[MUD-Dev] Graphic MUDS/Ultima Online

[Jeff Kesselman]

At 07:47 PM 8/13/97 PST8PDT, you wrote:
>> >   at 06:00 PM, Adam Wiggins <nightfall at user2.inficad.com> said:
>> >>I've never seen a descent looking 3D landscape, realtime or rendered. 
>> >>Organic shapes just don't take well to polygons, and it's difficult
>> >>to get the rich colors of a fantasy world in 3D.
>> 
>> Hmm. Then Ild hesitate to say you haven't seen many rendered images..
>
>Maybe, but I'd say more that I'm just spoiled by painted art.
>I've certainly never seen any rendered 3D which comes near the beauty
>of your average fantasy book cover.

Hm. I thought you were talking the drive to photo-realism, nto the drive to
art.

If yo uwant art, you shoudl see the signed CCy Lum Dragon that hangs in my
cube, done in 3D o nan SGI.

Bigegst issue in making 3D art (or even photorealistic 3D cheap) is proper
texture maps.


>
>> Ild sugegst yo ustart with an image called "The Road to Poin Reyes" done by
>> The Lucasfilm Computer group (now Pixar) about 15 years ago, and it onyl
>> gets even better from there.
>
>Sounds interesting - know where I can find a copy of it?

Oh gods, my image is in an ancient SIGGRAPH proceedings... Actually, if you
go to a university engienering library they shoudl have SIGGRAPH
proceedings abck through whenever.  Ild start flippign theorugh the
color-page section ine ach years...  lots of good stuff in there.


>Draw time matters when you're doing rendered art?

Yes, becaus eits your feedback, but not all that much. I was eferrring to
why all the games you see are polygonal.
>
>> From Polygons, you go to Splines, CSG trees, and a whoel host of even mroe
>> esoteric ways of describing surfaces like fractals and octrees and such.  
>
>Well even though I can't work 'em, there sure are a lot of cool little
>packages availible nowadays...metabols are a lot of fun, also those
>ones that do muscle groups.

Is that in a commerical pakcage now? I saw the original "Biosensor" demo of
the metabol concept years ago at an early siggraph. i think it was a
japanese group that came up with it...

>
>> Its worth noting that the s3D chip, which failed becuase no game progrmamer
>> undersrtod it, was  hsrdware spline renderer.
>
>s3D?  Made by what company?

Same company that makes the S3 2d accelrator. I forget the name.

>
>*nod*...I'm a game guy(tm), so graphics are more or less irrelevant
>to me (which could explain why I have no problem playing text muds).
>I've certainly never seen good 3D in a game - most of them look grey
>and surreal, like Diablo.  Ick!  Blizzard's games had pretty good graphics
>until they went to 3D...

I've had Myth demoed to me.. its kidna pretty.

I dont' know WHY ebverything ID does is so damn DARK.  It doesn't have to be.

JK
Jeff Kesselman
Snr. Game Integration Engineer
TEN -- The Total Entertainment Network -- www.ten.net

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