Worms music video by Sil Van Der Woerd January 18, 2008
Posted by mwj as 3d, art. 3 comments.
Nodes and Web 3.0 October 21, 2007
Posted by mwj as 3d, art, crowd sourcing, virtual worlds, web3.0. 2 comments.Last week at the Masters of Digital Media we were paid a visit by the creators of Houdini, a high end 3d animation suite. I haven’t used much in the way of 3d tools (like Maya, 3D Studio Max or Blender), but I am getting more interested in the subject. This is mostly because I believe that Web 3.0 will consist of traversable 3d space, like the Metaverse from Snow Crash.
Houdini is the most expensive 3d animation software out there, but the big selling point is that it allows users to solve visual problems in a procedural way. This sort of proceduralism works like so: first, you take a standard primitive object, like a basic pyramid or a sphere. Then you select an effect, say the colour red, and apply it to the sphere. After this, perhaps you take a certain bumpy texture and apply it, or a certain set of commands that morph the sphere into a different shape.
Each of these effects are called nodes, and the beauty of them is that they can be re-applied to a different shape to generate a different object. Or we can follow the advice of one of the crew from Houdini, and think of proceduralism as cooking. If we think of this style of creation as making a soup, the object that you apply everything to is like the stock or base, and each node you add is a different ingredient.