The 3D Raddict

More a grimace than a smile......but at least I'm showing my teeth!

I guess that face-morphing is not my strong point !

Back to the rest of my body....I've now added textures to it:-

Well, that's the physical me finished. Now I must give myself some movement.

Wow, nearly two weeks have passed since my last update. Time really flies when your'e busy! After having completed the Eureka! project, I felt that I needed a slight change of direction.
I have always tried to stay clear of character animation, but I needed a unique character to explore my yet-to-be-built 3DRad worlds. There is nobody more unique than oneself.......so i decided to tackle the bull by the horns and model "yours truly"
I dug out my old Modelling and Animation books, and, after a number of attempts, ended up with a base model of my head, to which I applied a texture map made up from my portrait and profile photographs. I found the body to be a little too complicated to build from scratch, so I "stole" one which was very similar to my own.This is the stage that I am now
at.......a textured head, an untextured body, as so:- 

I don't always look so serious, but when I've placed a set of teeth in my mouth, I'll morph it into a cheesy grin!
I still need to give myself a skeleton and rig everything together. Another requirement I have laid down is NOT to build my own animations......I am going to animate purely by importing from the many freely available BVH animations. An application that I have found to be extremely useful in this regard is DAZStudio. It has a really unique way to easily create custom animations, imports/exports BVH files, and exports Collada .DAE files (which can easily be imported into 3DMax using the Collada plugin). Tons of free stuff is available on their website, but there are EULA restrictions on the use thereof.

The application was reported as crashing on occasions when one of the blocks hit against the sides of the glass tank. I managed to fix this by doubling the thickness of the rigidbody comprising the side of the tank.

The latest Task 5:Eureka!  of my Virtual Workbench Project has been completed, and is available for downloading. This was a very challenging and interesting task to work on.

The bug in the Buoy Object was fixed in the November update. I've been testing it out in the Eureka! project, and it works really well !  I think that if Mr Achimedes was alive today, he would be very pleased with it.

Of course the BIG news this week has been Unity following in the footsteps of 3D Rad by going freeware. I just had to see how this hotdog engine compared with Rad, so I joined the throng and downloaded it, together with all its tutorials. I've been reading the documentation and made a start on the 2D Platformer tutorial. The documentation is first class, with good referencing and examples, Also the Editor lives up to the glowing reports I've read about it. But what is NOT publicized so widely, is the fact that you really have to be a topnotch scripter/programmer to get the most out of it. So, in this regard, I do not think that 3D Rad is going to lose many users!

From a personal point of view, I really do like the use of PhysX for the physics side of things, but other than that, I think that 3D Rad is far more intuitive and simpler to use, as well as living up to its RAD part.
In the near future, as a personal exercise,I would like to port the three major Unity tutorials (3D Platformer, FPS, and 2D Platformer) to 3D Rad for comparison purposes.

My Eureka! project is progressing well.......no major hiccups. Just waiting for the November update for a fix on the Buoy Object bug.
Meanwhile, here is a video of the Spring Balance in operation.