Virtual World Design

If that creepy Second Life documentary didn’t scare you off the topic of virtual worlds forever, this brand new offering from award-winning, 20-year veteran of virtual environment design Cudworth is a comprehensive look at the subject and principles. The 400-plus-page book explores the intertwining of 2D graphics, 3D models, lighting, sound and storytelling, and illustrates how these elements come together to create accessible virtual environments for teaching, research and entertainment. Readers are treated to 200 illustrations and can hone their increasing knowledge as they go with a dozen step-by-step projects, offering creative challenges through exercises building a virtual classroom, “all access” terrain, sound-based game and more.

22See Frank Miller’s unique comic art style come to life on screen in the longawaited Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.

need to be totally CG performers capable of making audiences laugh as easily as gasp with daring deeds of heroism.

Getting that kind of performance out of digital characters was far and away the most complicated and challenging part of working on this movie, says ILM’s Pablo Helman, production visual-effects supervisor on the film.

The Heart of the Matter

“The show from the beginning was really about performance,” says Helman. “We decided from the beginning it was going to be great ‘The whole premise of this system was we were going to be able to edit those performances because we needed to reinterpret this

scientifically gotten data into something that was appealing and that was telling the story that we wanted to tell with the character.’

— Pablo Helman, ILM, production visual-effects supervisor