Twin Forces Portfolio

This page shows off some of the more visually interesting work we've done.

Click on a link below to jump to an example from one of the following areas:

• Star Trek
• 3D Gaming
• Quicktime VR
• Java
• Real Time Surface Editing
• Real Time Light Editing
• Motion Capture

Our most famous work is probably the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation we did with Joe Alter at Fourth Dimension. Joe used our renderer and contracted with us for a customized particle system to implement the "Culvard Starburst Maneuver". Here are are some small images, and you can see some of our other rendering work here.

					The ships move into a star formation in order to begin the Culvard Starburst Maneuver. Next, the ships will release some plasma into space, creating a trail. When the plasma jets collide, the trails will ignite, producing a flaming star. click for larger image (14K)
		Here you see the star igniting. Notice how the particles change color as they "burn". click for larger image (35K) You can get a video clip and more detailed synopsis of the episode from the Paramount site here. (It's episode 219, The First Duty)

			One of the projects we were working on was a CD-ROM game that had a real-time 3D engine. Unfortunately, our client ran into financial difficulties, so we were never able to finish the game. Just for fun, we decided to hook the 3D engine into a public domain tank game for the macintosh called Bolo. We originally planned to keep updating Bolo3D as Bolo was updated, but right after we released Bolo3D 0.5, the original programmer for Bolo sold the rights to the game to a third party and stopped updating Bolo. So we had to stop updating Bolo3D. But people keep downloading it and having fun shooting each other in 3D over the Internet. That makes it our second most famous project. Read all about it here.

For that same CD-ROM game, there was going to be a substantial QuicktimeVR section that let you explore a desert scene. For that game, we created a tool that let you automatically generate a QuicktimeVR movie with multiple nodes. Basically, it works by having you put in the location and orientation of each node. From that, it can automatically create the link bitmap. If you make your scene in a 3D program to begin with, you're all set.

In other words, we wrote a program where you can create a 3D world in 30 seconds.

You can download it here.

			We've been doing some Java work for an online game based on the novels of the New York Times bestselling author Tracy Hickman (Father of DragonLance). It's challenging to work within the limits of the Java toolkit, but we've been able to do some pretty impressive work. Follow this link to a Java applet we did that shows an entire galaxy of stars in 3D.

		As part of our 3D work, we built a surface editor that could work in real-time, yet was 100% accurate. While being able to adjust sliders instantly and accurately was very helpful for the artists we worked with, we thought why not show them the variations and let them choose which one was right. Our artists loved it! They found that they could hone in on precisely the look they wanted very quickly. We have a page that goes into more detail here.

The real time surface editor went over so well, that we decided to concentrate on another problem, light color, intensity and placement in a 3D scene. The results are documented here.

Motion Capture