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Dawn (Demo)Dawn is a fictional character created for nVidia's technology demo called "The dawn of cinematic computing" used to promote the GeForce FX video card. She is a forest fairy with two translucent wings, antennae on the head, pointy ears and very revealing 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 maps. In the animation mode Dawn walked over the branch to a simple tune, or sat on a branch dangling her legs and smiling. 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 is very 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 in November 2002 at the Game Developers Conference running in realtime on a GeForce FX card. The downloadable demo appeared on nVidia's site shortly thereafter. The demo works best on any nVidia DirectX 9.0 compatible card such as GeForce FX, but there is a compatibility mode for older cards. This was not the first demo of a realistic human character, as such demos have been created in the past for game consoles and some video cards. Even nVidia has created a demo with Aki Ross and Dr. Sid from a year before. But this was the first time that sex appeal was used to promote a video card. The scantily clad Dawn has become an important milestone in the development of realtime computer graphics, ushering a new era of games with increasingly realistic characters. While in the past technology demos have been of interest only to graphics aficionados, now the audience rightfully expects each major video card release to be accompanied by an impressive demo that offers more than just product demonstration. This also helps create a strong brand image that customers can easily connect with, although it's unclear how big this advantage can be. The appeal of the demo was the human form, life-like facial expressions, realistic skin, and obviously, the sexuality of the character. Impressed with the demo, but disappointed that it won't run on ATI cards, a group of MIT engineering students has hacked an OpenGL wrapper to run the demo on R3x0-series ATI hardware. The speed and quality was at least as high as that provided by nVidia cards. Very soon after the demo was released, excited gamers started to speculate about a nude version of Dawn. By March 2003 some people have posted nude screenshots, but these were initially dismissed as photoshopped. Surprisingly, it turned out that the nude mode was real. Simply removing certain model and shader files from the demo directory removed the clothes from the fairy. A patch was released by a certain Corak. The popularity of Dawn led nVidia to follow up with Dusk, a dark leather-clad fairy. Later, in 2004 for promotion of GeForce 6800 series nVidia created a mermaid called Nalu, with extremely detailed and realistic hair. ATI countered the sexy video card girl race with a redhead superagent, Ruby, in its DoubleCross demo for the X800. An MTV show Video Mods produced a music video for Bring Me To Life by Evanescence, with Dawn playing the guitar and Dusk the lead vocalist. In 2004 Dawn finished in the top ten on the Miss Digital World CGI beauty pageant. External links * Video Mods - music video by MTV
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