Too bad it still takes 5 seconds before you see changes you've made to the code in the editor .. should be instant.

I was hoping that I could pair this with a totally different creation method - if you're not building with triangles, you'd have to build with something else. If you can tolerate a probabilistic rendering method, maybe you could tolerate a more probalistic data representation and sketchy creation process.

That's definitely the better approach, but ( as mentioned ) it takes a significant investment.

I would love to see a probabilistic rendering system based on something other than triangles

Already possible. The primary reason why ( i think ) we don't see this yet, is because you not only need to develop a custom rendering pipeline, but also the ( plugins for ) tools to create content for that pipeline + retrain artists who only have ( years of ) experience with the cookie-cutter polygon based pipeline.

The easier / more cost-efficient alternative is to use a post-processing effect that mimics some of the aesthetics you're after.

And those that are curious about live visual programming should take a look at ThreeNodes.js.



Still under development, but probably the easiest ( runs in your browser using javascript + WebGL ) way to have a taste of this kind of workflow.

Coding is like painting, except that you would use a telephone to give your painting instructions to a remote, neutral painter, instead of painting yourself

Exactly! I don't think many artists would prefer this approach to the conventional way of painting

You could certainly tie everything together with an additional layer of abstraction, but you'd be relying on using pre-determined blocks.

Just like programming languages themselves rely on pre-determined blocks.

However, I think you can needlessly limit yourself if you come to rely on tools and, ultimately, you still need to understand the fundamental concepts underlying your craft to utilise them well.

Artists / animators / musicians that rely on "limiting" tools like Photoshop / Maya / Reason seem to do just fine.

I don't believe programming is out of any of your reaches, especially as artists.

This is not about the difficulty of programming. This is about preferring a interface that lets you draw a line using your mouse / tablet instead of typing ..

Code:

0 0 moveto 
0 100 lineto stroke

While I certainly share his principle, I don't believe in his ( current? ) direction for a programming solution.

There's no need for a separate input "view" in the form of conventional code.



All authoring should be done directly on the end-product .. just like his animation tool.

Perhaps we should just adopt haute-jeu(x) .. in the vein of how haute-couture / haute-cuisine distinguish from regular clothes / food

Are there any point-cloud rendering engines or content-creation tools available that could be used for games?

OpenGL & Direct3D have build-in support for point-clouds. Concerning content-creation, you usually want to use a scanner .. but you could generate the data from polygons / NURBS in most 3D tools as well ( by ray-casting your scene ).

I love the artifacts and the transparency. It definitely gets away from the cleanliness of 3D space.

Radiohead used raw point-cloud data for their House of Cards videoclip a while back. Part of the data can be downloaded here ..

http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/

It's certainly possible to do a game using point-cloud visuals. You just need to generate a polygon / octree / primitives data-set to solve collisions with .. or go the other way around, generate point-clouds from a polygon source

This whole topic reminds me too much of QTVR.

The technology I linked to generates texture-mapped 3D environments from the point-cloud data that is collected by the device.

I downloaded and looked into ”The Hunter” (a hunting simulator). I cannot imagine that all that could have been ”hand-crafted”.

It's part procedural-generation, part smart editor / tools that let you "paint" the environment rapidly.

Welcome, Healther Cute art style! I particularly like the subtle shading in "3D Sweater Girl", it adds a lot of volume. And good to see someone using Processing, which is a excellent platform for interactive sketching ( and learning to code ).

Are there any cameras available that can record precise 3D position and rotation together with the image, so you can reconstruct the scene in a virtual environment later?

http://www-video.eecs.berkeley.edu/research/indoor/

You shouldn't fight the medium; you'll always be unhappy.

Agreed. And to those longing for more power .. there's light at the end of the tunnel.

http://www.newelectronics.co.uk/electronics-news/graphene-electronics-breakthrough-turns-previous-research-on-head/40034/