Features
- Devoted to Virtools to achieve sophisticated
results using drag-and-drop code modules.
- Easily accessible to beginners but filled with
valuable information for more experienced animators.
- Helps you teach yourself to build and populate
Web-based virtual environments, assign tasks to actors, develop and test
interactivity, implement artificial intelligence, and carry out real-time 3D
rendering.
- Covers development of human-like behaviors,
interactivity between characters and virtual cameras.
- Open to a wide range of Web-based animation uses:
games, architectural and medical applications, real-time visualization,
scientific research, story telling, virtual reality, and more.
- Includes numerous full-color illustrations.
On the CD
The enclosed CD features full-featured, time-limited
copies of three of today's most popular modeling/animation programs: Life Forms
3.9 (Mac and PC), Virtools 2.0 (PC), and Deep Paint3 D (PC). You also get all
the files relating to the book's 22 tutorials-including 3D models, textures,
behaviors, and motion files-plus links to a rich selection of software and user
resources on the Web. Included are textures from Marlin Studios.
About the author
Jean-Marc Gauthier has decided in this season of
bits to populate the
digital with characters that can act, that can play,
that can respond in
coherent and interesting ways to their human creators and
collaborators. His
interest in not in abandoning the traditions of puppetry,
theater, and
cinema for the "intelligent agents" and "information avatars" of
the new
information age. Gauthier's focus is on the stage, the podium, the
room--an
architecture of the possible. In it, the progress of millenia, of
us
representing ourselves differently, will be continued,
experienced,
reworked, and experimented. And he invites us all with access to
the
digital, including children, to participate, making it as easy as
possible
(particularly for the adults). With Gauthier we are not counting
polygons
but possibilities."