This blog entry will be about many things, some about progress in ARMA2, some not. As I don't have time to write about these things in separate, longer texts, I hope this short summary form will show you some progress in ARMA2 and also a little of what's new for BIS.

Firstly, we finished clutter; these are simplified models of vegetation that cover the landscape, such as grass or small plants and things. The locations where these models are placed is controlled by a kind of mask of the landscape’s surface texture, this is not finished yet, but we are finalizing this texture and on most parts of Chernarus it’s done. You can see it in some pictures around this text. So we can say that all vegetation for ARMA2 is finished.

Because of this we have opened a new website and started offering services in CG generated vegetation. You can see that at our website http://linda.bistudio.com/ where you can find some more detailed information about the system as well as a few videos about performance & analytic tools build into Linda.

Another small note that I wanted to write is about a new process that we use for making very realistic and believable faces. As ARMA2 is encompassed within a complex story, it’s very important to have good looking characters. In previous games we used the same model with different textures or special models of just the head, but still without any real correspondence to the actors that play in the campaign. This is different in ARMA2, we chose real actors not just for their voices but we will also use their real faces. We take photos of them for textures and we also take 3D laser scans. This surface data we use as the master shape for the creation of their head model to perfectly replicate it from the original. We also developed new skin shaders that simulate lighting similar to subsurface scattering in real time, to have much more realistic face lighting then in our previous games. See attached pictures.

Civilian usage of VBS 

I’m proud to announce that we are shipping VBS to Czech Universities; we hope that it will enable us to better cooperate with students on our projects and teach them to use our technology. The first application is a VBS installation at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, where they will use VBS with an EEG system to measure the speed of user reactions and brain behavior in stress situations. In Prague it is Charles University's faculty of mathematics and physics, where VBS will help to teach students how to program AI and in the future it will also be used as a VR environment for the diagnosis and measuring of development of Alzheimer’s disease.