mork1234

Instead of putting in the hard yakka to design 150 possible character models in the RPG, you could simply use a system for procedurally generated human beings and then manually apply touch-ups to major characters as necessary. This could save a metric ton of time and money for companies, which in turn could be used to improve gameplay, story or sheer polish.

Alternatively, a program for a procedurally generated city (a la GTA) without the need for the company to design a (very likely) expensive and buggy engine to do it all from scratch.

mcderek3000

(if you need explanation, do a google image search for Stanford University logo)

Eltigro

If you use Dryad, I think you'll find that it's very much unlike the other tree creation packages that are presently available, for two reasons. First, the navigation interface: if you can use a map, you can use Dryad. You don't have to know anything about botany or L-systems or parametric design spaces or any of that stuff. Second, the collaborative aspect. Every time a user saves a tree, we store the tree on our servers and use it to inform future Dryad sessions. This means that, the more people who use the software, the better the results for everyone.

One of the motivating principles behind our work is this: the more accessible we can make content-creation tools, the more useful and interesting virtual worlds will become. I've been doing graphics research since 2003, and I *still* suck at Maya. There certainly is a lot of interesting content in worlds like Second Life, but imagine how much more there would be if it wasn't necessary to pay an artist to make it for you! In my book, free is always the most reasonable of prices. :-)

jtalton

Just like in the real world (where I don't know how to make 99.9% of the stuff I have) virtual worlds have people who do know how to make things and will sell them to me for a reasonable price.

2nd Life's modeling tools are awful, horrible to use and incredibly limited to how you can mangle a primitive object. And yet there is no shortage of original content in that world.

There is a benefit to better modeling tools, but it seems like what they're doing has been done years ago and much better by major 3D modeling applications.

Seems to me they're reinventing the wheel and tacking "community-sourced" and "Virtual Worlds" on to it to make it the new hotness.

(Disclaimer: I've done 3d modeling and animation for over ten years. I played 2nd Life for about 3 hours once.)

Zadaz

cabjf

LordChris915

Mongoosekun

JoDi