Shawn writes about randoms
Shawn has a nice little article about the way people think about random numbers. Take a look here.
I think the only way you need a better random number generator than the .NET Random is when your game is totally relying on random numbers. Games like Roguelikes or Diablo style hack n slash with lots of item drops and random dungeon generation probably use their own random number generator because the built in ones often give a pattern over a large number of samples. In fact I don’t know that much about random numbers, so just read Shawn’s article.
zAnimation – exporting models from Maya
This is a short tutorial which I’m also posting on the zAnimation codeplex wiki. The next one should be about building a new project with zAnimation. This was going to be a video tutorial, but my english speaking abilities sock. As well as my english writing abilities. Also I suck at modeling/animating, so this shouldn’t be taken as a modeling tutorial. It’s a tutorial on how to export stuff. So let’s get started. Read the rest of this entry »
Offside – 3D Scanner
Found this interesting post in my RSS reader this morning on Another Early Morning.
I’ve heard about 3D scanners before, but I never knew that the technology has become so advanced.
As you can see that proFORMA produces “nice” geometry, does texture mapping and captures textures. It’s not officially called a scanner, but a “system allowing on-line (live) generation of textured 3D models.”. Well what I’ve seen from the video it’s a 3D scanner.
These kind of things always make me think how’s it done. I think that you have to have some kind of depth camera (like ZCam). Can you get depth from 2 cameras positioned like 10 to 20 degrees from one another? Yeah, you know the ray from each cam to the pixel, and where the lines from each cam meet, there’s the pixel. But you’d have to have an really precise algorithm for matching pixels. It’s all about filtering pixels to get some key points for the model. I know there’s a filter for edge detection (Sobel filter), there’s probably a filter for “corner” detection. The only problem I see this might have is scanning convex objects. Anyhow it’s a nice way to build game art. You sculpt the model, paint it and scan it. Or take a pen, stapler and some boxes and make a game from that! Awsome.
But according to this the only thing you need is a web camera. Well, didn’t Microsoft Labs do something like this already? Photosynth? Well anyway, I hope the software’s going to be free.
