Benoît Saint-Moulin is a teacher of interactive 3D technologies at the Belgian school Jacquard Infographie. He and a team of four students developed a game using a combination of tools including Blender, 3DS Max and the Gimp. They actually built an arcade machine around it with an innovative interface.
Benoît writes:
Dynamic Ball arcade-game-like, as shown at the 2009 opendoor day at HEAJ (Haute Ecole Albert Jacquard). Dynamic Ball has been developed with Autodesk 3ds Max and free software Blender by a team of students under teacher Benoit Saint-Moulin's expertise.
Teacher
- Benoît Saint-Moulin
Students
- Adrien Xhibitte
- Olivier Deveux
- Christopher Helin
- Audrey Cauchie
Software
- Autodesk 3ds max
- Audacity
- Blender
- Gimp
- Glove Pie
Links
- Video of the installation and a short making of
- Download Dynamic Ball as a .blend (released under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa license). Login required for this site, maybe someone can set up a mirror?
- Official forum thread
- More pictures
8 Comments
Excellent interface :)
Congratulation for your team!
Awesome, now where can I buy this to put in my living room? :P
Seriously... I'm impressed. The ball controller seems a lot like the Wii controller (possibly the same 5-axis Cubloc controller even).
The game is a great exercise in co-ordination and perceptive skills, which in a sense has educational value as well as being entertaining.
this is a large scale awesome 3d gaming-interface...might be a bit big for the average casual gamer but i bet its lotsa fun to play :D.-...great work
Cool concept, looks awesome
I like arcade games
I like tangible interface design
I like the unified color scheme.
I like the lighting
I like cool student projects
* * * * * 5 stars
They have a thread on blenderartists here: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=159712&highlight=Dynamic+Ball
here is a mirror of the old file: http://www.cdupload.com/files/59769_z8zsz/HEAJ_Dynamic_ball.zip
If this has since been updated, let me know.
Hi all,
I'm Ben, the teacher behind this project, all the honors and congratulations go to my students!
Thanks for your feedback !
- What's to controler inside the ball ?
it's a "simple" Wiimote, connected with Bluetooth to a laptop (inside the arcade machine).
- What's parts was made into 3ds max and Blender ?
All the modeling and texture baking was made into 3ds max and animation and realtime project was made into Blender.
- Why using Blender ?
At start I help my students to found a good technology to finalise this project but we tried a lots and no one do the job so easy as Blender Game Engine and Logic Brick can do ! My students are not programmers at all, they only have few logic and math to solve problems, I can't ask they to programms more then 10 lines...
It's vey important for me that's my students can get access to the technology as at college and at home, I don't like piracy and don't want my students fall into this dumb, so Blender was the right choice !
About documentation, Blender is the only one with so good printed books to learn ! Reading PDF or HTML to understand a workflow or solve solutions is not the best way, I think for this task we must go far the computer and no other 3d realtime technologies have so good printed books, funny isn't !?
Don't hesitate to ask me all the questions you want :-)
Thanks for sharing the file on mirror, I understand it's boring to registering to so many website, the goal is not to get more registered members but to keep alive your bandwith (the bandwith in belgium is really expenssive!) and avoid direct links to the files hosted on tdt3d, if you registered on tdt3d on don't like it you can freely destroy your account and delete it forever (account, email, newsletters,...) with a single click into your Control panel...(I don't like website like a trap and privacy no respect!)
Sorry for my bad english writing...