I'm glad too, Eric:D No "co-compression" is not my term thought it is kind of rare. You can find it here for example: http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=28 Yeah it seems like it should to be plain vanilla DXT but it doesn't behave that way. The very article from UDN you linked says that Normal Maps are…
One way to do it: http://bk-coffeehouse.cottages.polycount.com//tut/realtimetree1.html There's lots of other methods out there though, just search for it.
I work in "new media", occasionally I get to do some fancy things with 3d or with animation. But mostly I'm a slave to flash and html. Marketing has a lot of room for your skills. All my work comes through agents, so I'd suggest having a look around the internet for some agents. Mostly they want you to come and see them or…
One thing that its really lacking is ambient occlusion, that will really help tie everything together. The flat hard "realtimish/d3" type lighting is never very good on its own.
I have used a "JoystickServer" app with Maya many years ago. It was able to feed the joystick commands as values right into Maya. http://www.geocities.com/jlimperials/realtime.html No idea if it still works. Keep us updated :) And this one I found with google. http://onepartcode.com/main/projects/X360_Maya.html "Controller…