Jason T Clark.net

Well, I’ve started working on my first Sketchup build.  As promised, I’ve decided to blog about it.  With no textures, I simply imported a topographical image from Google Earth into Sketchup, then used that as my basis for building out the foot print of my build:

As you can see, the building that I’m trying to make a build of is the *infamous* Cameron indoor stadium, the place where your illustrious Duke Blue Devils call home court.  Currently, the build has no textures applied, since finding outside pictures of the facility has been somewhat difficult.  But, my main dilemma is finding out the proper elevations for the building itself, in an effort to ensure that I’ve got the correct heights for the model.

So next steps for me is finding out how to effectively get reference points for the various heights of the building, and then applying the textures to the individual faces of the build.  If need be, I may just run over to Durham and take the pictures myself.

Stay Tuned!

So, if you’re an IBMer, and you’re in the know about IBM’s Hackday events, you’d know that the results were recently posted.  And the winner in the Virtual Worlds/Augmented reality category was none other than my Project WiiSpark application.  Thanks to Peter Yim, my colleague, for all of his work contributing to the project.  And, thanks to all those who voted.  Since this is an internal IBM event, there’s not much I can show about the other winners.   However, we here at IBM developerWorks are planning to to a full-on YouTube video explaining the app, and the technologies used to pull it off.

Again, thanks to everyone for participating!

OK so, there’s this thing at IBM where a bunch of coders get to together around the world on one day and come up with something novel and new to create- it’s called IBM Hackday.

Peter Yim, my co-worker from the not-so-infamous Wii Headtracking at IBM developerworks YouTube videos, decided that we were going to participate in HackDay this year. He came over, we put on a pot of coffee, and we started Hacking away. We created a AS3 application that utilizes WiiFlash and Papervision3d. Hopefully in a few days, we will be able to showcase it here. Stay tuned.

Over the last month or so, I’ve been wondering from an implementation perspective if Flash is a viable virtual worlds solution. I’ve said to my colleagues that in some cases, a web based world would be a nice fit, depending on what that world was trying to accomplish. There’s a somewhat infamous discussion as it relates to virtual world implementations, augmentation vs. immersion-to simply “augment” the web with the elements of a virtual world, or to immerse your audience within a world.

From reading this discussion, I began to explore ways that I might be able to “augment” our current web presence. Many problems that arise from the immersion approach that takes the audience to a new “location” stem from attempting to bring artifacts of the traditional web along with you. In addition, when a virtual world is accessed from the traditional “thick client” application, the issues with downloading, cross-platform support, and updates management comes to play.

Can we simply use the web to access and interact with virtual worlds? Well, isn’t that what Webkinz is? What about Club Penguin? Although these environments have a youthful audience in mind, still the function is the same. So, I began to look at Flash, since it seems to provide the richest web-based content that could possibly do the job.

I felt like such a newbie when it came to learning all about Flash, because there is a plethora of information, tools, tutorials, videos, and etc on creating Flash applications. And Actionscript, Wow! There’s tons of stuff out there about learning Actionscript and leveraging tools to do the job. One of the first things I decided to do with AS3 was to learn a 3D Gaming Engine built on AS3. There are 4 major projects for this type of work:

• Alternativa3d
• Papervision3d
• Sandy3d
• Away3d

I’ve also been playing around with FFilmation, the Isometric engine using AS3. There’s tons of stuff I could probably mention in this post, but just now that my attention is now slightly focused on how using these technologies can solve some of our problems with virtual worlds based on totally immersed environments. I’ll be catching us all up on some of the unique things that can be offered in this space.

Once again, a break from blogging has brought me to a new place in my journey- 3d Modeling. Around the office, there aren’t many people that possess this skill, and although I’m not much of an artist, it seems like 3d modeling is more like science than art. I headed over to http://www.3dbuzz.com and purchased the Mastering Maya: The Fundamentals DVD, which is a collection of close to 400 video tutorials on getting started with 3d Modeling. The 3dbuzz guys have certainly impressed me with their video tutorials on Unreal and Half-life modding in the past, so I think these should be good.

Right now I’m using Autodesk Maya 8.5 PLE, which is the free version of the modeling product, however, I am unable to export my work into workable formats, such as COLLADA or ASE format. For now, I don’t think that it should be a problem. Who knows though- if I get good at it, I may need to get the unrestricted version.