Overview
DX Studio is a complete integrated development environment for creating interactive 3D graphics. The system comprises of both a real-time 3D engine and a suite of editing tools, and is the first product to offer a complete range of tools in a single IDE.
The system includes both 2D & 3D layout editors, and allows full JavaScript control of everything from changing the background to editing meshes in real-time.
Using DX Studio you can build complete real-time interactive applications, simulations or games, for standalone use or for embedding in other Microsoft Office/Visual Studio applications.
The engine behind DX Studio uses DirectX 9.0c to make the most of 3D graphics hardware acceleration, and includes support for the latest pixel and vertex shader effects found on the more powerful 3D graphics cards.
Live Editors
The integrated 2D and 3D editors let you bring together your models, environments, sounds and effects into a scene and define how it all behaves. As you edit, you can see exactly how the final scene will look with full shadows, per-pixel lighting, and anti-aliased fonts.
Lighting and Shadows
DX Studio features both fixed function rendering for legacy systems and a full per-pixel lighting model for more recent graphics cards. You can choose whether to pre-bake your shadows into a second channel, generate baked shadows when lights move, or have completely runtime shadows. You can also mix and match to provide the best speed/quality for your application.
Controls and Modules
For true rapid application development, nothing beats reusable components, and controls and modules in DX Studio provide this for 2D and 3D respectively. A control behaves like a scene, but you expose properties and methods that will be picked up by a parent scene and hide all the internal workings. Some useful controls and modules have been put in the library to help get started.
Visual Scene Editing
The DX Studio 2D and 3D editors can be used to build interactive layers and sequences, which are combined to produce a complete interactive document. The top level editor can be used just to drag and drop scenes together at a high level, or can 'drill down' to edit 3D and 2D scenes.
Physics
DX Studio abstracts the physics engine for your documents so you can select to use either Bullet or PhysX behind the scenes. You can build physics hulls for your objects either with simple primitives or use model faces directly. Supported features include rigid body dynamics, pivots, cloth, vehicle and character control.
Vertex Morphing
If you need to manipulate vertices at runtime, morph targets allow you blend different meshes together at vertex level. This is particularly useful in facial animation, where you can define a base face position and additional positions for raised eyebrows, smile, etc. You can then blend proportionally to multiple targets at once, e.g. smile 50%, raise eyebrows 80%.
Customisation
We don't tie you into using our viewer - the files produced by DX Studio use standard XML to describe the entire scenes. The files also contain all the resources needed to display the 3D world, compressed into the same file using standard ZIP compatible algorithms. There is no proprietary binary format so your data is never locked away.
Plug and Play
Using ActiveX technology you can build your own C++, C# or VB.Net applications and just drop the DX Studio Player in as a component. This means you can concentrate on your application code and make use of the high level DX Studio methods and properties for rapid development of 3D applications.
Special Effects
The editor includes a bank of useful effects including bloom, radial blur, fractal clouds, ocean, and many more. If you know how to create shaders you can also define your own effects to drop in to the player.
Publishing
A complete interactive document can be compiled into a single executable. This can then be pressed to CD, emailed, placed on a website or in another archive. The player performs system checks and will download and install any DirectX upgrades that may be necessary. You can also publish for the web and mix browser JavaScript/HTML with your DX Studio document. The document or any of its resources may also be made external, either on disk or downloaded over HTTP.
