DOTT (Day of The Tentacle) is a non-interactive real-time 3D cut-scene.
Old-time gamers will directly remember the original Lucas Arts® classic title
[Maniac Mansion 2: Day of The Tentacle], from which many resources were taken and updated,
just to fit in this “reproduction” of the great title.
The story is modified a little , it speaks now about two 3D game programmers.
The first one (purple tentacle) uses DirectSkeleton® as his 3D engine,
while the other programmer (the green tentacle) uses some other 3D engine to power his games.
DOTT has been built primarily to showcase many of today’s advanced game techniques, like:
Toon Rendering (using DirectX Programmable Vertex Shaders), Shape Animation, Skinning (Enveloping),
Lips Synchronization, Rotoscoping and a couple more.
All the scenes were modeled and animated in SOFTIMAGE|XSI™ 2.0.1, where the original characters
were rebuilt and engineered, then rotoscoped against the 2D backgrounds.
Next, the scenes were exported to SOFTIMAGE dotXSI™ 3.0 files, where every piece of info was saved
(even the credits were done using dotXSI!). Then, the files were optimized using XSIDump 1.3,
just to become ready to be loaded in runtime.
Using DirectSkeleton® 3.0, I was able to apply all the techniques mentioned above and achieve the final result,
which fooled many people into thinking that they’re watching a 2D cartoon story.
During the demo, you can press F1, F2 or F3 to cycle between solid, wireframe or point rendering,
so you can see which elements are 3D and which are rotoscoped 2D.
The speech and music were taken directly from the original title, then compressed into MP3 (Variable Bit-Rate)
format to minimize the size of the final product.
If you experience any trouble when running the demo, please consult the Readme.txt file,
or contact support for help.
System Requirements