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history
Well, I will try to answer some of those questions we have been asked about many times since we released this intro. I will give my personal point of view of each one, of course. For a complete report on the "making of" just follow the articles in rgba or in the different personal web pages of the rgba members. Something nice of rgba is that each production takes place in between real life experiences (we all work, and even some of us have a familly!), and so each production is intenselly influenced by real wishes, problems, motivations and frustations. So, here goes my part of the story. The idea of making this intro began just in the train going from Bingen to Kohln, coming from the Breakpoint. I was watching the winner demo of that BP, and asked myself "why did it create the "woh!" effect during the projection?" I decided the cause was that global illumination like shading (Sphereical Harmonics or Ambient Occlusion, I thought) of the scene with the pink petals. I remembered the reaction of the people at the partyplace. I said myself, "hey, we have the Ambient occlusion in rgba's introsystem since almost one year...". An idea was being cooked. "This demo uses only 3 or 4 textures at most... and no more than 5 big models... and all of them static...". Before arriving to Kohln I had a copy of our Paradise intro with a new texture: a HDRI cubemap lighting my AO shaded rhino. No return, it was just out of my control. I still had some battery left, so I had a closest look to the data directory of the beautyfull demo. A directory per scene, a subdirectory called "geometry". Some suspicius IBO and VBO files ("index and vertex buffer objects!", I guessed). Uh, uh, they just made it so simple to me! I could just read those files and extract the geometry to help our modelers re-make the models... I thought rgba could not miss this opportunity to make his first re-make production. I continued inspection the data directory. The SHO probably contained the Spherical Harmonics or SHading data, but I didn't need them, I could just calculate some AO in less than 300 bytes of code. I could not wait to arrive home, I was so hungry!!! Some weeks after I pushed rgba to go for the project. We took it as a fast production (since all the content was allready designed), and because there was not real technicall challenge for this one (we had all the code ready!). So, it was the fantastic scenareo for testing the very-basic intro-tool we where creating Utopian and me, and to see if our new coder, Gortu, could finally make real my dream of having our own synth-man in the group. |