Reading a rumor last week that ATI have secured the deal to deliver the GPU for Microsoft’s next xbox got me thinking about the next console generation, how far away it is, and what would convince people to buy a new system? The Wii is the most successful system this generation with arguably last generation graphics. There must be more to a new round of consoles than graphical power.
Archive for October, 2009
Next Box
Monday, October 19th, 2009Facial Edge Loops: Part 1 Striving for perfection
Sunday, October 11th, 2009The face is a complicated structure to recreate in 3D and more so if you want it to distort realistically, At first glance the facial distortion seems very complex with distortion happening all over its surface in the form of skin sliding over bone, muscles directly affecting the surface or skin creasing & stretching due to muscle activity near by.
A tried and tested method for dealing with most of this seemingly complex movement of the face is the facial edge loop system, originally derived by studying the musculature of the face. 3 muscle sphincters around the eyes and mouth who’s only purpose is to close the opening it surrounds and the radiating muscle groups designed only to open the hole within the sphincter. (more…)
Mapping Mars
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009Having worked on a couple of open world titles, I’ve had experience with two different teams methods of creating the basic surface mesh of a game wold. They both used at their core, a flat mesh that was deformed in a vertical axis by artists or imported height map data.
Texture mapping co-ordinates were projected along the same vertical axis as the mesh was deformed. This meant that the greater the slope of the mesh, the more distorted the texture appeared in the world, as is illustrated by the image below,
