Howdy

[Redrobes]

I'm a 3D Animator for a little independant developer, so I use it daily for Animation, some character set-up, and abit of basic Mel scripting to save time. Also done a reasonable amount of modelling and texturing, just bits and bobs that needed doing at work, but also some little projects in my spare-time (mostly props and stuff).

Not really used it for any kind of map work though, as this was originally meant to be a rough note map to help me organise the writing i'm dabbling with in my spare-time, and i got abit carried away with it lol.

Cool ! So thats why your "Jammy" Matt ! There was a job going down my way recently for a Mel scripter and I know its a lot like Perl which I do a lot of but not having used a lot of Maya I couldn't really think of going for that one. There was a PLE version of Maya for free once and I should have booted that one up and played with it but its getting the time. Oh while I think of it you may possibly find this thread useful if your part of a small dev team.

[JammyMatt]

Yeh, Jam's a name that kinda stuck at uni after someone said i was very jammy actually lol.

Dunno why Autodesk pulled the PLE version for some reason a while back. You can get a 30 day trial now, but doesn't give you long to get the hang of it really. I've not had much exposure to scripting other than the basics of Mel, but my animation workload is quite high so rarely get the chance to dedicate much time to it.

Had a read of that thread, some interesting stuff on there, that scanner is very cool. However, from a practical viewpoint i've never heard of a development team using something like this, because they create all their models within the software. With software like Mudbox and Zbrush you can digitally 'sculpt' models to very high levels of detail (we're talking millions of polys), where you manipulate the mesh in a similar way to how you might work with clay. So you start by creating a basic model in maya or max, import it into mudbox or zbrush, subdivide the model up to millions of polygons, then sculpt it so you have an awesomely detailed mesh. Then you create displacement maps (or more likely for in-game assets you'd use normal or parallax maps) in mudbox/zbrush, apply these ontop of you basic mesh in maya/max, and you've get a very high detail 'looking' character that's actually low poly. By creating all the high detail sculpting digitally, they bypass any need to scan actual sculptures/objects.

Nevertheless, that scanner is awesome!

[Redrobes]

Yeah I guess thats the way its done now. I see some unbeliveable models said to be done with Z-brush. Someone posted a new app which is like zbrush but it dynamically was subdividing the polygons as it was transforming. I was quite impressed with that. I think that app was low cost too. I showed by scanner to some animators a long while back and they said it was interesting but because it generated a poly mesh instead of nurbs then they would have had trouble animating it. I guess that cant be the issue now unless Z Brush can output a nurbs model. I havent used the scanner for a while - years in fact on anything commercial.

I know about the normal maps thing and I was one of the devs which wrote a hardware accellerator for Maya to do that sort of thing in the card shaders but that was many years back too and I have forgotten most of what I did now. I remember tho that we got the old nVidia chameleon sped up somewhat on it. What several of us focus here tho is terrain modeling in 3D which is not too difficult to display but hideous to calculate realistic form with erosion and all the geological processes competing. But at least the end result you can generate a normal map.

Heres another use we have been playing with which a thread I started for auto thatching buildings because the texture has to be aligned with the gradient. In there you will get a normal map of the dummy. But you would be well able to run this stuff as its all based on 3D models and interesting lighting and masking.

http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=1932 - Thatching-for-dummies

We have also got some good method of generating the 3D object from a 2D black and white mask of the buildings what were missing is some method of placing buildings in a believable pattern based on roads and minimizing the number of walls and keeping access to them all etc. I think we need something more intelligent than a random process. So if you have come across that sort of stuff in your travels then that would be golden info.

While I am mailing and since your doing a tolkien map - I am a member of the me-dem.org group which is making middle earth as a 3D DEM. Tho the site there is not very active it is still limping along. Theres more pics on here if you rummage around a bit than you can get on there I think.