hardware

The Kip animation and images were created on a Pentium 100 with 16Mb and a Pentium 166 with 32Mb. I found that the rendering times per frame of the P166 were almost half that of the P100. Modelling and object manipulation were much faster on the P166 also. I now use a Pentium 233 with 44Mb or RAM and find that even reasonably complex scenes will animate in the perspective window in shaded mode when in the tri-view window layout whereas they would frequently revert to wire frame on the P166 and P100. I haven't done a significant amount of work on this platform to otherwise gauge its performance. The Bryce scenes were rendered on a Power Macintosh 7200 with 16Mb of RAM. I found that when the scenes became overly complex the Mac would just lock up. Object manipulation was (sometimes) painfully slow and this still holds partially true for the PC version. Lesson: 3D requires all the hardware you can afford.

History

I first became interested in 3D in late 1992. I got a copy of Videoscape 3D on the coverdisk of the November copy of CU Amiga magazine and had seen an animation created with it of a Lotus swerving between cars on a busy freeway. It blew my mind that that could be done on my lowly Amiga and I set to it. Videoscape was a pig of a program to get results out of. The modeller was very primitive and scripts had to be written and executed to produce animations. I found a copy of Sculpt Animate Jr. on the May 92 coverdisk and started on my first animation, the Starship Enterprise orbiting a planet. It was very primitive with the whole scene having less then 10 objects and less than 300 vertices but I did get the Enterprise to eventually orbit the planet. Encouraged by this early success I went out and bought a copy of Imagine 2 for the Amiga. This is where I spent most of my time learning the basics of 3D object modelling and rendering. Imagine has an idiosyncratic interface but I became very fond of it and stuck with it until version 4. By this stage the more complex functions like bones, texture pinning and IK, although available, were obscured by multiple editors and other difficulties in the interface. 3D Studio Max makes all these functions and more immediately accessible. I love it!

If you would like to see some thumbnails on this page or any other pertinent information then you'll have to encourage me. Please email me with words of encouragement.