I love getting free software.

A couple of weeks ago, on the Animation:Master mailing list, the company rep announced the next animation contest topic: do anything you want, and export it to ArcticPigs format. ArcticPigs is a 3D plugin (for Windows Internet Explorer only, unfortunately) which permits the Web browser to download and render realtime 3D animations. It can produce better quality than a video file, because it doesn't have to compress the hell out of each frame, since all the data is actually rendered on the viewer's computer. But since the model and choreography data is fairly efficient, the file sizes are relatively quite small.

Anyway, to get things started, the rep offered a free copy of the ArcticPigs exporter to anyone who had won a Hash image/animation contest before. They quickly changed this to "anyone who'd placed in a contest", and a couple of days later, offered it to anyone who'd even entered a Hash competition.

Hooray! I'd entered one once, so I dutifully sent in my contact information, and last night it was waiting for me when I got home.

Unfortunately, my modelling style is kind of incompatible with the ArcticPigs requirements; I do a lot of tweaking in order to round the edges of inorganic models, and AP completely ignores the tweaks I do, so my rounded edges end up sharply beveled. Still, it only took me a few hours last night to fix a lute model that had taken me about a week to build. I still need to texture it, as the AP plugin doesn't support the kind of textures I used.

The AP export is pretty cool; you can rotate, move and zoom around the models, even if there's no animation going on. My lute model generates thousands upon thousands of polygons, and it renders surprisingly quickly under ArcticPigs. I think I'm going to have fun with it...