VFXWorld presents a new excerpt from Building Interactive Worlds in 3D by Jean-Marc Gauthier. This months excerpt is the last on the Donut Tutorial and focuses on creating interactive textures.
All images from Building Interactive Worlds in 3D: Virtual Sets and Pre-Visualization for Games, Film & the Web by Jean-Marc Gauthier. Reprinted with permission.
This is the latest in a series of excerpts from Building Interactive Worlds in 3D by Jean-Marc Gauthier.
Creating Interactive Textures
The viewer can control and/or replace textures applied to the inner and outer rings with scrolling images or videos or by adding interactive blending in relationship with variations of the cameras speed. In this example, we use procedural textures with interactive behaviors described in detail in the chapter about interactive textures (Chapter 3).
Please note that the Background is a procedural texture created in the chapter about interactive textures. In Virtools, the Background texture and its behavior can be found in the Virtual Sets, Resource Folder > Textures Folder, located on the right of the screen. Before setting up the procedural texture, you need to drag and drop the Background texture in the 3D Layout window.
In Virtools, right click on the donut viewed in the 3D Layout window and select Materials from the drop down menu. The Materials Setup window opens in the lower part of the screen. Inside the Materials Setup window, select the Texture pull-down menu and replace the existing texture with a new texture called Background.
Adding an Additional Top View Helps to Keep Track of the Locations of Cameras on the Circuit
The viewer can follow the race with an additional top view created inside the screen. In Virtools, go to 3D Layout and select Top View. Create a new camera. In Level Manager, rename the camera Top View. The behavior Additional View can be found under Building Blocks > Interface > Screen. Drag and drop the behavior on the words Top Camera in Level Manager > Global > Camera. Double click on the script created under Top Camera. This will open the script inside the Schematic window. You can edit the placement and size of the additional top view inside the 3D Layout screen.
The viewer can follow the race with an additional top view created inside the screen.
This tutorial helped you to design an interactive experience made of several parameters, textures, depths of field, speeds and camera angles that can change according to the viewers input. This simple scene can be reused in more complex projects for example, a car driving inside a virtual city.
Find more turnkey tutorials that detail all the steps required to build simulations and interactions in Building Interactive Worlds in 3D: Virtual Sets and Pre-Visualization for Games, Film & the Web by Jean-Marc Gauthier: Focal Press, 2005. 422 pages with illustrations. ISBN 0-240-80622-0 ($49.95). Check back to VFXWorld frequently to read new excerpts.
Jean-Marc Gauthier teaches at New York University in the graduate studies department of Interactive Telecommunications and is the author of Interactive 3D Actors and Their Worlds (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers 2000). He is also a consultant at www.tinkering.net and an award-winning 3D artist.
