Dawn (demo)
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Dawn is both the name of NVIDIA's technology demo and its main character. The eponymous demo is called "the dawn of cinematic computing", and was used to promote the GeForce FX video card.
Overview
Dawn is a forest fairy with two translucent wings, antennae on the head, pointy ears and a very revealing set of clothes, made of leaves and blue petals. The demo was set in an enchanted forest, with a single tree branch floating in an environment created with forest foliage cube mapping. In the animation mode, Dawn walked over the branch to a simple tune, or sat on a branch smiling, dangling her legs.The character model was created by Steven Giesler, a well-known 3D artist, who has also created many characters for the and Final Flight of the Osiris films by Square. The model was extremely realistic, with high-resolution photorealistic textures, detailed facial model and life-like animation. The animation of the model is controlled with vertex shaders. Simple sliders allow her to change facial expressions, although the number of controls in the released demo was limited.
The demo was first shown November, 2002 at the Game Developers Conference running in real-time on a GeForce FX card. The downloadable demo appeared on NVIDIA's site shortly thereafter. The demo works best on any DirectX 9.0 compatible card from NVIDIA (such as a GeForce FX), but there is a compatibility mode for older cards as well.
Implications
This was not by all means the first computerized demo of a realistic human character, as such demos have been created in the past for game consoles (Shenmue for Sega Dreamcast being notable) and some video cards. Even NVIDIA themselves created a demo with Aki Ross and Dr. Sid from a year before.However, this was the biggest use of sex appeal to promote a particular video card yet. While pre-rendered females had appeared on retail boxes before, the unarguably real-time Dawn in her scant clothing has become an important milestone in the development of real-time computer graphics, vanguarding a new era of physical character realism in games. While in the past demos like these have been of interest only to graphics aficionados and the demoscene, now the audience expects video card releases to be backed and accompanied by impressive demonstrations. The appeal of the Dawn demo was in the human form, life-like facial expressions, realistic skin; and obviously, the sensuality of the female character.
Fan work
Impressed with the demo — but disappointed that it wouldn't run on ATI cards — a group of MIT engineering students promptly hacked an OpenGL wrapper to run the demo on R3x0-series ATI hardware. The speed and quality was just as high as on NVIDIA.Very soon after the demo was released, excited gamers started to fantasize about a nude version of Dawn. By March 2003 some people posted nude screenshots, which were initially dismissed as photoshopped. Surprisingly, it turned out that the nude mode was for real. Simply removing certain data files from the demo directory removed the clothes from the fairy. A third-party patch was also released to perform this.
Follow-ups
- e3dfer
See also
External links
- [NVIDIA Dawn demo] - official page
- [Dawn Sleeps with ATI] - instructions for running the demo on Radeon cards
- [Elfin butterfly showing striptease] - the original nude patch for Dawn
- [Fairy Nude Patch] - nude patches for Dawn, Dusk and Nalu
- [Steven Geisler] - personal website
- [Video Mods] - music video by MTV
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