We’re releasing a new Project RedTail Material Editor, created by some of the fine folks over at Sheridan College’s Visual Design Institute. This is going to let you do some pretty crazy stuff with your model, which you would have otherwise had to manually code into the .material files for your Ogre mesh. Anything from scrolling, and rotating textures…to reflective materials, it’s all here.

The program is very straightforward, if you managed to get through the process of exporting a mesh by yourself then this will be a piece of cake, simply “File –> Open” and find whatever .mesh you’d like to modify the texture on. Your first level of options will be on the rendering pass. Simply right click “pass” to add any of the various attributes available to you, then modify each accordingly. After this, you can move one more down in the hierarchy and start playing with the texture itself. Right click “texture_unit” to add any attributes the same way you did with the rendering pass options. If you want to add a bitmap that you’ve created, simply add the “texture” attribute under “texture_unit” and it will allow you to browse your computer’s folders for the image file.

When all is said and done, simple hit “File –> Export to RedTail” and you’ve got a file ready to go on the service all fancied up.

RedTail Material Editor Download

Nicholas :: Apr.09.2008 :: General, Design, Service :: 1 Comment »

Hey RedTailians and Fellow Travellers.

For the latecomers, RedTail is the world’s first complete web solution for building, publishing, and sharing rich multimedia spaces that are immersive, 3D, and interactive. It’s hard being the first–things get kind of lonely. That’s why we get excited when we see other people doing cool things to speed the emergence the 3D web. Case in point: Check out PicLens, a Firefox plugin that lets you browse picture feeds in a gorgeous, full-screen, 3D grid. You can browse Picasa web albums, Flickr feeds, Google and Yahoo image searches…They’ve done a great job of focusing on a slice of the 3D web experience and just nailing it. Bravo.

But back to RedTail: Our goal is to help designers participate in the 3D web by providing them with the ability to create their own web experiences. To that end, we’ve rolled out another update today with some great features that give designers more control over how spaces behave and interact. More specifically, we’ve really expanded the number of Behaviors available in the Designer tool. Now designers can define how much control over camera position they want to expose in their spaces. Can people spin or rotate a space? Can they use their mouse wheel to zoom? It’s up to the designer–you can tie the behaviors to mouse events or disable them. We’ve also added some fantastic animation behaviors to frames: move, rotate, spin, and fade. This lets designers do very cool mouseover effects, for example, that can really bring a space to life.

But wait, there’s more:

• You can download your spaces and run them locally, along with all the media. We did this for selfish reasons mostly–often when we demo RedTail there isn’t a reliable network.
• The Content Uploader utility is back! The Uploader lets you upload batches of media at a time, which saves you time and clicks!
• Group manipulation in Designer. This is a huge time saver–you can select many frames, group them together, and manipulate them as a single object. Our designers are rejoicing.

For more information, see the Help section of our Wiki.

(P.S. Mac types might have noticed that our client for Safari on Mac OS X is available again. It even works like charm! Enjoy!)

Cheers,

Al

admin :: Feb.06.2008 :: General, Service :: No Comments »

Hello fellow redtailians? I’m one of the Designers working on ProjectRedTail.com. I’m commonly referred to as the “3D guy” at the office; probably because I like to do a lot of 3 dimensional things like…modeling, eating chicken wings, and recording platinum records. I realize not everyone out there is a “3D guy”, and most probably don’t even have a modeling program installed on their computer, so with that in mind I’ve started to archive some of the RedTail models used in various expressions into one easy search so you can use them yourselves. To do so, simply follow the listed steps.

1. Go to the Project RedTail home page, and click the “Cells” link on the left hand side.

2. If your logged in it’s going to default to showing “Your Cells”, your going to want to click the drop down and click to view “Everyone’s Cells”

3. In the tag filtering search box simply type redtail3d

4. Click on any mesh you wish to use and click the “Copy Cell” button on the cell display page.

5. To view the search results automatically Click here

[Edit]: Just a quick note about triangle counts, generally when we are creating a space, and we want it to load at a reasonable speed, we try to keep it under 10-15 thousand, generally we try to keep most scenes at a max of about 50 or 60 thousand. Ultimately though you can push it as far as you want, depending on the computer your using, and your connection speed the scene could load fast, or slow, and run fast or slow. But as a general guideline, we’d suggest keeping it under 50,000 for optimal performance.

Nicholas :: Jan.30.2008 :: General, Design, Support :: No Comments »

Is 1 PM too early for champagne?

Oh well, coffee will have to do. Let’s all raise a mug to the new Project RedTail. Isn’t she pretty?

The RedTail Team is still a little pale and jittery after a massive update last night. It’s been a long time in the works, and takes the concept of RedTail to a new level. I’m thrilled, and I’d like to thank all of our designers, developers, writers, testers, and operations guys. Deadly job, guys.

So what do you need to know about the new RedTail? Well, here’s a few salient points (as usual you can get the full scoop from our Wiki).

• We’ve obviously made massive changes to the look and feel, and we hope the new site is more expressive and unique. Let us know what you think!
• We’ve worked hard to make it easier to find stuff. There’s improved search across cells, spaces, and people, as well as simple ways to browse and filter large sets of objects.
• We’ve added cool viewer controls to our environments. You can use them to share stuff, collect stuff, play media, and get information about media. Best of all (in my humble opinion) is the new Full Screen button. You haven’t experienced RedTail until you open some of these spaces in full screen.
• A simpler organization of concepts and features. Most notably, we’ve dropped the distinction between what we used to call Designs and Expressions. Now, it’s all about Spaces. You design them, you publish them, you share them–easy peezy. I should note that the term ‘Space’ isn’t universally loved by the team. Some feel it cribs too shamelessly from MySpace and Windows Live. Personally, I think the web was built through shameless cribbing. What do you think?
• Now you have far more sophisticated sharing options. You can assign View, Copy, and Link permissions to everyone, or just to to Friends.
• Hello world! Everyone has a home page now where all of your public spaces and cells are displayed. From your home page, you can update your picture, change your blurb or your password, etc. Note that we’ve given everybody a nonsensical tag line by default–if you’re not content describing yourself as a 100-year-old world-class champion yodeler and clown college graduate, just throw in something that works for you.

Before I sign off, a couple of important notes. First, there’s a new version of the RedTail Viewer for Windows on our Download page (1.1.1.7892). This is a major upgrade, so please take a moment to uninstall old versions of the viewer and install this one instead. Over the next five weeks or so we’ll be pushing a few patches out to our update server, and you may notice a software update when you open a space or cell from time to time. Don’t panic, and we promise we’ll be stabilizing on a solid version 1.0 very soon.

Mac users may have noticed that we haven’t posted our Player for MacOS X yet. It’s a few weeks away from being ready to go with the new site, but all indications are that the Mac RedTail experience is going to be vastly improved. I’ll post here when we make it available again, and we’re sorry for the delay.

So. Onward. RedTail is still in its infancy, but now we definitely feel like we’re on the right track. Thanks for participating in the world’s first complete web solution for building, publishing, and sharing rich multimedia spaces that are immersive, 3D, and interactive.

Al

admin :: Nov.20.2007 :: General, Service :: No Comments »

Heads up RedTailians. A big change is afoot. When you wake up tomorrow morning and hit projectredtail.com for your daily fix of 3D magical goodness over coffee, you may notice that we’ve tinkered a bit. OK, a lot. It’ll be a whole new web site, pretty much. I’ll blog some more about it in the morning. For now, be aware that we’re going to take the site down for a couple of hours this evening, starting at 5PM EST.

Al

admin :: Nov.19.2007 :: General, Service :: No Comments »

Hello all you RedTailians. Mike an I are just finishing breakfast and on our way to the final day of DUX 07. It has been incredibly interesting, as my 15 pages of notes would prove. There have been a very interesting group of presenters. Some theorists, some practitioners, some industrial designers and lot’s of “webdudes” (that is actually the name that a guy we met had an all his registration info… On of the most interesting of the first day was a prof at Stanford who has broken simplicity down to 6 variables, which allow you to create “simplicity profiles” of your users. We’ll explain more later.

There was also a really interesting group of presentations around the idea of experiencing the invisible. One example was a program that turned your data into sound. A network administrator used in so that he could listen to his network instead of watching it so that he could focus better on the work he was doing. His network had the sounds of a forest and every time an e-mail was sent a bird would chirp, and as more data crossed the network the babbling brook would get louder.

More cool stuff to come:)

See you soon.

Chris :: Nov.07.2007 :: Tech, Design :: No Comments »

Hi,

So we’ve gone through and with much hard work from Wes got the first round of the RedTail video tutorials up and ready to go.

There will be more to come in the future but these ones are aimed at users who are trying to learn about the Designer tool and for new users of the service. Be sure to check them out, there’s an interesting range of different voices all from our design team!

You can find all out currently released tutorials here:

http://wiki.projectredtail.com/index.php/Help:Tutorials

Also be sure to check out what’s new on our Wiki:

http://wiki.projectredtail.com/index.php/Project_RedTail_Wiki:What%27s_New

Tamasin :: Oct.05.2007 :: General :: No Comments »

You’ve been lingering on our front step for a few weeks while we’ve rushed around frantically, stuffing dirty dishes underneath the couch cushions, emptying ash trays, etc. But we think we’re kind of ready for you now…by all means, come in, come in!

I’m sure our Design Team told you all about the Project, but before you get cracking it wouldn’t hurt to take a minute and read our Quick Start. It’ll walk you through the basics of uploading content, designing an expression, and publishing it. One super important piece of documentation: The Quick Reference for our design environment. Keep it handy and you’re off to the races.

For those of you who’ve been around for a bit, we’ve rolled out a barrel of features over the last few weeks. Here’s just a smattering of them:

• The Project RedTail Uploader utility (because after all, every next-generation Web 2.0-ish social media thingy needs one)
• Media player controls for audio and video in an expression
• A new alpha client for Safari running on Mac OS X v10.4 (Intel only for now, see the Download page for the full specs)
• A spanking new user forum
• More behaviors in the design environment, including the ability to customize mouseover events (oh imagine the bells and whistles!)

As always, see our What’s New page for details. And of course, we’ve made some very badly needed bug fixes, many of which require our latest client. If you’ve already installed Project RedTail, take a minute to uninstall and replace it with version 1.1.1.7381, also on our Download page.

As you play, if things blow up and cause you grief, don’t internalize it–pour forth your anger and frustration in our user forum, or even send us a bug report. There’s a Report a Problem link on every page, and we’re very responsive (or so we’re told).

Finally, a peak ahead: Despite the slew of new stuff, our big work item over the last while has been a complete re-do of our site. It’ll include a souped up look and feel, better and easier sharing of content and designs, user profiles…the works. If it isn’t out before the snow flies, we’ll eat our socks. Here’s a glimpse:

Cheers,
Al
Project RedTail Sock Eater Extraordinaire

admin :: Sep.12.2007 :: General, Siggraph, Service :: No Comments »

So this is an example of a music player, with the ability to link either a myspace or personal website, record label, etc…to an area in the player, as well as 2 images of the artist, along with an audio sample. It’s a spinner, so it can be left open for your screen saving audio enjoyment. It’s made entirely in one layout w/ view captures and click to view behaviors (the labelling feature came in SUPER handy). Made perfectly aligned and spaced via the cylinder algorithm and various rotations.

give a look/listen!

Ta!

Julia :: Aug.17.2007 :: Design :: No Comments »

It was really great to meet everyone at Siggraph. I know the team here feels like we’re on to something, but it’s really inspiring when we see new users getting excited about what our service can do for them!

If you find yourself wanting to experiment with bringing your own 3d models into the service, take a gander at this page on our help wiki:

Exporting to Ogre

We’ve linked you to the Ogre exporters download page (Ogre is the open source 3d engine that we use). We also have detailed instructions for exporting from Maya and Sketchbook using the export plugins.

Kam (aka Don Agro)

Kam :: Aug.13.2007 :: Tech :: No Comments »