This tutorial shows how to create behaviors for interactive textures: scrolling, blending textures on the faces of a cube. We will work on one face of the cube with its specific material-shader and one texture “mountain.jpg”. Part 4 of this tutorial covers setting up an orbital camera.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

hen creating animations, you should be very careful what you do with the FloorRef. When walking or running, the character should stay at a constant height from the FloorRef object. When jumping, the Character should increase it’s distance from the FloorRef object to give the appearance of translation away from the floor. Characters should ALSO have a “stationary root” that only moves relative to the floor reference (e.g. for walking, jumping etc.) but that does not move constantly (i.e. in an idle animation the root should not move). This is very important if you wish to use your Characters with the Virtools Mulituser Pack, or the dead reckoning algorithm used for predicting distributed objects will not work correctly.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

The following tutorial will take you step by step through the creation of a natural environment in Maya. You will also setup a character inside the environment and to add interactivity in Virtools. This tutorial introduces you to Maya’s 3D Paint Effects allowing you to paint in 3D. A few strokes can paint trees, grass, flowers. The paint strokes from your brush are converted into 3D objects inside a 3D space. Maya’s ability to convert 3D Paint Effects to polygonal objects is helpful to create content for interactive environments. This tutorial requires Maya 5.0 and up.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

Comprehensive Life Platform for Creating Highly Interactive 3D Applications The Virtools 4 Life Platform ushers in a unique solution for pervasively developing and deploying 3D experiences on personal computers, game consoles, Intranets and the web, demonstrating Dassault Systèmes’ commitment to bringing the power of 3D to all user communities. The open-ended architecture of Virtools 4 supports a wide variety of 3D formats. 3D Content Capture plugins support most commonly used DCC software formats (3ds Max®, Maya®, XSI®, Lightwave®, Collada®) for importing/exporting 3D XML files, making real-time 3D technology easily available. Now based on the new Product-Context Scenario (PCS) paradigm, Virtools 4 allows users to imagine, share and experience highly interactive 3D content.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

This tutorial explains how to export a 3D Studio Max scene from 3DS Max version 3. Before you start this tutorial, ensure you have installed the Virtools Exporter plugin for 3DS Max. The Scene in 3DS Max Load the sun_room scene located in the scenes folder for this tutorial into 3DS Max. When the file is opened it may indicate that certain textures are missing. If so, simply find the path to the textures in Map_RT. Here is what you should see: Activate Display, Polygon Counts - you will see that the scene contains 474 faces. Note a certain number of specific characteristics before exporting this set: - The vertex lighting: Select the wall_Small object, for example, and you will see the attributes of the Vertex
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

This tutorial shows how to create behaviors for interactive textures: scrolling, blending textures on the faces of a cube. We will work on one face of the cube with its specific material-shader and one texture “mountain.jpg”. Part 4 of this tutorial covers setting up an orbital camera. Part 1- In Maya, exporting a cube with textures Before exporting to Virtools, make sure that all faces inside the cube have their normals facing towards the inside of the cube. Go to Modeling, Display > Polygon Components > Normals Normals are represented with colored lines sticking out of the faces of the cube. The red arrow shows the way one normal should look like.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

Virtools provides the amazing ability to endow your worlds with a reasonably good simulation of real world physics with the addition of a few building blocks. As we will see, this system becomes a bit of a black box, but I hope you’ll find that it works reasonably well in many circumstances. The Physicalize BB Let’s begin with the Virtools Getting Started Physics demo. C:\Program Files\Virtools\Virtools Dev 3.5\Documentation\Physics\Physics Database\GettingStarted.cmo.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments

The Quick Start tutorial is your introduction to the power and simplicity of Virtools Dev. The Quick Start tutorial is structured very much like a real project in Virtools Dev. You will follow these steps: 1. organize resources 2. plan the content to be implemented - what do you want the composi- tion (CMO) to do? 3. import the media; the models and characters that form and inhabit the world 4. arrange the scene 5. implement interactivity within the scene 6. test the scene 7. refine the scene based on the results of your tests 8. go back to (6) and continue to test and refine until you are satisfied that the scene meets the requirements you chose in (2) 9. release the composition NOTE In actual production, you would plan the content before organizing the resources.
Read the rest of this entry »

• 0 Comments