Dawn (demo)
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Dawn is both the name of NVIDIA's technology demo and its main character constructed for performance by Jim Henson's Creature Shop [1]. The eponymous demo is called "the dawn of cinematic computing", and was used to promote the GeForce FX video card.
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[edit] Overview
Dawn is a forest fairy with two translucent wings, pointy ears, and a pair of antennae on her head. She wears a very revealing dress, made of leaves and blue petals. The demo is set in an enchanted forest, with a single tree branch floating in an environment that is created with forest foliage cube mapping. In animation mode, Dawn walks over the branch whilst a simple tune plays in the background, or sits on a branch smiling, dangling her legs. The demo can be paused so that the user can examine Dawn more closely.
The character model was created by Steven Giesler, a well-known 3D artist, who has also created many characters for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Final Flight of the Osiris, two films by Square Pictures. The model of Dawn is extremely realistic, with high-resolution photorealistic textures, a detailed facial model, and life-like animation. The animation is controlled with vertex shaders. The user can manipulate Dawn's facial expression with a set of sliders, although the number of controls in the released demo was limited.
The demo was first shown in November 2002 at the Game Developers Conference, running in real-time on a GeForce FX card. The downloadable demo appeared on NVIDIA's website shortly thereafter. The demo was intended to showcase the Geforce FX 5200 card, but works best on any DirectX 9.0 compatible card from NVIDIA. There is a compatibility mode for older cards as well. The demo can be run in an "ultra" mode that uses more advanced shaders, but runs slower.
A similar demo, named "Dusk", was made for the GeForce FX 5900 card. This featured the Dawn character as well, with a less revealing outfit, in a setting reminiscent of the Matrix films (the FX 5900 was launched at around the same time The Matrix Reloaded premiered in cinemas).
[edit] Implications
Dawn was not the first computerized demo of a realistic human character, as such demos have been created in the past for game consoles (such as the Sega Dreamcast title Shenmue) and also some video cards. NVIDIA themselves had created a demo featuring the life-like characters of Aki Ross and Dr. Sid from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within a year before.
Dawn was however innovative in that she operated in real time. Previous life-like human characters had been pre-rendered. As with Lara Croft of the Tomb Raider games, Dawn's voluptuous curves attracted a substantial amount of media attention, and were several unauthorised "nude" patches by amateur programmers.
NVIDIA has subsequently repeated this strategy with several more recent real-time female demo characters, including Nalu (a mermaid), Luna (a cybernetic being), and Adrianne, a digital representation of real-life model Adrianne Curry.
[edit] See also
- Dusk (demo)
- Nalu (demo)
- Luna (demo)
- Adrianne (demo)
- NVIDIA Demos
[edit] References
- ^ NVIDIA and Jim Henson's Creature Shop team up - Jan 09, 2004
[edit] External links
- NVIDIA Dawn demo - official page
- Dawn Sleeps with ATI - instructions for running the demo on Radeon cards
- Elfin butterfly showing striptease - the original nude patch for Dawn
- Fairy Nude Patch - nude patches for Dawn, Dusk and Nalu (1.5 beta Doesn't work on the current release of Nalu, which includes versions optimized for 6600 and 6800 nVidia cards.)
- Steven Geisler - personal website
- Video Mods - music video by MTV
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