3DVIA BOOTH #1432, SOUTH HALL [ RSVP ON FACEBOOK ]

We have an amazing set of presentations for the entire 3DVIA community this year.  Watch this video to see the top 3 things you must see before you leave the show.

For those of you with a short attention span, here is a taste of the games and partners to be presented at this years show.

If you can not make the show this year, check the 3DVIA blog for Emmy’s daily GDC blog post or follow our live stream on Twitter.

Take 30 minutes on Thursday, August 27 at 11:00 a.m. to learn new skills with 3DVIA Virtools and have a chance to WIN a $100 Apple® Gift Card*!

Wii™ Prototyping and Production
Thursday, August 27, from 11:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. EDT

In this live demonstration, discover how easy 3DVIA Virtools makes Wii game prototyping and production (DVD retail or WiiWare™ distribution). Learn about the features and services, such as the Wii Build Block library, converting your PC games to Wii in minutes and simplifying Lot Checks, that have contributed to 3DVIA Virtools’ current use in the production of over 15 games, including released titles.

IMPORTANT NOTE: this session is only accessible to authorized Wii developers, as confidential information will be shared. Please confirm your status by contacting us through WarioWorld.com.

*One participant from each webinar will receive one $100 Apple Gift Card. The winner’s name will be drawn and announced at the end of the webinar. Apple Gift Cards will be mailed directly to winning participants. To qualify as a potential winner, participants must be present for the duration of the webinar. Apple is not a participant in or sponsor of this promotion.

Learn to use 3DVIA Virtools and see how it helps small teams build games like Subsurface in no time with our free online tutorial series. Every other week watch Little Chicken Game Company, the studio responsible for Subsurface, go over the 3DVIA Virtools basics to get you started.

This week Little Chicken demonstrates how to import and use blend shapes.

Tutorial 5: Blend Shapes
Learn how to import blend shapes straight from your DCC software and use them for animations.

3DVIA Virtools Tutorial 5: Blend Shapes from 3DVIA on Vimeo.

Take 30 minutes on Thursday, August 13 to learn new skills with 3DVIA Virtools and have the chance to WIN a $100 Apple® Gift Card*

How to Use Shaders in 3DVIA Virtools
Thursday August 13, from 11:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. EDT

Shaders allow programmers to circumvent traditional graphic routines. They offer ways to operate on every vertex—to morph or bend objects—and on every pixel—to color, texture, light or change material properties. Shaders speed up graphic-intensive programs, allowing graphic processing units to handle more computation, while leveraging more CPU for other tasks or commands. This presentation will cover pixel and vertex shader implementation, as well as supported shader languages in 3DVIA Virtools.

*One participant from each webinar will receive one $100 Apple Gift Card. The winner’s name will be drawn and announced at the end of the webinar. Apple Gift Cards will be mailed directly to winning participants. To qualify as a potential winner, participants must be present for the duration of the webinar. Apple is not a participant in or sponsor of this promotion.

Learn to use 3DVIA Virtools and see how it helps small teams build games like Subsurface in no time with our free online tutorial series. Every other week watch Little Chicken Game Company, the studio responsible for Subsurface, go over the 3DVIA Virtools basics to get you started.

This week Little Chicken demonstrates how to create simple movement and import an animated character using 3DVIA Virtools.

Tutorial 3: Creating Simple Movement
Learn how to use simple scripting and pre-packaged behaviors to move objects.

Tutorial 4: Importing an Animated Character
Discover how to import an animated character and create secondary animations.

Take 30 minutes on Wednesday, July 29 at 11:00 a.m. to learn new skills with 3DVIA Virtools.

The Benefits of Virtual Versus Classic Training
Wednesday July 29, from 11:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. EDT

Discover how on-demand virtual training with 3DVIA Virtools enables users to learn any time, anywhere in a safe and forgiving environment. Using multiple, real-life examples, you will understand how 3DVIA Virtools can be used to create 3D training applications quickly, affordably and with a variety of scenarios that would be expensive and difficult to recreate in a classic training environment.

Learn to use 3DVIA Virtools and see how it helps small teams build games like Subsurface in no time with our free online tutorial series. Every other week watch Little Chicken Game Company, the studio responsible for Subsurface, go over the 3DVIA Virtools basics to get you started.
This week Little Chicken demonstrates how to create a scene using 3DVIA Virtools in two tutorial videos.

Tutorial 1: 3DVIA Virtools Basics Part 1
Import models, adjust lighting, set up views and alter scene properties, including fog. 

Tutorial 2: 3DVIA Virtools Basics Part 2
Discover scripting essentials to set up any scene in 3DVIA Virtools.

Take 30 minutes on Wednesday, July 22 at 11:00 a.m. to learn new skills with 3DVIA Virtools 5.

Rapid Game Prototyping and Development with 3DVIA Virtools 5
Wednesday July 22, from 11:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. EDT
“Build a multiplatform game in weeks / months instead of years!”

Understand how gaming companies benefit from the use of 3DVIAVirtools for rapid development, whether for internal use or consumer products on the PC or console platforms. Learn from concrete examples of projects (including development of the Subsurface game, which was completed in 60 days) and a development pipeline description.  You will be exposed to tips and tricks on how to best take advantage of the latest release of 3DVIA Virtools.

Play Subsurface online and request a free evaluation to see the source code!

Help Dr. Valerie Toulé navigate through an underwater field of depth charges and missiles as she tries to prevent the evil narco-terrorist Ian McClusky from discovering a power capable of destroying the world. But don’t let the story doesn’t end there…discover the 3DVIA story behind the Subsurface story.

Meet Little Chicken Game Company, the development shop responsible for the creation of Subsurface, and learn how with a team of just 6 people, Little Chicken was able to turn out Subsurface in only 60 days. Watch the team discuss the making of the game in this video.

Enjoy!

-Emmy

Watch the official Subsurface trailer and get pumped up before you play the game!

Hear from the six people at Little Chicken Game Company on how they built Subsurface in only 60 days using 3DVIA Virtools 5.

Coming straight from the floor at this years GDC 2009, the folks at Little Chicken present how they built Subsurface in 60days with a team of only 6 in this great video.

Your camera man and the source for this very cool spot is our very own Virgile.

If you weren’t able to make it to the show, we invite you to also try and play online. (The highest score so far has been 355!)

>Here’s a link to a hi-res video

Here’s some video snippets of the underwater enviroment and game controls.

because we’re aiming at current gaming pc’s but in an online enviroment as well , we want to keep filesize low, so the enviroment features a selected amount of normal map shaders on the base enviroment. In an extension of this optimisation, all foliage, fish (now only a shark), lightbeams etc etc are spawned as a relatively simple placement and spawning script, iterating over a selection of spawnable items.

There’s no particle effects in the video , but these and other sfx will be added later. Als the Submarine itself is not using any dynamic lighting, to optimise the scene, we chose to keep the submarine static, because its also physically always within the same lightcone, (it being the source of most lights in the world) We’re also hard at work to create a large selection of spawn-able foliage, such as brain corals, spunges, and other deep-sea flora.

Deep sea Corals? When we think of lush coral based ecosystems we always tend to think of warm shallow tropical settings, but did you know there’s large coral systems in the deep atlantic, apparantly the colder streams of the north atlantic are very rich in foodsources, allowing corals to grow much much deeper, where as tropical waters tend to be poor in nutrients, requiring coral to seek nurishment close to the surface.

here’s a link to the story

On the left is the low poly mesh without any maps applied. In the middle is the mesh with opacity and normal maps applied. The normal map was made by rendering a high poly model sculpted in Zbrush to the texture of the low poly model. The model on the right is the mesh with opacity, normal and diffuse texture maps applied. The diffuse map was painted in Photoshop.

After this the model will be rigged and animated in 3ds Max. Valerie will be exported to the Virtools 5 engine and made playable by our resident Virtools wizard.

Next up: The bad guy!

It will serve as a brief exploratory space and enviroment to showcase the virtools 5.0 character animation features.

Just to showcase how easily the scene has been accomplished inside the engine, here are a few steps of implementation

step 1 : importing the model. This image is of the bare model including only vertex colors for a base shading, and as a base for future shaders (ambient occlusion etc etc)

step 2 : Adding lightmaps. Basically this is a static scene, there will be caustics (more on that further on), but the general area can be lit with a static lightmap generated in this case from 3Dstudio Max.

step 3: Detail. Due to the speed of production and the online requirements we forego explicit lighting on the detail and interactive objects, this also serves to shows you can combine many techniques to get an overall result. In this case the details receive vertex coloring to light them from the same solution as the lightmap. The waterplane in the bassin receives a virtools standard water shader with some reflection effects.

My role in this project and in Little Chicken in general is make and to oversee the art. So I’ll post more shots as this model, and the others develop. Enjoy the show!

The frontal sketch of the model used as modelling reference.