Slashdot Mirror

Something similar already exists and provides haptic feedback so you can "feel" the surface you are sculpting with your pen/tool. I have to say i'm not that impressed with the results (see their gallery), but that's not necessarily a comment on the product, rather the artists who use it. Seems people have been getting much better results with stuff like ZBrush anyway

Interesting, the CGI product "Zbrush" uses the same image on their website. Well it looks very much the same at least.

http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/zbrush-is-painting /overview.php

I guess they used zbrush to do the texturing and modelling and then this other product to animate it? Anyone know?

I can't help but feel that this may be treading on ground somewhat already covered by zbrush, a modeling program in which the user paints in shape, mixing 2D and 3D funcitonality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbrush
http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/home/home.html

If artwork and technology are causing exponential development costs, developers need to work smarter.

Right now the game industry is in a transitional phase where great graphics are expected, but hard to produce. The solution is to make it easier to produce great looking games and Middleware is the key.

Middleware solutions are growing fast and have enabled spectacular feats. GTA3+, for example, runs entirely on RenderWare with a proprietary background-loading/streaming system. Rockstar took existing technology (RenderWare) and existing game play stuff (racing, 3rd person shooters, crazy-taxi, etc) and blended them together with something new and unique and CREATIVE (a vast, free roaming game world). Sure the development costs were high for the GTA3 series games, but I can bet you that had they been forced to reimplement RenderWare, there would be no GTA3 games to play today. The cost would have just been too prohibitive.

Now that Rockstar has come up with this free roaming world game play style (and people clearly enjoy it) either rockstar, or someone else, should release the technology as middle ware and poof, its now easy for people to add new innovations to that.

There needs to be more art-related middleware such as http://www.speedtree.com/ and improved tools such as ZBrush (being used for bump map creation in Unreal 3) from http://pixologic.com/home/home.shtml

A lot of time is spend reproducing work. We need to work smarter, not harder. We need public domain high resolution 3d models for common real world objects, character model generation software, facial expression engines, animation engines, tons of stuff!

There is a big itch that people need to start scratching! And you can make a lot of money doing it.

There is a professional production 3D modelling software which has been doing this for years, it's called Z-Brush. Of course its UI is much more sophisticated (and complicated), but you can already see on its website that the results which can be achieved by its use are impressive to say the least.

BTW the colors for this slashdot section are _horrible_.

I didn't post above, but I currently use both XP and 2000 daily. Make your own decisions but I also use OS X daily and it's far and away the most pleasant working environment I've encountered to date. That doesn't mean it's perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but that's not the point now, is it.

As for "OS 9," um, who's talking about OS 9?

If you want Unix, install Linux... FreeBSD... SuSE... Debian... Lycoris... Lindows... There are choices in the Windows world.

Well, by the time I've finished clicking through the (Continue) buttons in an OS X install I've managed to install both the entire GUI environment and the entire Unix OS. I can also install other Unix systems on Mac hardware, but frankly I've got everything I need right here.

I don't need to install anything else except Logic Pro 6, Ableton Live, MetaSynth, ArtMatic Pro, MetaTrack, Voyager, VTrack, Absynth, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniDiskSweeper, Studiometry, FileMakerPro, Adobe Creative Suite, LaunchBar, MySQL, Perl 5.8.3, Fink, Plone, Keynote, BBEdit, FastTrack Schedule Pro, Sonasphere, Toast 6, ZBrush, and a few more but I'll get to those tomorrow.

I run all these (plus my email, internet, contacts management, calendaring, etc) in the same operating environment; not an emulation shell, not after dual-booting, but in the very same operating system and simultaneously.

To top it all off OS X comes with a full set of developer tools, documentation and optimization utilities, plus Cocoa+Obj-C is a match made in heaven.

There's no need to pay Apple for a decent Unix experience.

Well, I believe there is. I enjoy the ability to support quality whether it's a film, a restaurant, a music venue, a book, clothing, my neighborhood, an artist, etc. every single day.

The hardware is just a hunk of material until you've discovered/designed an interface with which to use it. Solely on a base consumer level, I'm very happy to pay Apple for what is, in daily practice, a superior computer operating system. From the level of both a technology consultant and a media creator, the solution is very simple.

OS X is a very impressive "Holy Grail" for all my current activities. Strap me in because I'm ready to get to work.

Also as a Cinema user, I purchased Mesh Surgery, which has some nice tablet or mouse free hand painting effects. It's a nice tool (a little buggy the odd time), great for adding muscles little ripples, painting landscapes. Good Stuff, and pretty cheap (if you have C4D 8.2)