Self-Developing a MUVE for Research and Educational Innovations - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 455

like Ratner (2009), in which the techniques for
modeling human characters are described along
with their foundation in classic human anatomy,
are rare. Virtual world researchers can build on
these techniques, discover new ones, and provide
the theoretical grounding for the techniques; thus
contributing to the emerging field of design sci-
ence within the domain of virtual world modeling.

buildings, rooms, characters, and creatures; (2)
texture mapping —for making realistic looking
models; (3) animation —for choreographing the
movement of the things in your world; and (4)
programming —for creating the behaviors of the
things in your world, and the consequences of
users interacting with things in your world, as
well as for creating special effects.
The fundamental skills are what you need to
start building a virtual world. However, to build
a successful virtual world with a community of
regular users, there are many other skills you need
including: digital storytelling skills for creating
enjoyable quests and activities for the participants
in your virtual world; user-interface skills for
creating controls and displays that make it easy
for your users to interact with your virtual world;
and business skills—particularly marketing and
sales—for designing both advertisements and
payment mechanisms.
We will focus on just the fundamental skills
in the following sections, and I will demonstrate
their application to building the exterior of a basic
virtual world.

BACkgROUND mINImIUm
HARDWARe AND SOFTWARe

To experiment with building a virtual world you
need the following hardware and software:

a. A personal computer with some form of
graphics support.
b. A 3D modeling, animation, and rendering
program.
c. A painting program.
d. A game development environment, which
will also serve as the virtual world develop-
ment environment.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to review
the numerous combinations of hardware and
software that are possible. The important point
is to ensure that you have all four items. For all
the examples in this chapter, I used the following:
(a) a Hewlett Packard TX2000 series tablet PC
with an ATI Radeon Mobility HD 3200 onboard
graphics chip; (b) Autodesk 3ds Max 2009; (c)
Adobe Photoshop CS4; and (d) Microsoft XNA
Studio 3.1.

SkILL 1 mODeLINg

In the context of building a virtual world, model-
ing is the process of taking an imagined or actual
object and creating a digital representation of that
object using a modeling package . This digital rep-
resentation is known as the model , and the person
that creates the model is known as the modeler.
To give the model a realistic or aesthetic appear-
ance, the modeler must add textures to the model's
surface. Furthermore, if the model is a character,
creature, or other moving object, the modeler
must add animations to the model to simulate
behaviors. The textured and possibly animated
model is then imported into a game development
environment, like Microsoft's XNA Studio, which
allows multiple users to interact with it and with
other users over a network.

THe FUNDAmeNTAL SkILLS

Regardless of what hardware and software combi-
nation you decide to use, if you want to self-build a
virtual world you need to develop four fundamental
skills: (1) modeling —for creating the terrain, the
sky, and the things in your world, which include