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3D Modelling From a Sketch
hargettp writes "Happened to be skimming through the December BoingBoing and I noticed this link to research into 3D modelling by interpreting sketches. Basically, with a pen and tablet and a good Java applet, a user can start digitally modelling 3D structures about as easy as if they were molding clay with their bare hands. It was the demonstration video that made my jaw drop. Impressive!"
Post an avi file on slashdot...Great going! I hope you warned them this was happening!
Wow, that was taken down pretty fast...
Anybody has had the time to snatch it and could make a torrent of it?
Just posted, and it's already slashdot...anybody got a mirror up?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Very old news. "Teddy" was developed by Takeo Igarashi at the University of Tokyo, and presented at SIGGRAPH 1999. 8-13-99 Schedule
And then people complain that we don't read the articles!
Hmm, now why am I suspicious of a link to a video called "smoothteddy.avi"? Oh yeah, because this is Slashdot.
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
maybe this will give some purpose to tablet pcs. sounds pretty sweet, but it was already /.ed so i couldnt read it. kinda dissapointing. either that or the link was bad.
Hmmm, a markup language based on pen strokes rather than text tags. Pretty obvious really. (After someone else tells you about it :-)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
A large number of games use cel shading these days. It's the current fad, didn't you know?
I think the newest Zelda game has it.
...
Google Cache to the rescue. What do I win?
Open source 3D for GIS : vterrain.org
See also openscenegraph.org
Both can use Remote Sensing data.
Animoog.org
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
now, nobody download that vid. let me do it and ill let everybody know about how it looks
tofu is made of little baby seals
So, what happens if you feed it an M. C. Escher drawing? Or a drawing of a Klein bottle?
You're kidding, right? Cell Shading has been around for ages and has become a recent trend in video games, ala Nintendo's latest Zelda game.
http://www.ubi.com/US/Games/xiii/
XIII is done totaly with cell shading. Looks and plays like a comic book. The demo at least.
Mark.
The / in
for some reason in the past two weeks, i have seen a lot more random nasty ac postings. i was just wondering if anyone noticed the same thing, and if /. was thinking of doing anything about it.
Although geared toward architectural sketching, SketchUp might serve some of these needs. (Disclosure: I've not used the software, but I do walk past their office on a near-daily basis).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
"...from the helluva-lot-easier-than-autocad dept."
With the latest spate of construction downtown, we see that these new buildings again look like something which was sketched rather than designed...
...and every nerd on earth collectively blows it up.
This sounds like it might have a lot in common with the Priceton 3d model search engine covered on slashdot a while back.
Their server must be pretty beefy... Normal web servers just die under a slashdotting of HTML. I am right now downloading a 50 meg video from them and it keeps going. (well...slowly). I'm guessing they aren't running IIS.
No, it's just that they're using BoingBoing to render better JarJars.
i should have a bt in another 2-3 weeks
tofu is made of little baby seals
Old news to architects.
FormZ (www.formz.com) has had simple 3d sketching capabilities for years. SketchUp (mentioned in previous posts) is one of the most user-friendly tools available today. However, most Sketchup functionality already exists in formZ. SketchUp just makes sketching (1) fun, (2) easy, and (3) look like pencil sketch lines or cartoon lines.
This one using Squeak (Smalltalk) [Google Cached]
I'm not really sure about what was orignially posted, but in some ways it does sound an awful lot like ZBrush..I've seen it demo'd at the macworld expo on a few occasions and its a pretty cool looking piece of software
You just need a 4-D monitor to properly display the results!
Sheesh, kids these days... Don't they even teach you basic topology in grammar school anymore?!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It was a 48 megabyte AVI file! Nobody got a chance to see it.
.torrent, or used open cache. Now none of us can see the video, and the poor guy has probably had his site shut down by his providor (at least temporarilly).
That really is inexusable on slashdot's part. They should have at least posted a
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I've got excellent karma but I've always enjoyed reading Slashdot at -1. Why? I like the raw tastelessness and counterculture in the -1 or 0 rated posts. I prefer the creativity of the more refined trolls as opposed to the bland groupthink that tends to get more and more dominating in the typical high karma posts.
The owls are not what they seem
When will people learn that linking to a video from a Slashdot article is almost always a bad idea? Think about it, 40MB+ times 100,000+ people is easily into the area of multiple tens of Terabytes! That's abso-fucking-lutely nuts!
If you really want to have people see a video, at least get a friend to setup a bit torrent tracker for it in advance or something, then the site will at least have a chance.
Saw a video a few months back of new research (teddy is old) having to do with using sketches to draw out a physics simulation. written in Java. IIRC, done at MIT's Oxygen lab. Anyway, it was incredible- the guy draws a ramp. Draws a box at the top of the ramp, adds wheels. hit go and the whole thing is played out at 1 G in the way it would here on earth. I would knife someone to get a hold of that. Ok, maybe not that, but yeah, it'd be great.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
on BoingBoing to be much more fascinating http://www.gasbgon.com/
What?
Damn straight. Reading
Trolling is a art,
It was the demonstration video that made my jaw drop.
It was also the demonstration video that made the server drop.
The ______ Agenda
GNAASTEE announced today their endorsement of Sir Haxalot 2004. More to come!
Bah. Cell shading... That's been used since... since... King's Quest and Leisure Suit Larry... Sure they only had 16 colors... but that's really not much more than Poke'mon uses now... ;)
I guess one must ask if this will give all those out of work 2D artists a job... Gotta think the skills are useful for something...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Yep, and while I do my part in verbally (well, textually) assulting cloaked troll karmawhores, the place wouldn't be the same without CUM-CHOKING DICKWHORES like Sir Haxalot. It's the Circle Of Life, bitch.
I don't understand; if it's as easy as modeling in clay, why not use clay? The tactile feedback while using clay has to be much more than using a pen tablet. There is technology that can scan something in 3D.
Perhaps I'm old fashioned...
Dada Mail - Program, Art Project or Absurdity?
Magic Pengel : The Quest for Color
t en tativetitle/
You draw a doodle and the game will turn it into a 3d sprite that you fight with.
anyways here is a URL from Gamespot about this
http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/strategy/colorquest
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
Moderate, -2 D'oh!
-Styopa
He was also an excellent speaker, very entertaining. He had used his program to draw characters from the movies shown in the Electronic Theatre during the show.
The program I thought was brilliant. It is what user interface should be, not a thousand menus and "toolbars" but an empty window that you click on and it "does what you want". Too bad there is no sign of such interfaces showing up in real-world applications, either open or closed...
anthony - sorry to hear about it. Hope you left the wife and kids well provided for.
Zeldafor GC , XIII on multiplatform, Jet Set Radio for the DC and Jet Set Raido Future for Xbox to name but a few
try the application itself. I was going to try it, but it requires windows for some of it's native rendering code (looks like direct x calls).
TallGreen CMS hosting
Good link though; I appreciated learning about SketchUp, as I was not familiar with it.
I'm the one who posted this article this morning, and I'm really bummed that the links quit working well before the article actually made it onto Slashdot. Otherwise, I think you (and everyone else) might have seen what is so different about SmoothTeddy: whereas SketchUp looks great for architectural design, SmoothTeddy is better for arbitrary shapes.
The video showed a user drawing an arbitrary closed 2-D curve, and the application would then intuit something about the 3-D surface being represented! Very interesting: suddenly a simple closed curve becomes a potato-shaped closed surface, complete with "pencil-shading" to remind the user of it's 3-D nature. The video continued to show how easy it is to grab and rotate the newly created surface, how drawing a circle on a the surface of the object and adding a new 2-D curve can be used to extrude that surface into a new shape. Cutting, creating indentations, etc., were all demonstrated very powerfully.
Words don't do it (again, pity there's no video), but what distinguishes Takeo's work from SketchUp (and other such apps that i've seeen, in my limited experience) is it's ability to 1) reasonably intuit a 3-D surface based on a 2-D curve, and 2) the simple interface for manipulating that surface / volume.
What exactly would you DO with it?
And don't bother telling me - send the answer, with an application, to the MIT Media Lab.
If you have something interesting to say, they'll consider you.
If you don't, why do you think that getting your hands on someone else's design will change that?
Check out Atrform's curvy 3d . It is quite similar to teddy but much more advanced. You can create very complex shapes with just a few strokes. The gallery and tutorials are very impressive.
http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/strategy/colorquestten tativetitle/
hate titty pee colon slash slash
YHBT!
796F75617265616E65726400
milk. out. nose. funny.
I have seen this demoed at CMU it was cool but for the most part it was useless, just a toy. I do have a back ground in 3D so I know something of the subject. Any one looking into 3D animation or modeling for a hobby would be bored with this in 10 minutes. You have no control over fine details, it is worse then trying to sculpting clay with boxing gloves on. If there is a program out there that looks like it can make it so easy to make a 3d model then it falls into one of two groups niche or toy.
Niche; being that it works great on one thing, programs that can take a set of photo pictures into a 3D model.
Toy; like smooth teddy. Microsoft had a 3D program back in the day it was so basic it was more a tool / demo of what Windows 3.1/95 could do , this was before they owned Softimage.
That is my two cents.
Life is marked by pain.
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)
Maya has had the ability to "mold" objects, and paint things with a stylus for a few years now. It's very nice.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
Also Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneaux developed a while ago another Siggraph-shown art project called A-Volve. I think their server can take it.. Also here you can see the drawing screen. You make fish by drawing the schematic and they swim in a crt under real water.. and have kids who look and act a bit like the parents! Nice people too. See the interaction and a bigger picture. They also developed gesture recognition based projects and were at NTT's ATR lab in Kyoto. Now I think still at IAMAS in Gifu, Japan. This maybe precedes Igarashi's work though his is also great stuff.
Ah, but the beauty of clay is that it basically has infinite levels of "undo" until you perform a structure commit (e.g., bisque it). Then, of course, you can apply textures and shaders (glazes, oxides, lustres), which also have reasonable levels of undo, until you render (e.g., fire at Cone 10).
For some examples, please see http://teapots.fogbound.net
The other cool thing about clay is that the basics of the OS have been in use for, oh, say around 10,000 years, and the latest major upgrade was about 2,000 years ago when people compiled kaolin into the kernel*.
(* You'll find people who will tell you that "paper clay" techniques were invented around 1970 -- these people are ignorant. Amazonian Indians along the Rio Napo have been mixing leaf fibres into their earthenware vessels (to give rigidity during pit firing) for thousands of years. It's the same basic principle. Other advances tend to be in the control space: kiln temperature and atmosphere, better refinement and greater availability of minerals and materials, etc. The basic technology, though, hasn't had much in the way of advancement).
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
You may be thinking of "Interactive Physics" (http://www.interactivephysics.com).
there is already a purpose! and in conjunction with Alias design tools there is some integration, and more I would expect in the future. As a Mac person primarily, i am often put off by Steve's blanket denunciation of platforms (Newton) and technology (interconnectedness--Appletalk vs TCP-IP). I use my tablet to design packaging conncepts, which i export to TIFFS, and incorporate them into documents for clients. I would love a high power Mac tablet pc like device, but i doubt that will happen soon. even on the Windows side, the tablet pc's are generally underpowered for tasks like 3d.
it seems if there are any, they are hiding :). my biggest problem with most GIS system is the general lack of good open data in a format that doesn't take a month to understand. tiger and DCW (digital chart of the world) are the primary data sets, but both take a lot of processing, and people who (like myself) actually bother to figure out the formats end up being quite stingy with the results. nobody understands us!
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
In this game, you used a variety of different brushes to draw a monster. You had different options, such as picking a "head" brush to signify the object you were drawing was part of the monsters head, etc...but, for the most part, the game just saw the lines you were drawing. The AMAZING part of this game was that it would take your 2d sketch and, for the most part, flesh it out in 3d. Not only that, it would also fully animate the model through a built in algorithm.
The impressive part was how well this worked. Not only did it do what it was supposed to do but, in most cases, it actually realistically animated the monster. It's a little cutesy, but you guys who are into this kind of thing should check it out!
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Please mod this up, it's quite relevant. I happen to own the game and the 3d drawing capabilities from just a PS/2 controller and a 2d screen are extremely impressive. I've even managed to draw Trogdor! And this coming form someone who has zero art talent ;)
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
This system is similarly aimed at architectural work. However it looks more like the Teddy stuff, as its based on generating points in 3d from 2d sketches (possibly scanned in) by looking at the perspective in the drawing.
It's not true 3d though - they assume all the points drawn lie on a unit sphere, and project them onto that. However this is good enough to provide panoramic views from building sketches, for example.
They admins probably can't connect to the box to figure out what's causing the problem.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I downloaded SmoothTeddy when I first saw it on boingboing and have been playing with it a little. It's nice being able to create 3D images so flexibly, but there are bugs in the system. The interface has many elements of gestures (delete a shape by drawing a line from it to a trashcan, cut it apart by drawing a line across it, mirror it by drawing a line from a shape off into the air). However it's written in Java and it shows. It's more of a technology demo than something that can be used for real work at the moment. The program's only export format is to Alice, a combination 3D modelling/programming system (well... that's technically true at least, heh). The guy's page said that there's a commercial product in Japan that uses the Teddy technology, but that it's Japanese-only.
Ignoring the bugs (many of which cause the program to freeze if an incorrect stroke is drawn), there are some cool elements to this. Most things you can draw end up looking almost exactly like a big pillow. You can draw objects on the pillow that intersect it and then adjust their location on the pillow's surface. When it gets where you want it you can "merge" it with the pillow. The program tries to create smooth meshes wherever it can, and making sharp corners is almost impossible without creative use of the cutting tool.
Verdict: fun to play with if you have a good tolerance for bugs and don't mind that you won't be able to easily get your work into another program.
Maybe editors are just hoping that with enough Slashdot frustration someone will reinvent then internet and solve all of our bandwidth issues forever. So they're not kicking your server in the nuts because they're stupid, they're kicking your server in the nuts because they care .
Power IS freedom. The freedom to decide who can use your software is the power software creators have. The FSF wants that power to be in the hands of the users instead of large corporations.
Software is just a bunch of bytes, believe me, it does not want to be free. It's the people that want it to be free, and when you want something you can't have, you're powerless.
Over a hundred comments and not one complaint about the alleged slowness of java? :)
Slashdotting rules!
From me, to you. But I don't except the server to survive a real slashdotting, so behave.
the videoThat is just too cool!
MetaCreations had a product called Canoma that you'd import a photo or two, describe the 3d scene in the photo with basic modelling, then it would create a 3d textured representation from the photos. It didn't make really really wonderful scenes or anything, but the stuff you could do with it in about an hour were incredible.
Adobe purchased the product from MetaCreations and it's not being sold anymore. Perhaps it will come out again in the future to compliment their horrible Atmosphere product.
Also, Java sucks.
~GoRK
Maybe people who post 48MB files on their website should smarten up and use Bittorrent themselves. Even if they don't get slashdotted, it's a wise move if they expect more than a few people to want the file.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
You can use this mirror to view the video.
This is true, but Joe Schmoe response:
.Torrent? What the heck is .torrent? Why can't I just click on the video? Oh, I have to download a program? !!!!
Followed by a quick click on the proverbial X.
Did you start with an S, and then draw a more different S? Also, did you use consumate V's?! If not... well... Strongbad will not be pleased!
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
Cel shading. There is no thing as cell shading.
It's not just something like this! Magic Pengel uses Teddy, the precursor to Smooth Teddy.
Please, pretty please, then, open-source your reformatted results!
I've looked into GIS several times over the years, hoping to use data for highly nontraditional purposes, but the formats are indeed a major pain, so I've always gone away discouraged.
So help the world out, publish your stuff!
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
Yeah, when I first caught that .sig, I took it have a negative conation towards RMS and the FSF. Like they are poewr hungry monsters. And maybe that's how the author meant it. But control over freedom is power. As is not giving someone freedom is power. Given that, it seems more like a damned if you do and damned if you don't scenario.
You can use your power to grant and maintain one particular idea of freedom. Or you can use your power not give people certain freedoms. In software that would be if you have access to code or if you don't. And then there's all the varying degrees of freedom between or beyond.
I guess with that being said, can freedom have limitations and still be considered freedom? US citizens considers themselves free, and they might be freer then most, but there are still restriction upon it. Even software with the BSD license has certain restrictions about it.
slashdot news for nerds ringing a bell? response from average nerd: bittorrent, no problem
...these aren't my real teeth.
Since Slashdot doesn't allow dupes...
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
I downloaded this. It says it needs a windows os. My version of RedHat Linux *has* Xwindows, so things should work fine. Nope. It seems they want a Microsoft operating system (not necessarily just one with windows) because it does work with wine. They should change the requirements to mean some kind of microsoft system instead of just windows.
You have to ask yourself what the intended audience and expected traffic of the website are. It's not RedHat posting .isos of its distribution. It's not a movie studio putting out a trailer that it wants to be seen by everyone. It's a university researcher who put up a website to give the curious someplace to go when they hear about his research. In fact, it's likely that he doesn't give a hoot about Slashdot. So why should anyone expect him to handle the Slashdot DDOS that comes his way? I expect that he's too busy working on his interesting research to deal with administering a bulletproof website.
thematrixhasy 011? *snif!* troll?
...was Professor John Hughes, currently on sabbatical from Brown University. In case anyone cares. Brown's graphics group, which includes Dr. Hughes, has been doing sketch-based 3D for around a decade. I worked in that group for a time.
Well I tried, but due to the drawing constraings I was forced to start with an S and then continue back up the same S from the tail, just more differently. But I did indeed use consumate V's, drawn with a very thin brush and dark green color :D And I gave him two big strong armitties (the better to punch with in battle), wings (he flies), and he even breathes fire...sorta. He does much burninating of the other doodles though!
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
Okay, so who wants to vote on Taco's IQ level ,given the direct AVI link as evidence?
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
who says..."as easy as if they were molding clay with their bare hands" it's easy?
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
From what I can see - this software has a lot of great tools for increasing productivity of a 3d modeller, but in a lot of cases, I saw it making some huge assumptions. Like in the extrusions. How does the software know how to do the rotation, how thick you want the shape, what kind of cross section, how much to curve it. Such assumptions won't make every modeller happy in every case, so they've got to enter this data somehow. So they're only showing half the story here.
I assume that the 3rd dimension is just as simple to add in as the other two - but they aren't showing it.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Well when nanotechnology comes of age, we can have smart clay. But in the meantime we can borrow the "metaforical" natural ease of clay manipulation for our 3D programs. i.e what's natural about clay vs computer?
In the mid-'90s, researchers at Brown developed Sketch:
r ch /sketch/
http://www.cs.brown.edu/research/graphics/resea
This concentrated more on scene construction than single-object modeling. It had some very nice aspects. One thing I liked was the use of shadows to specify depth of one object relative to others.
For instance, when an arrow object is placed in the arrow/target scene on that page, it could be at any depth along the camera's line of sight. That's an underconstrained situation, and the system would guess at a reasonable distance for the object. By jotting in a shadow on the ground, it would move the arrow to the position that would match that shadow position.
Oops! I mean, yea, haha you fell for it. *changes sig*
796F75617265616E65726400
I'd disagree slightly. Clay once dried out has to be slaked before you can modify it by any plastic process, and once slaked, it's been "undone" all the way back to the empty file level.
Also, I'd have to disagree that the last major upgrade was 2000 years ago. Certain useful techniques have evolved more recently. Die extrusion, for example. Electroformed metal. Or hydraulic pressing using damp powder. Thixotropic clay. Or even such admittedly trivial techniques as upside-down wheels. Certain colors are available now that weren't even 50 years ago, such as encapsulated cadmium reds for high-temp work. And what about fiberfrax armatures and other products of recent ceramic advances?
But basically, you're right. The basic technology hasn't changed in a long time. It's the headspace that's really changed.
I wonder if we're the only potters who visit slashdot.
Ah, but the beauty of clay is that it basically has infinite levels of "undo" until you perform a structure commit (e.g., bisque it).
I disagree. The "undo" you have with clay is roughly equivalent to the eraser in a paint program, not the undo feature. You can poke at it until it approximates what you had a few minutes ago -- mutability remains, but you cannot instantaneously snap back to *exactly* what you just had.
Clay has a really good interface. However:
* No undo equivalent.
* Cannot be duplicated easily.
* Cannot be transferred to others easily.
* Computers allow a number of useful transforms to be applied easily -- squashing, resizing, etc. This is not trivial with clay.
* Computers allow version history to be used.
* Computers allow a rapid move from prototypes to models used to produce production output.
* Computers allow physically difficult-to-produce structures to be created.
* Computers allow color to be manipulated many times, easily.
* Computers allow side-by-side comparison of variants.
May we never see th
Lots of companies provide web hosting services. Not many provide BitTorrent hosting services on their UNIX box.
:-( )
(And this is a university, so you can't even argue free market economics
May we never see th
Japanese PS2 game, RAKUGAKI OH-KOKU (Japanese), uses modeling technique of Teddy. It have been sold 100 thousands in Japan. Released at 2003. In Japan, many comic artists(i.e. HIJIRI, Yuki) presents their RAKUGAKI(graffiti) arts in WWW.
He's not talking about slashdot. Take another look.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
redundant?!?! I know, the -1 was correct, but fucking redundant? Fuck you mods.
I'll keep posting on this thread, and damn' be the mods :)
OK, I'll admit to some exaggeration here. Of course, I'm approaching this from a dilletante perspective, whereas you appear to do serious production work, so I hope I can be forgiven for my presumption.
I acknowledge the advances you mention. I hadn't even thought about hydraulic presses. I'll even admit to having used some of the Mayco One Stroke encapsulated metal glazes (and I've been amazed to get nice buttercup yellow in Cone 10 reduction). But haven't extrusion techniques have been around for a long time? Didn't the Romans extrude ceramic pipes?
But anyway, I digress even farther. Maybe my argument is nonsensical -- I suppose one could similarly claim that metalwork is the same today as it was two thousand years ago, but that we just have better equipment and purer ores... Still, it feels like clay is closer to where it was 10,000 years ago in Jiangxi than, say, agriculture or transportation.
Do you think we'd have an audience to create Slashpot?
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Yeah, you're right. I'm just quibbling. I don't know about the Roman pipe deal, but it sounds plausible. I used to extrude with nothing but a tube, a die, and a lever.
Slashpot? I like it. And you know, there are all sorts of correspondences between the industry based on making useful things out of formless mud and the industry based on making useful information out of formless bits. Both Protean endeavors, and I suppose there was a time when having clay pots (or not) made as big a difference in daily life as having computers does now. Or bigger-- but we haven't seen the end of the computer's effects on daily life. Or even the end of the beginning.
Curvy 3D lets you draw the basic shape of a model with your tablet, two or three lines is usually enough to define the bulk of a shape.
Then you can add more primitives and smoothly merge them together - much like metaballs but using hand drawn primitives.
Next you can work into the surfaces, you can paint displacement, colour, bumpmaps directly onto the 3D model. Like ZBrush - but all your shapes stay in full 3D, no 'baking' involved.
The rendering is excellent, in realtime it handles beautiful lighting, displacement maps and bump maps. You can have effects like strong backlighting or metallic reflections easily, all in realtime.
And finally you can export the hige res detailed models to 3ds to animate or render in other 3D programs. All the UV's export fine - no need for UV unwrapping - they are already uniform.
Curvy 3D will ship for $450 in Feb 2004, but watch out for the budget version that will be sub $100!
www.curvy3d.com