From dawn to dusk. (multimedia).(Nvidia's animation characters, Dawn and Dusk)

For the past several months, Nvidia has been turning heads at industry trade shows with its short animation of the fetching fairy Dawn, a realistic-looking real-time character created by the graphics card vendor for showcasing the power of programmable shaders and vertex processing on its GeForce FX line. Since the E3 trade show in May, Dawn has been sharing the spotlight with her pixie pal Dusk, also created by the Nvidia development team to draw attention to the same programmable features used in "Dawn"--in particular, the use of customized skin, hair, and wing shaders--but with the addition of real-time shadow effects.

In the original demo, a fresh faced Dawn prances along a tree branch, as soft sunlight filters through her colorful, translucent wings and is absorbed by her light-peach skin. In contrast to this sun-kissed setting is the more robust, dark, "grungy" environment of "Dusk." In the "Dusk" animation, the moonlight is reflected on the character's black leather and lace clothing and on her silver wings, along with projected real-time shadow effects.

"Our goal [with these animations] is to show that the new graphics hardware now supports the kind of shading language that the film industry has been using for years, only in real time," says Curtis Beeson, manager of the company's technical demonstration team. "We initially did this with 'Dawn,' and she had this soft, high-dynamic-range lighting effect that people weren't used to seeing in real time. But something was conspicuously absent--shadows. So when we released the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, which supports the same function set used for 'Dawn; we were able to go back and add that detail."

Produced by Nvidia's content development team (led by Daniel Hornick), "Dusk" was created in much the same way as "Dawn." To model the character and the background, the group used Discreet's 3ds max and character studio (mainly for touch-up) and Alias|Wavefront's Maya (mostly or the character setup, skinning, and rigging). Texturing was accomplished in Adobe Systems' Photoshop and Right Hemisphere's Deep Paint.

To animate Dusk, the Nvidia team hired a modern dancer, whose movements were captured with a 24-camera Vicon8 optical system by House of Moves. The motion-capture facility then ...