In our previous blog entries, we’ve looked at constructing character models, animating them and building a world for them to inhabit. All well and good, but there’s little point in having 3D models in a 3D world unless they’re going to move around at some point!

In this blog we’ll take a very simple butterfly model, animate the wings using a wire parameter and move it along a path through 3D space.

That’s Another Fine Mesh!

Now that we have Bennie walking and talking, we need an environment for him to inhabit. The style we’re adopting here is sometimes referred to as 2.5D. This is where flat 2D objects are placed within a 3D world, thus creating a hybrid of the two.

Wafer-thin Vegetation

As with Bennie, our first port of call is Adobe Illustrator. Here we can concept out the trees, bushes and clumps of grass that will form the basis of Bennie’s World. We create these by blending very simple shapes together, to form our 2D elements. …

Over the next two blog entries, we’ll be looking at the making of the Bennie The Lion video from our initial ‘Setting the Scene’ Blog. In this first part, we’ll look at how the Bennie character is created and animated, from the ground up…

Smoke, Mirrors, Prisms & Pulleys

“The Autodesk® FBX® format is a free platform-independent 3D authoring and interchange format. Available for Windows, OSX, iOS and Linux operating systems.”

Clear as mud? Read on…

At Numfum, we need to take the models and animations we create in 3ds Max, and re-produce them on multiple hardware platforms. This means FBX is a logical choice for us, and is something we’ll expand upon in a future blog, when we take a ‘deep dive’ into the belly of the format.

But for now we’ll take a look at what’s possible using the FBX format, and how we can use it to drive certain aspects of the NNT (Numfum Neue Technologie) 3D Engine.

Horses for Courses

It’s a safe bet that a high percentage of people…

Broadband slower than text messaging, and computers that smell of corned beef sandwiches and yoghurt, sporting less graphical power than a 1980s Gameboy.

Yes… we’re talking schools around the World in 2016.

Education is the long favoured dumping ground for outdated and often obsolete technology. Bargain basement computers that allow school secretaries to tick boxes in budgetary spreadsheets, and empower headmasters to meet classroom head-count quotas.

Seldom is consideration given to what these digital dinosaurs are actually capable of achieving in the classroom. …