The next
level of rich media on the web…
The
Mad Scientist welcomes visitors to the Discreet site
thanks to Pulse Entertainment
By
Audrey Doyle
Ever since it formed in 1996, San
Francisco-based Pulse Entertainment has sought to
breathe life into the Internet by making the Web a
medium that is as entertaining as it is informative. The
fruits of its efforts are the Pulse Creator web
authoring tool and Pulse Player plug-in.
Since they were introduced about a
year ago, these products have been used to power a host
of popular Web personalities, among them Virtual Jay,
who appears on the website for The Tonight Show with Jay
Leno; and Marvin the Martian, who can be seen on Entertaindom.com.
More recently, they have been used to help Electronic
Arts give gaming fans a Web-based preview of
"American McGee's Alice," a new PC-based
action/adventure title. As a result, they have propelled
Pulse into a leadership position in the market for
creating streaming animated characters that walk, talk,
and interact with their environments on the Internet.
Helping the company further strengthen that position is
3d studio max®, the award-winning 3D modeling and
animation software from Discreet.
When it developed Creator and Player,
Pulse knew it had the tools to bring high-quality 3D
character animation to Internet audiences. For instance,
developers could add life and personality to web pages
by importing wireframes of their 3D characters into
Creator, and then texturing and animating the characters
there. Then, using the free Player plug-in, an
approximately 300KB streaming, interactive 3D web player
compatible with all PC and Mac browsers, website
visitors could play back the interactive 3D content over
a 28.8k connection without experiencing delays or
bandwidth problems. What Pulse didn't have, however, was
a product that enabled developers to import into Creator
anything more than wireframes of their 3D creations. The
more pertinent information associated with their
models—bones, texture maps, animation behaviors—had
to be added in Creator.
To simplify the process for 3D content
creators, Pulse turned to 3d studio max from Discreet.
And thanks to a recent alliance it forged with Discreet,
Pulse is now putting its technology directly into the
hands of the more than 120,000 3d studio max users
around the globe. "We're very excited about this
partnership," enthuses Bill Mitchel, executive vice
president of business development for Pulse
Entertainment. "3d studio max is the leading 3D
modeling and animation application on the market. Now
the entire max developer community can seamlessly export
their creations to our format and put them on the
Web."
To help 3d studio max developers do
this, Pulse has created a new tool that is embedded
directly into max. Called Pulse Producer, the authoring
product is a version of Creator that Pulse
"condensed to fit inside max," explains
Mitchel. Using Producer, he says, developers can export
to a web page the models, texture maps, and animations
they designed in max. "It's truly a seamless
solution for max users to export their characters
directly to a Web page," Mitchel states.
Already, Producer has been used to
bring to the Web an interactive 3D animated character
designed in 3d studio max. Called The Mad Scientist, the
character was originally developed by Carlos Hernandez
and Fred Ruff for use in the Discreet booth at the Game
Developer's Conference in March. On May 1, the character
began greeting visitors to Discreet's website.
According to Mitchel, the character
was originally modeled in 3d studio max by Mike
O'Rourke, of Discreet. Then, a Pulse animator used
Producer to export the model and its accompanying audio
files to Creator, where the character was animated and
lip sync was performed.
“The Pulse animator then used
Creator to link buttons on the web page to specific
actions performed by the character” explains Blake
Porch, director of production at Pulse. As a result, a
visitor to the Discreet site can now, for instance, move
his or her mouse over a button to learn more about a
specific Discreet product, and The Mad Scientist will
say a few words about the product before the visitor is
linked to the page. "He's basically designed as the
host to the Discreet site," says Mitchel. "He
presents information that Discreet wants to present to
its website visitors."
"You also can use your mouse to
move the character around, and you can click on the
background directly behind him and move that around that
as well," adds Porch.
According to Mitchel, The Mad
Scientist represents the next level of rich media on the
Web. "If you look at most web pages, they have
flat, simple designs that make use of primary colors,
and that's it," he says. "Companies are
starting to want a host for their websites; a character
that's always in the upper corner and personalizes the
site and the company for the visitor, making the visitor
want to further explore the site. We offer what we call
'lean-forward' technology. Even when he's not saying
anything, The Mad Scientist draws visitors into the
Discreet site.
"We chose to partner with
Discreet because 3d studio max is the standard in the
industry," Mitchel concludes. "Our goal has
always been to be 'the' standard platform for 3D
animation on the Web. This partnership will help us
achieve that goal."
Discreet's
Mad Scientist
Interactive Animation Courtesy of
Pulse Entertainment.
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