CrazyBump

CrazyBump is an excellent tool that generates Normal Map, Displacement Map and Occlusion from photgraph. You may tweak the generated data by tweaking parameters with real-time preview.

The beta version is free in 30 days. The stable version will be not free. This tool deserves to be paid money. Professional game developers look very much to this tool. And, I want to use this at also home, because the tool is easy to use for programers. Please, low price!

I tried it.

Download a picture from Turbo Squid for test.

Start CrazyBump. Click “Open photograph from file”.

Umm. I thought that I should select the right shape.

Great!

By the way, the normal mapping is one of the standard expression of the next-gen video games. It’s impossible to make normal map by hand, so anybody presents a new way how to use normal map with a new tool.

For example, some tool bakes shadow to texture by the normal map(*). This covers the weak point of the normal map expression. It’s impossible to do such texture baking by hand.

This movement is the chance for 3D tool vendor. So they will present many new ways with their new products.

(*) This way is not useful for the case which the light-source moves. But, if a game uses light-map, the light-source can not move. So that’s not big problem.

Demoniak3D

Hyperion3D was renamed to Demoniak3D. Unpronounceable!

But Demoniak3D has all features of Hyperion3D and got more examples, so it keeps useful. I tried to reseach the reason why Hyperion renamed, but I can not read the Blog, because the blog is not written in English. Um, even if the Blog is written in English, I may be unable to read.

The best UV editor?

A designer said, “UV mapping is not difficult, but a troublesome task” in this page. The page expains that the most important thing for UV mapping is guts. lol

Many designers agree him. There are many UV mapping features of each product, but they don’t have big difference. Everyone need guts and much time to do UV mapping.

Even if Modo’s UV mapping feature is excellent very much, we can not use it in free time. Because, UV mapping uses much time of our free time.

Maybe, we should choose not UV mapping but direct 3D-painting. I think that Direct 3D-painting like BodyPaint 3D is the best solution for free-time projects, because it does not need to use much time editing UV points.

3D-painting features are implemented in many products. The most popular product of them is BodyPaint 3D. But, it’s not reasonable for free-time projects, if you are not the rich. I am not the rich to pay $1000.0 to only direct 3D-painting feature.

Blender has such a feature like Modo’s. At the beginning, we should try it.

High Quality Degital Tutorial Books

The blender art publishes very high quality digital tutorial books. And, some contributors have translated them to French. See the page. I’m surprised at this quality.

I didn’t know the existence of these free books. I found the information from here.

How many bones we need for low polygon models?

Japanese deformation characters don’t need many bones, if the camera is far enough from models. I am trying to check how many minimum bones are.

When I was an animator and was drawing “DETECTIVE CONAN (Case Closed)“, I felt that Japanese deformation characters need 12 bones to animate basic actions — One spline, one neck bone, three leg bones and two arm bones.

This is a half of common 24 bones, and omits major 6-7 bones — hands, shoulders, divided spines and a waist bone. I added some of them to the minimum bones.

eg) XSI default character Rig;

Cinema4D = BodyPaint3D ?

I didn’t know that the latest BodyPaint3D has the same features as Cinema4D. Therefore, does BodyPaint3D equal Cinema4D? It seems that…;

• BodyPaint3D and Cinema4D have the same CORE.
• BodyPaint3D and Cinema4D have the same price.

But, BodyPaint3D is a plug-in, it’s possible to use the plug-in in other popular tools — maya, max and XSI. We can use the excellent BodyPaint feature in Cinema4D, but it is not removable for other tools.

UnrealED4

I didn’t know it’s possible to get UnrealED4 by buying RoboBlitz. Additionally, I didn’t know RoboBlitz using UnrealEngine is sold through Steam. Because Steam is managed by Valve which sales Source Engine, that’s an interesting situation.

However, these days, Valve’s software doesn’t run well on my XP. I have not understood the cause. I can’t play Half-Life2 and use Hammer. So I’m just wondering whether to buy RoboBlitz by $15.

flagMOTION breaks a skin mesh

Some features of flagMOTION are better than MilkShape 3D. But, it’s impossible to export .X including skin mesh animations. That’s a strange problem.

• DirectX Viewer in DirectX August 2006 can not load .X file exported from flagMOTION, and can not display animations correctly
• Old Mesh Viewer can load the .X file and can display its animations correctly

It’s possible to solve the problem by re-saving a file with old Mesh Viewer.

flagMOTION

I got flagMOTION which is a low polygon modeller and animation creation toll like MilkShape 3D. This tool is used to create MOD as well as MilkShape.

But, it seems that flagMOTION has an interesting feature. This tool can load BVH from Poser or BioVision. Therefore, I may be able to use flagMOTION as an animation merge tool. I’ll try it.

In addition, flagMOTION can export data as OGRE XML model data. It sounds interesting.

C# Possibility for game development

At the present day, most of game developers have to use C++ or C (and a little assembly, shader). These languages are very powerful, C++ is productive enough, so we have no problem.

But, I had wanted other languages for holiday. Any game developers want to develop their own game, but it seems impossible. Because game development needs much time. Most of developers hope to sleep than their own game development on holiday.

For the purpose, I needed some light-weight program languages to develop minimum arcade games. They are rapid game development languages for only holiday. I tried HSP, Python, Ruby, Java and some scripts of game engines. (I used Java for game in the company only once, but I want to use Java for it no more)

After that manner, I had tried many languages, but I got the same result every time. It is that C++ is the most productive language for game development over the world. So I started to check the boost library and OGRE.

After that, I met Managed DirectX and C# 2.0. Managed DirectX is the managed library edition of DirectX. C# 2.0 is extended C# having Generics feature. I thought these are the best answer at the present days. Now, microsoft provides the XNA framework and XNA studio which are .NET products tuned for game development.

C# is the low-performances. Like C# and Java, the languages with GC feature have no aptitude for the real-time processing. When I had the first contact with XNA, I thought that XNA and C# have overcame problems of GC with some ways. But, XNA is very low-performance after all.

However…, I and other developers have the same conclusion of it. The conclusion is that we should be GPU supremacist. On GPU processing, C++ and C# don’t have different performances. Ideas that GPU can calculate physics and more are on some books. It may be no productive way…