Newbie: How to make demo like 'Ruby'?

#1

I want to make realtime 3d content and anmation, but not for games. ATi’s ‘Ruby’ demos use their card’s features to render and animate on the fly. But I’ve yet to find any program that is made specifically to take advantage of ATi or nVidia’s engines.

Closest I have found is the Unreal Engine, but I’m not making a game.
What about those of us who only want to make cinema?

An OpenGL screensaver named ‘Chimera’ would be a fair example of this. The scenes are rendered and anim. in RT, and even on my R9200 it looks spectacular.

So, where do I start? Is this something I’ll have to program myself? Or does an app exist already that can do this?

Mods, move to appropriate forum if needed…

#2

http://www.quest3d.com

is probably your best bet, check out the sky citadel and especially the coastal demos, these are designed around 1 off scenes much like what your describing but in realtime, content is obviously created elsewhere, for example, max or maya, and exported from there into quest3d, whereas shaders, etc are probably all integrated through quest3d.

#3

Another to look at would be Deep Creator from Right Hemisphere(http://www.righthemisphere.com/products/dcreator/ ) it offers a similar functionality set to Quest3D in terms of visual output - though they take different authoring approaches and have different strong points and weak points.

(Disclaimer:I am on the DC team at RH).

The Act-3D guys (makers of Quest3D) are a good team and they have done a really nice job with their demo page and current demo set - so right now Quest3D has more visible demos which fit into the area your looking at, though DC can be used to author similar environments and apps.

At the end of the day both are good products, with trial versions and low cost branded entry versions as well as higher costing full feature versions. Both also have good quality and responsive user communities and similar feature sets.

If you need cross platform demo performance then you might want to look at Anark - which has a Mac player. However if you want to focus on PC stuff and experiment with shaders and real time effects integrated into scenes and cutaways for machinima and related film like stuff then I’d suggest that your best bet is to download both trial versions of Quest3D and Deep Creator, play with them , ask questions on respective user communities - if your a programmer you will probably want to look at both SDK’s as well since they can give you an added level of control on directing, tools, and integration with other production pipelines -and see which best fits your needs, aims and preferred working style.

Hope this helps,

Phillip

#4

Wow. Both of these solutions blew me away. Quest’s demo reels showed what i’m looking for, but gee whiz! The price is scaring me away for the moment.

I’ve yet to learn 3d modeling and anim, so this is encouraging to see. I saw in the demo reels realtime footage that would’ve taken hours, if not days to spit out of a traditional software renderer. Amazing.

Thanks guys. That was a huge help (and a big push) for me!

#5

Ted - both have introductory level pricing - DC has a home version at $150, student version at $50 - with some limitations on final publishable scene size as well as watermark branding

Quest3D used to have an introductory version at a around $100 and I think a student version as well (please check with Act3D on this - been a while since i looked at their pricing).

Yeah Quest team demos are uber cool.

Biased note from my side of the fence - we will have a new set of DC demos up just after 4th of July - so seriously worth checking them out ( if any wonders on the bias see the disclaimer in previous post) they ain’t like anything we have shown publicly before…so worth taking a gander at.

Both sets of software have 30 day trial versions that you can download and play with…

This all said, if your not familiar with 3D modelling and animation - then you probably want to start there and work up. Both DC and Quest assume you know a chunk of 3D related stuff before you can start trying to build high end demos.

There are a lot of really good and relative low cost (or even free like Blender - which is stunning in its featureset) 3D modelling and animation tools. Be worth spending some time with one of these to get familiar with a lot of concepts, tools and techniques.

Hope this helps,

cheers,

Phillip

#6

hello I’m the main coder of demoscene group plastic (http://www.plastic-demo.org). I think that the best start for will be learning Maya. It’s because ATI and nVidia demo teams are using this software. You can model/animate in traditional Maya way (there are some exceptions) and after that You can attach a specific hardware shader directly in maya. Currently I’m also using maya as our main editor. But the difference between picoEngine (used by plastic) and traditional Maya plugin hardware shaders is that, that I’m making the whole rendering process in Maya achieving final result in preview window. So there is no second stage in creation process. Normally you preview your work while editing and then in final viewer.
So If You want to make realtime movies (demos) act like a traditional graphicial and follow the rules given by specific engine. In example You can only use two bone solver when performing IK animation and etc.

Cheers!

#7

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