Rachels Lab Notes

One of the things that concerns me about the game industry “as-is” is the fact that we take too long to actually produce even playable prototypes. Everything moves at rather slow speeds – you can’t just quickly add a new model, for example.

At least for the prototyping side, there seems to be hope though. A couple of smart guys from the University of Cambridge came up with a way to generate textured models using a simple webcam.

In a nutshell, it allows you to go from here:

to here

without using any artist-time.

If you look closely (or watch the video in the original article) you’ll see that this won’t generate final content for us. The data is still very rough, and you will need an artist to either rebuild it or clean it up. But it will allow us to quickly generate placeholder art that in turn will allow us to iterate on gameplay with a look that is at least closer to the final game than the usual checkerboard boxes.