Reading Post

The end of Chapter 4 in our book discusses real-time rendering of 3D animation for online gaming sites. I took the Qualitative Research Methods class a couple of years ago at IC, and we had to use Second Life (http://secondlife.com/) for our semester-long project. I was really annoyed at how slow everything on the site loaded and it bothered me when materials or shapes seemed to be missing from the scene my avatar was in. The book's explanation of the amount of rendering needed to make these sites work explained what a great feat creating sites like Second Life really is. The site is rendering in real-time millions of simultaneous users' virtual reality experience. Thinking of how long it takes to model and animate simple things in Maya, along with the book's explanation of rendering time, levels of detail, and the amount of animation and transformations needed to have real-time rendering, I am now much more impressed by the functioning quality of Second Life.