Applications of 3D

1. Applications of 3D

3D in Games

3D Monster Maze was the first ever game released on a commercial games machine that was in 3D. It was developed by Malcolm Evans in 1981 for the Sinclair ZX81 platform. The game awarded points for each step the player took without getting caught by the Tyrannosaurus Rex that hunted them in the 16 by 16 cell, randomly generated maze.

http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/generated/tapeinfo/0/3DMonsterMaze(NGS).html

Transition to 3D

The fifth generation is most noted for the rise of fully 3D games. While there were games prior that had used three dimensional environments, such as Virtua Racing and Star Fox,

Virtua Racing

Star Fox

It was in this era that many game designers began to move traditionally 2D and pseudo-3D genres into full 3D. Super Mario 64 on the N64, Crash Bandicoot,

and Spyro the Dragon on the PlayStation and Nights into Dreams... on the Saturn, are prime examples of this trend. Their 3D environments were widely marketed and they steered the industry's focus away from side-scrolling and rail-style titles, as well as opening doors to more complex games and genres. Games like GoldenEye 007,

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or Virtua Fighter were nothing like shoot-em-ups, RPGs or fighting games before them. 3D became the main focus in this era as well as a slow decline of cartridges in favor of CDs, which allowed much greater storage capacity than what was previously possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_games#Transition_to_3D_and_CDs

Current Trends
The use of hyper-realistic 3D technology within games is now seen as a standard element, (barring the current interest in retro styling) bringing ever more realistic worlds and narratives to life. Games have evolved into interactive films, for example,
The Batman Franchise

The Uncharted Series

The ever-increasing download speeds capable through wireless and mobile networks and the developments made in the field of motion/gesture control, mean that 3D technology will have a big part to play in the ways in which games are played and displayed.

3D in Animation

First 3D Animation
This historical video was recently re-discovered after being lost for many years. It was produced in 1972 and is believed to be the world's first computer-generated 3D animation.

It was created by Ed Catmull, a true pioneer of 3D technology, who was a computer scientist at the University of Utah (birthplace of the famous Utah teapot.) If the name sounds familiar, it's because a few years later he was one of the founders of Pixar.

Pixar's Tin Toy

Tin Toy is a 1988 American computer-animated short film produced by Pixar and directed by John Lasseter. The short film, which runs five minutes, stars Tinny, a tin one-man-band toy, attempting to escape from Billy, a destructive baby. The third short film produced by the company's small animation division, it was a risky investment: due to low revenue produced by Pixar's main product, the eponymous computer to manage animations, the company was under financial constraints.

Lasseter pitched the concept for Tin Toy by storyboard to Pixar owner Steve Jobs, who agreed to finance the short despite the company's struggles, which he kept alive with annual investment. The film was officially a test of the PhotoRealistic RenderMan software, and proved new challenges to the animation team, namely the difficult task of realistically animating Billy. Tin Toy would later gain attention from Disney, who sealed an agreement to create Toy Story, which was primarily inspired by elements from Tin Toy.

The short premiered in a partially completed edit at the SIGGRAPH convention in August 1988 to a standing ovation from scientists and engineers. Tin Toy went on to claim Pixar's first Oscar with the 1988 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, becoming the first CGI film to win an Oscar. With the award, Tin Toy went far to establish computer animation as a legitimate artistic medium outside SIGGRAPH and the animation-festival film circuit. Tin Toy was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" in 2003.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Toy

Accessing the Technology

Although traditional forms of animation like cell and stop-motion are still popular (and often produced using computer technology), the availability and affordability of high-end 3D software has allowed individuals to access the technology and make creative animations that are of a professional quality. Stories can be told using the freedom 3D space gives the animator. This has led to an explosion of self-published animations and subsequent networking. Freelancers are able to develop short animations for the children's TV market and advertising, competing on an equal footing with larger production companies.

Techniques

3D Animation is carried out by key-framing the camera, lights and objects within a scene. Character movement is created by using rigging or motion capture techniques.
Rigging

Skeletal animation is a technique in computer animation in which a character is represented in two parts: a surface representation used to draw the character (called skin or mesh) and a hierarchical set of interconnected bones (called the skeleton or rig) used to animate (pose and keyframe) the mesh. While this technique is often used to animate humans or more generally for organic modelling, it only serves to make the animation process more intuitive and the same technique can be used to control the deformation of any object — a spoon, a building, or a galaxy.

This technique is used in virtually all animation systems where simplified user interfaces allows animators to control often complex algorithms and a huge amount of geometry; most notably through inverse kinematics and other "goal-oriented" techniques. In principle, however, the intention of the technique is never to imitate real anatomy or physical processes, but only to control the deformation of the mesh data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletal_animation

Motion Capture

Motion capture is the process of recording the movement of objects or people. It is used in military, entertainment, sports, and medical applications, and for validation of computer vision and robotics. In film making and video game development, it refers to recording actions of human actors, and using that information to animate digital character models in 2D or 3D computer animation. When it includes face and fingers or captures subtle expressions, it is often referred to as performance capture. In many fields, motion capture is sometimes called motion tracking, but in film making and games, motion tracking more usually refers to match moving.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_capture

3D in Film and TV

First 3D Animation in a Film

As shown earlier, notice the rotating palm and face made of polygons. It's the world's first 3D animation rendered in 1972 by Ed Catmull and Fred Parke, at that time young scientists at the University of Utah. Four years later this animation was eventually discovered by some Hollywood executive and included into the 1976 sci-fi movie Futureworld. Today, Ed Catmull is known as a co-founder and president of Pixar Studios.

The first revolutionary use of 3D imagery in a movie was in Jurassic Park released in 1993, almost all of the dinosaurs were created in using 3D CGI in and shown in the live-action scenes of the movie:

It is now common place for 3D composites to feature within TV and films – characters, SFX - explosions etc.

Pan's Labyrinth - 2006

Batman Begins

Marvel's Avengers Assemble

Compositing is the combining of visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene. Live-action shooting for compositing is variously called "chroma key", "blue screen", "green screen" and other names. Today, most, though not all, compositing is achieved through digital image manipulation. Pre-digital compositing techniques, however, go back as far as the trick films of Georges Méliès in the late 19th century; and some are still in use. All compositing involves the replacement of selected parts of an image with other material, usually, but not always, from another image. In the digital method of compositing, software commands designate a narrowly defined colour as the part of an image to be replaced. Then every pixel within the designated colour range is replaced by the software with a pixel from another image, aligned to appear as part of the original. For example, a TV weather person is recorded in front of a plain blue or green screen, while compositing software replaces only the designated blue or green color with weather maps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositing

3D Animation on TV

3D featured rarely on television until 1994 when a Canadian production company called Mainframe Entertainment based in Vancouver released a CGI TV series called ReBoot. The series was credited to be the first ever full-length, completely computer-animated TV series. The program was unique at the time it was released since the first fully 3D animated movie hadn’t yet been released, so it attracted a lot of attention not only from the audience but also drew the attention of older people too due to its originality and technical vocabulary.

The setting is in the inner world of a computer system known by its inhabitants as Mainframe. It was deliberately chosen due to technological constraints at the time, as the fictional computer world allowed for blocky looking models and mechanical animation.Mainframe is divided into six sectors: Baudway, Kits, Floating Point Park, Beverly Hills, Wall Street, and Ghetty Prime. The names of Mainframe's sectors are homages to famous neighbourhoods, mostly in New York City or Los Angeles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReBoot

As the cost of production has fallen, the use of 3D within TV has mushroomed. Production values have started to mirror those of the film industry.
24

Primeval

3D in Education

3D technology is used effectively to create educational tools and content, enhancing traditional education methods or by providing virtual classrooms. For example, Gaia 3D Viewer:

The Gaia 3D Viewer has been designed with the classroom in mind. The simple interface requires no training and teachers are able to start teaching lessons in 3D straight away. Different Viewer options offer a variety of capabilities allowing maximum flexibility in the classroom. Gaia offers a variety of lessons covering all subjects from Biology to History and Geography. Each lesson can be enhanced by the teacher with the capability to quickly and easily embed external assets directly into the lessons provided. The full environments, such as the Roman City and Pond Ecosystem, allow teachers and pupils to explore and discover in a virtual environment. Using the camera function in the Viewer, teachers may individually determine and control the path they wish to travel inside any selected 3D environment. For instance, take the classroom on a virtual tour of ancient Giza or on an underwater hunt for tadpoles.

http://www.gaia3d.co.uk/

3D in Architecture

Architects are able to use 3D technology to plan buildings and environments and produce visualisations of the finished designs:
Construction