For those of you who have been playing the game Blocks, we’ve released a newer version of the demo. We have incorporated a lot of the feedback received from everyone and included 3 new levels. For a full rundown, check out the Darkwind Media Blog.

Thank you for playing!

Hey Juicers. I have an announcement to make.

Luster is now in public beta. Download it here. It is available for PC and Mac. I promise that it if you install it and want to uninstall it, you can uninstall it easily as you would any program.

Luster is our platform for creating interactive 3D applications. Like Flash, once the Luster runtime is installed on your computer, you can run Luster applications. Luster applications can be hosted on a website through major browsers or as applications on your desktop.

So what are you going to do now that you have installed Luster? Well easy! Download and play Blocks.

Blocks is a game we have been working on at the Darkwind Media offices to promote and test Luster. You can download Blocks for free and run it on, again, Mac or PC. Its small. It does not require installation. Just download and play, delete when you are done.

If you could give us feedback on any bugs you encounter in Blocks while playing it, that would be great. Email us at feedback@luster3d.com. Once Luster is downloaded, you can also check out some of our other demos. If you don’t want to download the demos, please at least check out our gallery.

Thanks Juicers. You are great. Huge thanks also to Brian, Choof, and Chris for putting in so much work and making this happen.

So, several years back I substituted my Character Modeling and Animation course at RIT with an independent study in character modeling and animation. My task was to create and animate the characters Josie True and iCat from a collaborative educational project.

Well, it took a while, but for the last 6 months or so I’ve finally taken the time to finish this project up so I can officially be a graduate of the Game Design and Development program at RIT.

Here is a video of my final work. The characters are being rendered in real time in an interactive environment in Luster.

I am not a character modeler nor animator. I have worked in Maya before and done some shotty rigs and animations in the past, but this was a huge learning experience for me. Not everything came out the way I wanted, but I am thrilled to have created what you see here. I am no Kyle, just a noob, but I am a proud noob.

Oh, and also, a little on the two characters:

iCat was rigged and animated in a fully forward kinematic system, which gave me a lot of control but made a lot of animating very tedious and difficult to get appropriate results (for example, making sure the feet stay on the ground)

Josie was animated in a fully IK system, which gave me a lot of nice tools for keeping feet on the ground, bones in place and extra realistic motion from her movements. It was also, however, very complicated to operate with pinning and pull and all that stuff, so making a wrong move would lead to a lot of frustration and other terrible things. Obviously very powerful, but something that I am sure takes practice and experience to master.

Hey Juicers, how have you been? I haven’t been around much lately, I’ll be better I promise.

I wanted to let everyone know that you can finally get Luster installed on your Windows machine and start playing around with some demos. Head on over to the Luster Beta Sign-up page to get started. After you have signed up, we need to activate your account. Once that happens, you’ll receive an email with instructions and more details about the whole shabang.

There’s some basic tech demos available online right now, but we have some sweeter demos that will trickle out over the next week or two, including one of the music visualizers. You should definitely check out the Arthas Dance Animation, it’s pretty cool. It uses somewhat advanced lighting techniques, so if you have an older video card it may not look as great as it should. But that’s what this beta thing is all about, figuring out these little details, right?

I leave you with a video of the Arthas animation. Major props to Chris for making this happen.

A couple of weeks ago, I set up the Darkwind Media & Luster Twitter accounts so we could start gathering a following and have yet another outlet to push our news & luster examples. This sparked the idea that I should start using my own Twitter account that has remained dormant since I registered my username a while back.

This is my call for any juicers who have twitter to list their account here (if they wish) so. Feel free to edit the post to keep it tidy.

• Choofins
• BLin22
• kstizzle
• Colin_Doody
• bochocki
• teamasparagus
• <empty>

Darkwind Media just put up the company website & Luster websites for the public. Give us a few days to get some Luster applications up, we’re testing the web players extensively.

Please note if you do download the players, there will be new versions very frequently. Watch the Darkwind Media Blog, because we’ll be telling people when new versions are available.

The Mac version is just a newborn, it still has some soft spots on it’s head. Be kind.

Yep, that’s the Luster Editor on my Dock. Luster & the Luster Editor are well on their way to being on the Mac! This is huge news and I am too excited not to share it with you all. Woot!

Big props are in order for Scott Flynn, he’s a certified badass.

I couldn’t wait, and decided to post a few screenshots. Since earlier today we’ve made a few additions to the spitfire. There will be even more tomorrow, since Choof has some tricks still up his sleeve.

Nice, Kyle

From the side; ignore the backwards letters...

Ok, for anyone who cares I’ll put in the details. First off, yes that is film grain added as a post-process. In screenshots it generally looks bad, but at runtime it really adds a cinematic quality to the image. The floor is dynamically reflecting the scene above it. The plane itself is lit with a hemisphere light as well as a single point light which follows the camera. We’ve used Kyle’s original diffuse, specular, and bump maps to add to the plane’s detail.

And, just to add some spice here’s some images from a simple visualizer I coded up at the end of one week. That’s Pontiac Dream by Boards of Canada you are looking at. I am far from done with this, but I figured I’d show a few images from it, because I think it is pretty cool.

The powerful beat of Pontiac Dream

As the orb is covered, you can see the rays shot out into the scene

We’ll be posting some videos again tomorrow, and hopefully a link to the newest runtime so you can see some of this stuff for yourselves.

Kyle let us use his Spitfire model he made for school earlier this year and put it into Luster. We took a small video with the camera rotating around the spitfire.

The video doesn’t do it much justice, it looks much better in Luster. If anyone is interested, feel free to ask and I can give you the Luster player installation and you can check out the file for yourself!

Hey everyone. I haven’t posted in a while. Love the blog, just never get around to posting. Driving through life at 80 miles and hour and keep missing my exit, if you know what I mean (don’t even think I do.)

Anyways- I just wanted to write that things are going great. The school quarter wrapped up a week ago, and then I flew out to San Francisco to AdobeMAX where things went great, and now I am back at Rochester and heading to Boston from Tuesday to Sunday for thanksgiving break.

On a few topics that deserve more elaboration, AdobeMAX went great. I gave a presentation on the New Media Showcase which was my senior project along with other juicers and talented youngin’s and the presentation was about not only the showcase but sort of a general philosophy on new media and education and the like. Again, this deserves more attention, but the talk went spectacularly. I was at a special Adobe event at Adobe headquarters before the actual MAX presenting to educators and industry leaders and the like. I was the first in a series of talks, and I got to talk for 40 minutes. I really felt like somehow the talk came together, and I really ended up impressing a lot of people. People were coming up to me and the professors all day saying what an excellent job I did and I actually was being referenced in future talks throughout the day. One guy told me that when I got up there, he didn’t expect me to say anything “important” or enlightening or anything that would get him thinking. He said that I just blew him away and that some of the stuff I was talking about really got him thinking. Anyways- it rocked. Real hard. Adobe gloating done.

On to school, school went awesome. Army Ants wrapped up great. I need to capture video on the school computers of the game so I can post it here and elsewhere. I think the game went really spectacularly.

Finally, Darkwind Media is rocking out hard. Luster is blossoming into a fine young gentleman. We will be releasing our first public demos soon, which show off some neat shaders and also take that platform and create a visualizer out of it. Real cool stuff. Be sure to “stay tuned”

That’s all. I need to post more. I need to comment more. I read everyones post and I am glad everyone is doing well. Peace my friends. Keep on Juicin’

P.S. Future posts to come: One on “What Android means for the future of mobile devices” based on my own speculation and a second on “Army Ants : A Post-Mortem”

Hey, just thought I would show off some of the new videos Brian has posted to the Darkwind Media Blog. For more information, check out the site

www.darkwindmedia.com

Video I : Luster Physics Demo

Luster Physics Demo from Brian Johnstone on Vimeo

Video II: Human Visualization Project Preview

Human Visualization Project Redux from Brian Johnstone on Vimeo.