Submitted by , posted on 30 June 2001
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Here is my first IOTD. It is a screenshot from a model I spent this
afternoon working on in our (commercial) package ViewBuild. It's a package
designed for quickly doing houses. It's built on icky D3D retained mode and
makes use of most of the features in the API. Of particular note in the
screen shot is the heavy use of Bezier curves, I put them in the package
about a year ago, and they've made some rather impressive looking scenes.
Look at the top middle image at how curved all this is. The bottom left
shows a wireframe version of the main image. The top right has an extra
bezier added in showing off how nice they look with an environment map and
a little specular. Try it out on your own projects - it looks sweeeet in
The program itself is getting close to 4 years in development, though I've
only been there around 1.5 years. It's written in C++ using MFC+D3D
Retained Mode (DirectX 5), and currently only works on Win32. There is a
rewrite in the works (OpenGL, STL, cross platform), that should allow for a
lot more expansion above what is available in retained mode.
As this is a commercial product, you can get a free viewer (free reg.
required) and download the model. I'll put it up just as soon as I send
this off. Expect to see some more shots of sweeter looking related work
(less commercial - more research oriented, possibly some source) soon. You
can read about ViewBuild on the website or email about any of the techie