Darkwind Media Blog

Those that have followed the blog before will remember Virtual Theater. This is a grant project at RIT which is trying to create a system for theatrical performances that happen completely within a virtual performance space. The actors control virtual characters, performing on a virtual stage, in front of an audience that is watching from anywhere in the world through their computers.

Tomorrow, Virtual Theater’s Vaudeville performance will start rehearsals. This is a brand new show, and the first to be put on within the new Luster framework. Tomorrow we start hooking all of the motion capture systems up to the Luster clients and running through the script.

I haven’t gone into a lot of detail before, but I want to tell you that Virtual Theater actually demands a quite complicated network of systems. RIT currently has access to two motion capture systems, both located in separate buildings on campus. These systems must send their motion capture data in real-time to a server running AutoDesk’s MotionBuilder software. We have created a plugin for MotionBuilder which immediately sends out the real-time motion data to our client systems. Running along-side the motion capture server is the main Virtual Theater server. While the motion capture server sends out the real-time motion data, the general Virtual Theater server is responsible for funneling all other performance events to the clients (most of whom are audience members). Outside of the motion capture systems there are two other important tools for controlling the performance. The first is the Stage Manager. This system allows the director of the show to trigger predefined events (sounds, set changes, lighting events, curtain up and down, etc.) while the Puppet manager lets a controller animate a virtual character during the performance. Some characters won’t be controlled through motion capture, so the Puppet Manager can allow a person to move and animated the characters in a more traditional way.

Along with this new script comes a new set and cast of characters. Here is the set for this performance, in Luster.

In the final image you can see the panel accessible only to the Stage Manager. Those are Cues, set up in advance, that lets the director set off planned events. You can see that until the final script is coded into our special XML format the general lighting and curtain controls are what is available.

A few weeks ago a local architect from Rochester, NY contacted Darkwind looking for more information regarding Luster. He’s very interested in bringing people together in interactive virtual worlds. One of his current projects, the Baden Street Gaming Center, is available on Google’s 3D Warehouse. I decided to bring it into Luster to show him what Luster could do for him. Here’s what it looks like from the outside:

After only a few hours of work, I was able to create a simple guided tour that brings the user into the various rooms of the complex. The user can pause and play the tour at any time, as well as switch into the free roam mode. This mode allows the user to move freely throughout the scene to take a better look around.

As you can see, there are several wall-mounted televisions in the basement. With a few lines of code I was able to put a flash movie player on the screen in which the user can interact with (pause/play, seeking, volume control). I personally love this use of flash.

You may notice a flickering effect occuring on some of the walls. This effect is commonly referred to as z-fighting, and it’s due to the way the model was constructed. The model was not originally created in Sketchup. It was created in a more professional tool such as AutoCAD and imported into Sketchup. Sketchup isn’t exactly the best when it comes to importing other file formats, so problems like this are unfortunately somewhat common.

Recently, I’ve been playing around with different looks in Luster. I’ve been interested in Non-photorealistic rendering, which is a focus not on realism but on expression. There are many techniques that have been developed over the years, most often a technique called Cel Shading. This achieves a cartoonish look. Hatching has also been researched and presented in the past couple of years. To start my prototyping, I decided to first implement a hatched look similar to the ones that have been presented before. Below are my results.

I will be continuing to work on different styles. Our ultimate goal is soften this look into a colored pencil, and if possible eventually a painted style. Painterly rendering is one of the most difficult styles to mimic in real time. Also, within the medium of painting there are obviously a huge number of artistic styles to attempt to mimic, including movements such as Impressionism to even the style of individual painters such as Van Gogh. Obviously, believably rendering an animated scene in real time with these styles is a difficult task. I’ll post updates as we make progress.

After a long build-up the Darkwind Media team is now open for business. We have extensive interactive 3D and multimedia experience and can build a wide range of different interactive applications. We’ve built systems in the fields of education, architecture, medicine, and games. Our 3D system, Luster, enables us to build 3D applications at a blinding pace, with amazing visual and interactive quality. We also have extensive ActionScript 3 knowledge and have built numerous Flash systems.

You can check out our company website at www.darkwindmedia.com or browse through our Luster website at www.luster3d.com. We can help you build state-of-the-art interactive applications or get you started with your own 3D system by licensing Luster to embed into your own applications.

We have another Luster piece in the works. A few of us are working with Eric Rothman (http://www.teamasparag.us) on an animated short with a small interactive game element. It tells a tale of an overweight astronaught and his struggle to maintain order and balance within his spacestation. The storyboards are coming along nicely and I would like to share a few of them with you. To see the rest, visit Eric’s blog post on teamasparag.us.

We have finally finished our website and it is live at www.darkwindmedia.com. You should definitely check it out. It is simple, clean, and to-the-point. The big new site that is up now is at www.luster3d.com. That is dedicated to our web-enabled, 3D multimedia platform Luster.

Check out both sites. Luster itself is growing by leaps and bounds. Our mac porting is coming along nicely, with support for almost all of the Luster plugins. Browser support on Mac will follow that. We are now entering a closed beta phase. If you think Luster could help you, or you just want to know more, then contact us.

To go with the new screenshots we captured some video of the physics demo and the HVP application. The physics demo is meant to demonstrate to other developers how to enable physics in their applications. It also showcases the new power of the Newton physics library. The new version can handle many more objects. The HVP application is a visualization of some very high quality medical models. We are still working on the interactions for the user.

Luster Physics Demo from Brian Johnstone on Vimeo

Human Visualization Project Redux from Brian Johnstone on Vimeo

It has been a while since the last update. That is because we have been very busy, with updating Luster and working on new projects. Virtual Theater has started and is going well. Luster has worked well so far for that project. I hope to have some good updates about that soon. With new versions of the runtime, previous applications and demos have been updated. Some of them have been upgraded with more advanced features.

The physics demo has been updated to include far more cubes than before.

The towers are now so tall that they have become quite wobbly.

The black balls in the simulation suck in objects around them, causing a cluster to form around themselves. Then they explode, shooting the objects out in all directions. This is an explosion as it is happening.

Because of the advanced nature of the black balls, they previously were very performance heavy. You really could only shoot one at a time. Here is a screenshot of multiple black balls being shot at once. They interact with each other and the rest of the world.

I am grabbing one of the blocks from the top of the stack. You can pull blocks out from anywhere, causing the whole structure to tumble.

Over the summer, new content was produced for HVP. This shows the extreme detail put into the modeling of the nerves and bones. As always this runs at realtime framerates, despite the extremely high polygon count.

This is another view of the lit skeleton and nerves. The entire body’s peripheral nervous system was painstakingly recreated.

This is a closeup of the detail in the legs behind the knees. There are quite a few nerves here, as almost anywhere, and the detail is amazing.

Flying through the cavities in the body gives you great new views on the modeling detail.

Mesh viewer is much as it was before. This model is fairly high-poly, and the shader gives it a rim-lit glowing look.

By switching to wireframe view you can see some great detail on this Star Trek inspired model.

Luster continues to pick up stream. New features are in development even as new projects start up.

The Virtual Theater project has begun. This is an ambitious one. It aims to recreate a full theatrical experience in a virtual world. This means that audience, actor, stage manager, director, etc. can all be in remote locations, watching and interacting through a virtual stage. Luster is forming the core backbone of how this experience is being created. Since this project has just started I’ll have more details soon.

Another project is related to medical imaging, which is also just now starting. I have practically no details to share right now, other than to demonstrate the huge breadth of Luster’s power.