The test game world needs boundaries. Typically it can be an island or an area surrounded by barriers. I've seen some games that even make a small planetoids with fractals. In this case, I made an island.
Depending on the camera angle, the horizon can be an issue. OpenGL ES 2 can really help with drawing horizons. One can do all sorts of alpha channel and depth tricks with shaders.
I made the character mesh with the free MakeHuman program. One initial issue was the default mesh is too much for the iDevice. Fortunately, newer versions of MakeHuman do have a lower poly count mesh suitable for games. One issue about using MakeHuman is you have to go through Blender with an export -- they have their own file format. I recall the lower polygon mesh is limited to the blender mbx export. By default Blender has the MakeHuman import disabled and you need to enable it.
I upgraded my Carrara and Modo programs. One thing to be careful of is the first release of Lion disables the super user on the Mac. When this happens, you cannot register the Carrara upgrade! Lion 10.7.1 might fix this. The Modo upgrade is much improved since 301. My only gripe with Modo is the program crashes all the time on the Mac -- annoying when you did not save! The crash consistency is about that same on 5.x and 3.x was. I really like the Modo material presets.
It looks like most of my tools export dae animation incorrectly. My benchmark is if the Mac OS X Preview app shows the animation, then the export is correct. So, Cararra, Modo, Blender … not so sure. The new Cheetah3D beta handles it properly with Preview. The Mac OS X console will indicate any XML/DOM issues with the dae when Preview reads it in. Another thing I've noticed is that the Astro Boy Max ( from collada.org ) example file works in Lion with Preview. So, it appears Lion has some improvements. With the exception of animations, Modo exports dae pretty well and is very configurable. I notice Modo marks everything a Node and there are no Joints. So, Modo is a useful when making static objects. Modo appears weak with regard to character animation.
I downloaded Daz Studio. They are offering it for free. In reality nothing is free. ( where is the service offering or the advertisement ) I think they are using it as a tool to up sell content. The license agreement looked draconian with regard to content rights. So, I did not install Daz Studio. Ironically, on the Modo site, I read a news article that said Daz was making a characters in Modo. Doh! I notice the same content up sell pattern within Vue 9. So, just looks like we have another case of software as a service but I just was buying a tool. I'd rather goto Turbosquid etc.
Dynamic shadows are too much for the iPad 1. So, I took them out. Might work on the iPad 2. Looks like iPad 3 is going to have a retina display … I hope the graphics processor is fast enough to handle the fill rates … I bet it will not.
BTW, the images from my last log entry were lost in a Sandvox upgrade! Huff…
So, now the animated character can walk in its new world. Another difference here is these are all dae imports versus obj in my prior creations.
iPad 1 with simple humanoid walking on an island...
