A wine glass is one of the first things most people make when they learn to use a 3D program. It’s fun and it’s easy.

Making a sculpted prim wine glass for Second Life is equally fun. In fact, it’s almost exactly the same except you need to UV map it before you upload it. A simple cylindrical map will do. Here’s a video to show you how using AC3D.

Click to download video

Here are the UV map settings I used.

When you import it into SL, be sure to set your mapping mode to cylindrical. If you don’t, the top and bottom of the glass will be solid instead of hollow.

Set the Stitching Type to Cylinder.

Download the model here.

Eric Gooch of Insomniac has an excellent tutorial on Creating the Lighting for Resistance: Fall of Man. The best part of the tutorial are the “before and after” shots that show how each scene looks lit and unlit. A lot of people underestimate the importance of good lighting, but these pictures really help make it clear. Well worth the read!

This plugin “bakes” a texture from one object to another, allowing you to transfer texture data between two models with the same geometry but different texture coordinates–without having to re-paint the texture bitmap! This is useful if you start to paint a texture, and change your mind later about the UV map; or for games when you can’t change the layout of the map for technical reasons, but would like different UVs for convenience during painting. It’s also good for fitting text onto a warped surface or other projections that would be difficult or impossible to paint by hand.

Download the plugin. (Requires Windows XP, AC3D 6.2 or above.)

This new wearable motion capture system is so compact, it can even be used to capture movement in otherwise impossible environments like behind the wheel of a car!

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0yT8mwg9nc 350 292]

The most interesting part? The authors claim to have built their prototype from off-the-shelf components for only around $3K. Read the paper here.

Ambient occlusion is a lighting technique that is commonly used to create soft shadows on objects. Ambient occlusion isn’t used to create the type of shadows that are cast from objects with a light shining directly on them. Instead, ambient occlusion generates the type of deep shadows that appear in the corners or creases of things, where it is hard for the light to reach.

Technically speaking, ambient occlusion is a global illumination technique. However, in common usage of the term it is often referred to as a cheap alternative to global illumination. To clear up any confusion, what most renderers refer to as “global illumination” is actually an amalgamation of several techniques such as radiosity, metropolis light transport, image-based lighting or photon mapping. The actual techniques used differ slightly from renderer to renderer. Some renderers include an ambient occlusion term as part of their global illumination calculation; others do not.

Like most global illumination techniques, ambient occlusion is dependent on the other geometry in the scene. Ambient occlusion on its own generates less realistic lighting than “full” global illumination. However, ambient occlusion is much faster and less complex to calculate than other methods which is why it is still popular among game developers and in production animation.

(Left) Without Ambient Occlusion. (Right) With Ambient Occlusion
Click for larger image.

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