Dan Lion, vp of sales and marketing for Turbo Squid.

Enter companies such as Turbo Squid (www.turbosquid.com), which offer libraries of 3D objects and environments at prices that are a tiny fraction of their original development costs. Turbo Squid has more than 80,000 royalty-free 3D models, textures, audio files and motion capture files available for downloading. What if a particular model that was used in a 3D game is not exactly suited for, say, a virtual classroom? “We now offer a custom 3D modeling service,” says Dan Lion, vp of sales and marketing. “We have been receiving an increasing number of requests from clients about custom modeling, from changing a model they purchased online to designing a range of characters for a game,” he notes. “At the same time, our vendors have expressed an interested in earning additional revenue when between projects. This service is a logical extension of Turbo Squid that benefits both parties…” Turbo Squid offers this service at no cost to clients. Someone that wants to create a 3D environment can enter his request online, and have access to over 6,300 digital artists around the world to help him fulfill it. Although this is not quite yet a “Kinko’s of 3D animation” (a place where professionals can come to let logistics be simply and quickly handled by others), it is an important step in that direction.

Thus, it seems to be a time when many different forms of 3D that were previously in different universes are coming together, which is especially fortunate given the trend toward collaboration. The days when all the workers for a major project lived in one building are long gone, replaced by work spread out over thousands of miles and many communities of practice for highly specialized tasks. Animators (and animation schools) should try to take advantage of this new blurring of borders and cross-train in multiple disciplines and different steps of the production process, to help the dialogue between the many sets of design teams involved — and to help with the technology transfer from the gaming community into business and technical fields.

Let’s hope that the day is not far away when a combination of simpler toolsets and the ability to re-purpose 3D resources will let many other professions take advantage of the production and learning available from the rich and colorful environments created by 3D animators. Perhaps in the near future a teacher can tap into a “Kinko’s of 3D animation,” order a virtual classroom with furniture, a whiteboard, a video display and other features, and have the package delivered to him within days for thousands of dollars, instead of in years for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Such environments may not have the intense creative and artistic values of a Lord of the Rings film or a Star Wars game — but they will be light years away from the reams of text and dry prose still used for most presentations nowadays, and will offer animators opportunities for using their talents to brighten and enrich new worlds.

Christopher Harz is a program and business development executive for new media enterprises around the world, and covers topics such as the Next Gen Internet, vfx, online gaming and wireless media. As vp of marketing and production at Hollyworlds, he produced 3D games for films such as Spawn, The 5th Element, Titanic and Lost in Space, and for TV shows such as Xena, Warrior Princess. As svp of marketing and program development at Perceptronics, Harz helped build the first massive-scale online game worlds, including the $240 million 3D animation virtual world, SIMNET. He also worked on combat robots and war gaming at the Rand Corp., the American military think tank.