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Esperient Creator takes a major leap forward with Smart Objects and Intelligent Materials.
Thursday, 02 October 2008
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Esperient Corporation developer of 3D authoring tools for visual computing and NextGen web apps, has introduced Smart Objects and Intelligent Materials to its core product, Esperient Creator.
Building on Esperient’s strength in creating cutting-edge shader technology, the Company’s Intelligent Materials technology takes Shader development into a new dimension. In Esperient Creator, there are currently two principal types of shaders - pixel shaders and vertex shaders – which add powerful effects to basic geometry. For example, an Ocean shader can be added to a flat plane to make it look reflective, refractive and morph with ocean wave-like effects, or a glass-styled shader can be added to a polygon to make it appear transparent while still reflecting the environment around it. In Esperient Creator, these shaders are taken into a whole new dimension – called Intelligent Materials.
Esperient Scripting code (lisp or CScript) can be embedded within the shader definition file to capture user events, trigger animations, track mouse and other application events to create interactive intelligent materials. By adding mouse interaction or object manipulation functionality directly into the shader source code, artists and developers can create self contained interactive materials that harness the power of the Creator API with the power of GPU-based shader effects to create Intelligent Materials.
For example, to make an interactive 3D paint application, code would be written to check every object in a scene for a user pick, mouse move or other change. As these events were captured, then the material files would be updated by additional scripting code based on these inputs. The code would be distributed throughout the application making it challenging to maintain or easily reuse.
With Intelligent Materials, everything is stored in a single file that is available through the asset browser. By simply dragging and dropping an intelligent 3D paint material onto any object in the scene, both the material and interactivity are instantly applied.
In the same way that Intelligent Materials can be created and re-used, Smart Objects work on the same principal. The core interactivity model has been extended to allow Objects to be saved as individual files and reused as components within a scene.
Esperient Creator Community Edition (Free) and Esperient Creator 3.0 ($500) can be downloaded from the Esperient website.
