| Q&A |
 Clive
Jackson
CEO Pelican Crossing, Inc.
Visual Communications in the 3rd Dimension
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"With
Blink 3D a environment a developer can add interactivity
to an environment without the need to program. Developers
can use the large range
of pre built behavior objects that come with Blink 3D.
These behavior objects are designed to work together
as building blocks. There is a simple
point and click interface that allows the behaviors
to work together."
<
Blink 3D RAD |
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| Q1 |
Please
give a brief description of Pelican Crossing. |
| A1 |
Pelican
Crossing, Inc. is a privately held software company based in
Southern California, USA. Incorporated in 2001, the company
focuses entirely on developing 3D and game development-related
software products. The companies initial focus was add-on products
for Adobe Atmosphere. However with the demise of Atmosphere
in Dec 2004, Pelican Crossing stepped into the resulting void
with Blink 3D. |
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| Q2 |
What
is Blink 3D? |
| A2 |
Blink
3D is a complete system for developing and viewing interactive
and immersive 3D environments. It consists of a Builder which
is used to assemble pre built models in the 3D environment and
then add animation and interactivity using the various behavior
objects that come with the builder. The result of the building
process is a 3D environment which can be viewed using one of
the various viewers that come with Blink 3D.
Blink 3D is currently in Alpha and is expected to be available
late 4th Qtr 2005. The price has not yet been set but is anticipated
to be in the $399 region. |
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| Q3 |
Why
is Blink 3D a Rapid Application Development (RAD) Tools? Does
it really increase the productivity for creating interactive
3D contents? |
| A3 |
Lets
face it, creating 3D environments is hard, much harder than
creating 2D Flash style applications. This statement is borne
out by the ratio of 2D to 3D applications that exist today.
Up until now the rationale for this was simply the nature of
the medium, that extra dimension causes a lot of problems. Creating
3D environments should be and can be as easy if not easier then
creating 2D applications. Blink 3D achieves this by complementing
your existing skill set.
There are two main hurdles to creating 3D environments. The
first is the creation of the models and the second is adding
animation and interactivity. Both require different skill sets.
Quite often people who would like to build 3D environments have
neither of the requisite skills.
Adding animation and interactivity is often the most difficult
task when building a 3D environments. The main reason for this
is that 3D environmens are typically built by people with graphics
skills who do not always have strong programming skills. A lot
of graphics departments and designers do not have programmers
available. The result is that often the environments excel graphically
but fall below par interactively.
With Blink 3D a environment developer can add interactivity
to an environment without the need to program. Developers can
use the large range of pre built behavior objects that come
with Blink 3D. These behavior objects are designed to work together
as building blocks. There is a simple point and click interface
that allows the behaviors to work together.
However, if you have experienced developers on board, they have
a choice They can either let the behaviors do all the heavy
lifting as far as interactivity is concerned add custom coding
themselves or they can write all the interactivity and animation
programs themselves using the JavaScript API.
There are also those who possess neither graphics nor programming
skills, yet have a business need or desire to create 3D environments.
They want to create their own game or add some pizzazz to their
PowerPoint presentation. Up until now their choice was either
do without or pay for someone to develop it. The Blink 3D Builder
allows people like this to use primitives, prefabs and existing
models when building the environment. There is no need to understand
wire frames or the subtleties of low poly modeling, it is simple
a question of positioning the models in the right place. Then
take advantage of the pre built behaviors to add the interactivity.
The result, productivity and instant gratification.
To take a static environment and add animation and interactivity,
it takes only a few clicks of the mouse, cutting development
time by roughly 80%. So to answer the question, yes it really
does increase productivity and decrease development time and
cost. Which is something that has always been the “Achilles
heel” of 3D environment creation as opposed to 2D Flash
application development. |
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| Q4 |
What
are the different ways to play a content created by Blink 3D? |
| A4 |
Currently
Blink 3D environments can be viewed online using our plug-in
for Internet Explorer which auto installs. There is also a stand
alone player which runs on Windows. On the roadmap is support
for the Firefox Web browser, Windows Screen Savers, embedding
in Microsoft Office documents like Word and PowerPoint as well
as an SDK for software developers. Long term, we plan to offer
the ability to view the environments on both Mac and Linux.
One important think to note with Blink 3D is that with the exception
of the SDK, the ability to view content is always free. All
the viewers (with the exception of the SDK) can be freely distributed.
The SDK is designed for people who wish to include 3D content
in their own applications whether they are in house IT applications
or commercial software. |
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| Q5 |
What
type of 3D application is it possible to develop with Blink
3D? |
| A5 |
The
range of applications that can be developed with Blink 3D is
very broad. They include games, education, historical building
reconstruction, pre-visualization, movie story boarding, pyrotechnic
and movie stunt pre-viz, Machinima movies, webisodes, business
process diagrams, advertising/advergames, marketing, data visualization,
custom configurators for configuring your purchase on the Web,
animated manuals, office space planning, house and kitchen planning,
convention and special event planning. |
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| Q6 |
What
are the main features of Blink 3D engine? Does it support advanced
3D effects such as pixel/vertex shaders? |
| A6 |
On
the engine side, Blink 3D contains a number of sub engines.
There is a state of the art graphics engine that renders absolutely
stunning looking environments. The graphics engine supports
host of features including vertex and fragment program shaders,
post filters, 2D GUI, multi-texture and multi-pass blending
and effects, skeletal animation, multiple animation blending,
key frame animation, multiple scene managers, hierarchical scene
graph, multiple shadow rendering techniques, multiple cameras
and views, multiple lighting techniques, fog, particle system
and sky boxes.
Blink 3D includes a high performance physics engine that is
capable of not only the normal rigid body collision detection
and gravity but also rag dolls, vehicles, cloth, buoyancy, particle
system and explosions.
The sound engine in Blink 3D includes support for both ambient
and 3D sound. Supported file formats include wav, aiff, ogg,
flac, mod, it, s3m and xm. There is also built in support for
EAX 2.0 which is the Environmental Audio Extensions for environmental
sound modeling from Curious Labs, Inc. the makers of SoundBlaster
cards.
Tying all this together is an extensive JavaScript API which
can be used to create the simplest of environments with a spinning
cube to the most extensive multi player first person shooter
games. |
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| Q7 |
Is
it easy to import, update 3D data from a DCC software (3ds max,
Maya...)? |
| A7 |
Blink
3D uses the .mesh file format. As a result there are a large
number of compatible exporters for available for 3D Studio Max,
Milkshape, Blender 3D, Maya, Wings 3D, AC3D, XSI and DeleD 3D.
This means that you can develop the models in your favorite
modeling package and then use the Blink 3D Builder to assemble
the models in the environment and add the animation and interactivity. |
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| Q8 |
Which
users are you targeting with Blink 3D? |
| A8 |
At this point the target market for Blink 3D is quite broad
especially due to the wide range of applications that can be
built with Blink 3D. However during the Beta test phase we expect
this to tighten down. We anticipate that the final target markets
will probably be education, games/Machinima, pre-visualization,
advertising/advergames and marketing. |
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