Vapour Technology was a company formed by myself and Warren Moore to develop and commercialise 3d graphics technology, particularly for web-based applications. The company is unfortunately no longer active.
Major clients included BT, for whom we developed game-related applications for their Millennium Dome body scanner, and Ove Arup & Associates, for whom we developed visualisation software for structural simulations. We also developed various end-user 3D applications which allowed users to pose, animate, and modify human avatar models.
Scanned Avatars in games
We created software tools to convert scanned Avatar-Me human body models into popular game formats. We created converters for:
- Unreal Tournament
- Halflife
- The Sims
The three games all have radically different demands and animation methods, so detailed character animation knowledge was required to reverse engineer the formats, and then convert the models into those formats so they could be used in-game. The Unreal Tournament conversion, for instance, required that we create over 700 unique keyframes for the animations, which in turn involved developing our own set of in-house animation and posing tools. In the case of The Sims, we had to perform some automatic remodelling of the character models, in order to blend them into the game style as much as possible.
We also created an installation system that would install the models into the correct place for the game to find them automatically, requiring no user intervention at all.
Avatar Animation Tools
We were asked to develop an end-user animation tool to allow people to manipulate their Avatar-Me avatars. We created a tool to do this, which was designed to be as simple as possible to use. Beta testers were chosen who had no experience with computers at all, so that the interface could be honed to an extremely intuitive design.
Features included:
- Constrained Inverse Kinematics, for easy posing of the avatar.
- Load and save animation sequences.
- AVI export.
- Scaling and resizing.
- Export to popular game formats
Unfortunately, due to a change in business model of the client, the project was shelved before it's release. The application lived on however, becoming a valuable internal tool for the company's other character animation projects, including the game converters above.
VRML Toolbox
Recently, we released some of the old Vapour Technology VRML97 tools as open source software. The tools are specialised calculators for helping VRML97 content creators, written in C++ and MFC. Windows only at the moment, I'm afraid! Source code and downloads are available from Google Code.