3D Stuff

3D Stuff

This page used to be about the Electric Wig 3D Engine that Graham Sanderson and I wrote in the middle of 1996. It was a state-of-the-art rendering engine, designed for use in videogames, and other applications requiring fast realtime 3D graphics.

Actually, it's not really fair to describe it as state of the art anymore, given that a couple of years have passed, and 3D tech stuff evolves at such a rapid rate. Oh well... it was pretty damn cool at the time, I can tell you.

Wig3d includes a high-level interface allowing the rendering and animation of fully hierarchical objects, such as human figures. This functionality was about to be utilised by Left Field Productions, a Los Angeles based videogame company (who I happen to work for), in an ice hockey game for Sega of America. That game fell through, so we rapidly converted what we had into a basketball game... The screenshot shows a really early demo running at a respectable frame rate on a low-end PC with no hardware acceleration.

To cut a long story short, the PC basketball demo above wound up becoming NBA Courtside, a Nintendo64 title due to be published by Nintendo in the near future. As I write this, we're in the last weeks of finishing off the game.

Wig3D, of course, does environment mapping, phong shading, etc... These are a couple of screenshots from the downloadable wobbly-face demo... click on either picture to view a larger version. The demo shows off the environment-mapping, phong-shading, and morphing capabilities of the engine.

This is another screenshot from a musical demo... the piano keys actually move in sync. with the music (which is all 16-bit 16-channel, entirely mixed in software). This demo is downloadable, but uses a fairly old version of my sound lib, which means you may not hear any music under Win95. Works ok most of the time on my machine, but you never know...

Click here to download the face demo - you'll probably need a 486DX2/66 or above. A VESA compliant SVGA card will also allow you to run the demo in 640x480 mode.

Click here to download the piano demo.

Click here to download the DOS4G/W 32-bit DOS extender, required to run all the demos.

Back! Back, I say!

Wig3d includes a high-level interface allowing the rendering and animation of fully hierarchical objects, such as human figures. This functionality was about to be utilised by Left Field Productions, a Los Angeles based videogame company (who I happen to work for), in an ice hockey game for Sega of America. That game fell through, so we rapidly converted what we had into a basketball game... The screenshot shows a really early demo running at a respectable frame rate on a low-end PC with no hardware acceleration.
To cut a long story short, the PC basketball demo above wound up becoming NBA Courtside, a Nintendo64 title due to be published by Nintendo in the near future. As I write this, we're in the last weeks of finishing off the game.
	Wig3D, of course, does environment mapping, phong shading, etc... These are a couple of screenshots from the downloadable wobbly-face demo... click on either picture to view a larger version. The demo shows off the environment-mapping, phong-shading, and morphing capabilities of the engine.
This is another screenshot from a musical demo... the piano keys actually move in sync. with the music (which is all 16-bit 16-channel, entirely mixed in software). This demo is downloadable, but uses a fairly old version of my sound lib, which means you may not hear any music under Win95. Works ok most of the time on my machine, but you never know...