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Quest3D Awards 2008 Winners
WINNER: "The Monastery of Dordrecht"
by Paladin Studios
Good use of HDR lighting, polished
look and feel, clever user interface
This year's winner is a presentation of an ancient monastery.
The presentation is very well crafted , with attention for detail,
usability and makes very good use of HDR lighting.
The application starts with a short intro with singing monks in the
background. When the intro is finished the user can navigate trough the
monastery and its courtyard with a single click navigation system. The
lighting creates subtle accents of sunlight and shadow. The 'gimmick'
in this presentation is that the user can travel through time by using
buttons that pop up at the bottom of the screen. When the user clicks
in the time line the scene changes to different situations in time.
Another feature is the bird's eye view that allows the user to have
several overhead perspectives of the building. In stead of using the
mouse to drag the perspective it uses a fixed camera path which is
easily controlled using two buttons on the left and right side of the
screen. Without a doubt this presentation would work very well with a
touch screen interface, even for users that have little experience with
navigating in a 3D environment.
The polished look and feel, the excellent use of lighting and
surprisingly simple user interface made the jury decide to make this
presentation this year's best entry.
Second place: "Office designer 1.6"
by 3D-Scapes
Innovative program, very useful
As the name of this software suggests, it allows the user to create
offices. The program starts with an empty office floor and
using standard tools and components the user can design an entire
office from scratch in minutes. It includes a very clever instancing
system that allows the user to build a section of the office and then
'paint' duplicates of this template. The library contains furniture,
walls and decoration.
With a single click the user can switch from a map view into a first
person 3D view which gives an instant impression of what the design
looks like from the perspective of the people that might one day
actually work in the office.
The application is very compact and contains a wide set of user
friendly features that turn designing offices into childsplay. Grid
snap, saving, loading and camera control all work very well. Because of
the good execution of this project and usefulness the jury decided to
give this entry the second place. Without a doubt this application
shows how 3D tools can make difficult tasks easy and we have nou doubt
the idea behind this application can be applied in thousands of other
areas.
Third place: "The plunge" by Ali
Rahimi
Technically daring and unique
graphical style
The first association with this entry might be the strange designs by
artist HR Giger. Alhough the application itself is basically a simple
flythrough there is a lot of technology driving these images. Ali
created his own art pipeline to get the images he wanted. Using
sophisticated techniques he created a system that combines 32
bit light maps with normal mapping techniques. On top of that he used
post processing to create a depth of field effect and simulate motion
blur. All together this results in a unique cinamatic
graphical style. Because of the technical effort and vision and the
unique visuals the jury decided to hand out the third place to this
entry.
Honorable mention 1: "Moebius house
design" by 3D Capacity
Great shaders and very succesful
effort to recreate a real-life scene
This application is a heavy beast. The large number of tree
leaves and abundance of shaders makes this an appication that begs for
the latest graphics cards. The result is a very succesful recreation of
a unique building that is normally hidden in the trees. There
is a nice start up screen for selecting resolutions, the loading screen
is unique and some of the shaders hit the exact sweet spot of
realism. The user can watch the presentation through a pre recorded
camera or navigate freely through the environment.
Honorable mention 2: "Avalon" by
Yorick van Vliet and Lukas Hoenderdos
Great results of an experiment only
skilled users can achieve
This entry was created by two creators that also appear in the credits
of this years winner. It seems they are doing an experimental project
on the side and the results are looking good. Avalon is a environment
creation tool that allows the user to paint land an vegitation. Using
simple tools the user can modify the topology and texture of the
landscape. With other tools the user can add trees or other types of
vegitation. Why wait for a lanscape painter inside Quest3D if you can
build it yourself seems to be the motto.
Movies and demo's
Movies and executables of this years entries will be made available
later. Watch our webpage for more material of the competition winners
and other entries.
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