To understand the child, one must study the parent. So to understand 3DRad, one must look at its parent,namely, 3Impact. Having recently become freeware, I decided to take some time off 3DRad and investigate the capabilities of 3Impact5.
I have found that the easiest way for me to study a new engine is to take a project that I know works in another engine, and port it over to the engine that I'm testing. I have had a fair amount of experience with the Nvidia PhysX SDK, integrating its physics into a previous 3D engine. I find that 3Impact/3Drad is sadly lacking on the physics side (it uses the rather outdated ODE physics), so my goal over the next couple of months is to attempt integration of PhysX into 3Impact. You can follow may progress at the 3Impact Forum. There will be downloadable demos illustrating the various tests I am apply

 
Making Waves 01/02/2010
 
A new year and a new start. I'm not getting any younger, so I'm going to make a start on my Surfing Simulation project before my bones give out!
During the last few weeks I managed to refresh myself on HLSL and hope to use this to produce a good surfing wave for myself.
I have been following an excellent series of tutorials on shader programming. It is actually a free e-book called "The CG Tutorial: The Definitive Guide to Real-Time Graphics" and is obtainable at http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cg_tutorial_home.html
Although it is based on Cg, which is a high-level shader language developed by Nvidia in close collaboration with Microsoft,it is very similar to Microsoft's HLSL.
I've taken a number of the examples and ported them to 3DRad HLSL format. You can pick them up from here.
 
 
I've now given myself a "walk" animation which can be checked out in the video here
By carrying out this little modelling and animation exercise, I have been able to refresh myself on all procedures required, and have also established a content pipeline to 3DRad.
The December update brought a new dimension to 3DRad, namely, User Defined Shaders. A long while back I did attempt to learn HLSL, but gave up because it was not easy to readily see the results of one's efforts and also there were not too many tutorials floating around the web.
Now that we have the means, I'm going to spend the next two weeks concentrating on learning and applying HLSL.
 
 
More a grimace than a smile......but at least I'm showing my teeth!
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I guess that face-morphing is not my strong point !

Back to the rest of my body....I've now added textures to it:-
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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:- 
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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.
 
Buoy Oh Buoy! 11/03/2009
 
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.
 
Unity for All 11/01/2009
 
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.
 
 
......and it also makes the programming of physical simulations one whole lot easier!

I could not imagine me doing this stuff without a physics engine on hand. I remember, not so long ago, the pain of collision detection using the traditonal software methods........lots of maths,vertices,vectors and matrices.......AND valuable TIME.

Now, we can fire a projectile in the air without any need for calculating its trajectory.If some object is in its path, so what........the collision will take care of itself! In my 1st person game, I am free to bump against walls,climb over obstacles,pick up and interact with objects, enable realistically moving machinery.........all with the aid of a GOOD physics engine.However, if the physics engine is NOT all that good, then one will get unrealistic performance and time will be spent trying out all kinds of workarounds to achieve the effect required.

An example of collision between two rigidbodies can be seen in the Eureka project, where the spring balance hook has to catch and hold onto the handle of the block "bodies". In the case of 3D Rad, if you plan the distribution of your spherical collision bodies and mass bodies correctly, then everything should go according to plan.