Into the projects

Google Analytics indicates a few people are reading this blog. Nice to know it's read by someone. I read somewhere that 95% of all blogs have exactly one reader. I maintain two right now, one for teaching and the other for a hobby project and both are getting up to 10 readers a day.

CSE 473 is into the first project. I always try to mix the projects up; giving something unique each year. I decided to give the first project a theme for each group. The five themes are frogs, rats, locusts, bats, and bees. I think you get the picture. I though I would have all of the models in some model libraries I have, but only found the locust (actually a grasshopper, but we'll just keep that to ourselves). I found a nice frog online that someone had done, but had to buy the other three. Hope students appreciate my spending my own money on these models.

Of course, just buying a model does not mean it's even remotely usable in XNA, particularly if you're doing procedural animation. I figure it averaged around four hours for each model working them into shape. Some of that time was spent writing a nice program to test the models and some was spent trying to get 3DS Max to do something I wanted it to do. It's definitely quirky and I had a lot of problems with crashing on one of the models. But, they are all done and I think they look very cool. The bee is pretty high poly, but the rest are more reasonable. They can probably get away with swarming if they want to try it.