Top 10 Usability Guidelines for Enterprise Applications

Via Biskero, I discovered this very interesting and useful article on Nokia Forum: Top 10 Usability Guidelines for Enterprise Applications.

Top 10 Usability Guidelines for Games

Via Biskero, I discovered this very interesting and useful article on Nokia Forum: Top 10 Usability Guidelines for Games.

These guidelines can be used for mobile game development and programming but also for web ad advergames.

Call of Duty 4: best videogame of 2008

During the 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences has nominated the best videogames of 2008 in various categories.

Here's the complete list:

Game of the Year: Call of Duty 4
Console Game of the Year: Call of Duty 4
Computer Game of the Year: The Orange Box
Outstanding Innovation in Gaming: Rock Band
Handheld Game of the Year: The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Massively Multiplayer Game of the Year: World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade
Cellular Game of the Year: Skate
Role-Playing Game of the Year: Mass Effect
Racing Game of the Year: Motorstorm
Outstanding Achievement in Game Design: Portal
Adventure Game of the Year: Super Mario Galaxy
Sports Game of the Year: Skate
Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year: Command and Conquer 3
Action Game of the Year: Call of Duty 4
Family Game of the Year: Rock Band
Outstanding Achievement in Animation: Assassin's Creed
Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction: BioShock
Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering: Crysis
Outstanding Character Performance: Portal
Outstanding Achievement in Story Development: BioShock
Outstanding Achievement in Game Play Engineering: Portal
Outstanding Achievement in Online Game Play: Call of Duty 4
Downloadable Game of the Year: Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords
Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition: BioShock
Outstanding Achievement in Soundtrack: Rock Band
Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design: BioShock

More info at official website

News found via Punto-Informatico.

Transformers: Rig Demo

During my latest session on Cgtalk.com website I encountered this great post by Mattias Jervill about rigging and animating a special Optimus Prime character from Transformer's movie / tv series. Mattias is an advanced user and works for many hollywood movies as character TD.

In this post you can download a great video (65Mb) and see how Mattias has rigged his character, and see from the software interface how he can transform it (Robot> car > helicopter) in a realistic mode using sliders, values, and understanding in each great 3d work - before starting with modeling and rigging - we must plan our work deeply.

For more info about Mattias Jervill, see his personal website.

Iron Man Movie Trailer

Via Youtube, an interesting movie trailer about Iron Man, the newest superhero (marvel side) movie coming soon in cinemas around the world.
Obviously, great special effects are guarantee! :)

New week, new Lightwave Tutorials (part 5)

Another week, another set of (very good) videos by William Vaughan for Newtek's Lightwave3d modeler and layout. This week William published 35 new video tutorials! WOW!

Modeling and animating a basketball net

Introduction to the Surfaces Tab in the Scene Editor

Introduction to the Items Tab in the Scene Editor:

Introduction to Motion Blur

Introduction to the Limited Region and Mask options

How to create custom shadows or have surfaces not cast shadows at all

Introduction to the Standard Material Node

Introduction to the BRDF shader

Introduction to the Surface Mixer shader

Introduction to the Weave shader

Introduction to the Occlusion shaders in the Node Editor

Introduction to FX MetaLink Morph

Introduction to Dynamics Effect and Record Motion

Introduction to the Text tool

Maintaining proportions when creating a UV map

Introduction to Bone Split, Bone Connect, Bone Fuse and UnParent Bone

Introduction to Sticky and Sticky Surface

Creating a Slug using Hypervoxels

Introduction to Make UVs

Creating a UV map for a Head

Customizing Modeler's Workspace Viewports

Creating an eye setup for animating eyes with ease

Introducing the 4 point triangle

Adding thickness to single-sided geometry

Creating an animation of a crowd of people

Introduction to the UV Spider command

Introduction to the Jolt Motion Modifier

Creating a 2D Cel Shade look with the Node Editor

Introduction to Edit Skelegons

Introduction to the Weld, Unweld and Weld Average commands

Introduction to the Set Value command
Note: Not to be confused with the Set Map Value command

Animating a basic walk cycle:
Note:If your new to animation and setting key frames this could be a good quick start for you.

These 3 new videos pushes the collection over 19 hours now:

Introduction to the Schematic View

Introduction to the Target Item option

Introduction to the power of Powergons:

2007 Flash Lite Game Contest

via Biskero, I remember 2007 Flash Lite game contest , sponsored by Playyoo, Adobe and O'Reilly. Prizes for this year are:

1st Prize - A prize of chosen by the winner up to US$ 5,000 and sponsored by Playyoo.
2nd Prize - Adobe software licenses
3rd Prize - O’Reilly books

For more info, visit the contest website

Voodoo Camera Tracking

In these weeks I'm working hard, It's time to improve my skills and back to all my old passions.
So, searching about newer versions for some 3d Camera Tracking softwares, I found this very interesting 3d camera tracker: Voodoo.

Voodoo Camera Tracker is a FREE software and seems to works very well. It can export for most 3d applications. Taken from Vodoo website:

"The Voodoo Camera Tracker estimates camera parameters and reconstructs a 3D scene from image sequences. The estimation algorithm offers a full automatic and robust solution to estimate camera parameters for video sequences. The results are useful for many applications like film production, 3D reconstruction, or video coding. The estimated parameters can be exported to the 3D animation packages: 3D Studio Max, Blender, Lightwave, Maya, and Softimage.

The Voodoo Camera Tracker works very alike to commercial available camera trackers (also called match movers), e.g. 3D-Equalizer by Science-D-Visions, boujou by 2d3, Matchmover by RealViz , PFTrack by The Pixel Farm, SynthEyes by Andersson Technologies. Please consider buying a commercial product, if you need a camera tracker with professional support."

Voodoo Camera is available for Windows and Linux systems; actually you can download the release 0.9.4 beta.

New Lightwave 3d tutorials (post #4)

William Vaughan continues his great work publishing lots of video tutorials for Newtek's Lightwave3d.
I hope my posts in this blog don't disturb Newtek neither William... I just want publish this great work and support the entire Lightwave3d community...

So, these are the newer videotutorials, enjoy! ... :)

Introduction to the Bevel Tool

Introduction to the Pivot Tool and Center Pivot Command

Introduction to Proxy Pick

Introduction to Sketch Color

Introduction to the Rail Bevel Tool

Introduction to the Hide options

Introduction to Color Selection

Randomly placing surface voxels on an object

Introduction to the Julienne tool

Introduction to the Make Pole tool

Introduction to the Helix tool

Introduction to the Sea Shell tool

Introduction to the Triple Tools (Triple, Fast Triple Fan and Fast Triple Traverse)

Introduction to the Collapse Polygons command

Introduction to the Image Control Panel for the Image Viewer

Introduction to the Scale and Rotate Morph Tools

Introduction to the Grid and Grid Square Size

*Creating a Clothespin*
This two part video tutorial walks through the creation of an everyday
clothespin while exploring various techniques and tools along the way.

*Part 01*

*Part 02

*Reference Images*

Introduction to the Reduce Points and Polygons commands

Taking a closer look at Input Fields
*Using LightWave's input fields to calculate and convert units of measure.

Introduction to the Absolute Measure tool

Introduction to the Use Global option

Introduction to Bones and Character Rigging

Introduction to IK: Inverse Kinematics

Building a Reverse Foot Rig

Introduction to Remove Polygons and Remove Vertices from Polygons Commands

Creating a cartoon elbow joint

Check it out in action here

Introduction to Band Glue

Introduction to the Band Saw and Band Saw Pro Tools

Introduction to Fix 3-5

Introduction to Align Polygons

Introduction to Magic Bevel

Introduction to Add Edges

Introduction to Light Exclusion

Introduction to working with Foreground Images in the Compositing tab

Introduction to the RIG format

Flash 3d programming: Sandy3d

In this post I want to introduce Sandy 3d for Flash developers.

I know, this is not a real news, because this projects has started some years ago. But now (and in next weeks) I want start to study newer implementations, interfaces and possibilities given by my knowledges in flash developing and 3d modeling, rendering and animations, and use these skills together. So, browsing the web I chosed to try these APIs (they seems to be the best for flash developing). Above, some informations taken from Sandy 3d website :

Sandy is an intuitive and user-friendly 3D open-source library developed in Actionscript 2.0 and now Actionscript 3.0 for Adobe Flash.

The idea came in 2005 from the lack of possibilities to run 3D in Flash. It was also a way to solve the major problems of the other 3D engines available at that time :

- Lack of documentation or support.
- Abandoned projects.
- Exclusive and limited engine.

Sandy is now one of the possibilities to create some 3D content in Flash. Other projects came out since Sandy first releases, giving more choice to users.

This 3D engine main features are :

• Flash player 7 to 9 compatibility.
• Both MTASC and Macromedia compilers compliant for AS2 and Flash CS3 and FlexBuilder for AS3 versions.
• Several 3D primitives, allowing fast and parameterized object creation without any 3D modelisation knowledge.
• Advanced and easy object management allowing some fantastic possibilities during your creations (scaling, rotation, translation, tween, etc.)
• Advanced camera management ( rotation, motion on linear or bezier-curve path, movements, etc.)
• Complex object loading thanks to the .ASE and .WRL files parser , but also Collada and 3DS files for AS3, (files generated by several 3D object modeling packages such as 3D Studio Max or Blender)
• Material system to easily change your objects appearance. Several material are available allowing to create transparent faces, bitmap texture and video texture as webcam video stream.
• Managment of Flash filters bringing some very nice visual effects