Bart Kuipers' Blog

We’ve got a pretty good animation up and running now. It looks pretty cool, but not half as good as the current new games. That’s why we’re going to add some cool looking effects. In this first of three tutorials we’re going to add a glow effect. This will make the bright spots stand out a bit more, because they fade out a little instead of making hard edges.

Since static meshes aren’t really fun, we’re going to add some flavor to our projects by adding an animated thing into the scene. It’ll be some kind of monster, just to see what you can do with it. It will be doing a simple animation, it will just swing its arms a bit and growl (no sound, since that’s something totally different).
Note: make sure you’ve got the may 15th 2008 release of TV when running this sample, otherwise the rancor won’t be drawn.

In this tutorial you’ll see how you can load a geometry made in for example 3D Max. This is a quite important tutorial, since you won’t make use of the normal cubes and spheres a lot when you’re trying to make a game. We will still load a kind of cube, but this one will have rounded edges.

In this tutorial we’re going to make the previous tutorial look way better. The previous tutorial used only the vertex information to calculate the lighting on the cube. This is a good way of doing it when you want to have your performance high, but if you want a better looking solution, you should take the per pixel lighting. This lighting system calculates the light for each pixel instead of interpolating it between the vertices.

In real life, an object is not evenly lighted. Some spots are darker, some places are lighter. To achieve the same result in the 3D engine, we’ll make a light and a material for our cube.

In the previous tutorial you’ve learned how to create a cube in truevision3d. There’s just something that isn’t cool about the cube. It’s white, just plain white. Therefore we’re going to add a texture to it. Now what is a texture? A texture is a picture that you can apply to a 3D object. For example, if you have a book laying on a table, you’ll want to have a picture of a cover of a book to apply to the book, otherwise it won’t look like a book.

In the previous tutorial you’ve seen how you can render a blank screen to your form. This is not like a game or 3D application yet, since we didn’t make any 3D things yet. In this tutorial we’ll make a cube that will be spinning around.

This is basicaly the first program you’ll write with the tv3d engine. It’s not hard to get, but it’s a great opportunity to learn something about the engine itself. There’s not a lot of code required to get something up and running with tv3d, but it’s good to know the possibilities of the engine as well. In the tutorial itself there are comments on the lines where they are necessary, but you can achieve more than just what’s being done already by experimenting yourself.