Hand-Draw Your 3D Models
Tim Holt (who I need to get in touch with because he’s doing some pretty cool projects in Multiverse), sends along a link to this video demonstrating a program called Teddy, which lets you create globular 3D models via a hand-drawing interface. Just sketch a shape on your screen, and Teddy automatically makes it into a topological sphere. Easily add arms, feet, other weird protuberances, paint the thing, then export the model in .obj format (which means it can be imported into Poser, Maya, Blender, 3D Studio Max and others). It’s a very cool interface, and there’s lots of information about how it works on the site. The free download is only 1.7MB. It’s definitely still experimental, as too much manipulation and painting often results in system-freezing crashes (it took me a long time to get even the simple model above in stable form), but you can have at least a little fun with it if you’re determined. I found I usually ended up with something quite Spore-like. Will Wright would be proud!
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Neat.. reminds one a little of the 2D-3D drawing tool demo’ed in the Croquet presentation videos - not sure if that one is import/export friendly though…
Teddy’s author has some other apps as well which might be of interest. I’d also mention that there’s a very impressive new application being developed by the guy most responsible for Rhino3D. I forget the name but it’s initials are MoI. It’s geared toward the same kind of pen-based interface but is NURBs (so the output is excellent). It’s in alpha or beta right now, but it’s getting some buzz.
Cool demo video of this in action at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5053834549541822378
It’s sort of meatballish isn’t it.