Something a bit clever

I won with the witch !!

and..

My colleague Ian Wilson has posted these example videos on Vimeo to demonstrate how clever his Emotion AI engine is - I won't go into details here since you can find out more at http://www.emotionai.com/ but he's written a little brain that you can plug into a character to give him actual, genuine feelings and reactions to stimulus.

The reason I've posted this here is that I built the head and the 50 odd morphs required to support all the emotions. I also ran the custom head through Facegen which allowed us to generate a (theoretically) vast range of different faces without having to redo the facial morphs.

Anyway, here we go


Emotion channel mixing from Emotion AI on Vimeo.



Push button facial animation from Emotion AI on Vimeo.



100 Smiles from Emotion AI on Vimeo.

Wee! She's finished

The witch is done.

This is a happy time for me since it was 80% zbrush work and I now feel like I've learned to use it well enough for it to be a commercially viable skill.

I don't want to jynx it but I'm pretty confident this is another low-poly comp win ;)

Here's some of the submitted images...

Aaargh! Deadline Looming!!

Just as well I'm nearly finished really.

I did a quick pose test on the witch now that the mesh and maps are sorted.

I'm not 100% on the bonsai pot yet, I may just replace it with a standard plinth and put the dirt/tree on top of that.

Please don't laugh at the deformation - I've not made any edits to the skin modifier's default weighting.

Why do I write as if somebody's actually going to read this?

I need tea and sleep

Further Progress

I've been beavering away at farcry2, assassins creed and now fallout3 so understandably things have been a little sparse on the modelling front.

Despite this I have made a large dent in the remaining work on the little witch character

sculpt:


low-poly:

It's been a while

Yeah - I almost forgot I had a blog but somebody from 3dtotal mentioned it.
this is likely to be an image heavy post since I have actually been fairly constructive outside of work.

Don't get the wrong idea, I've been constructive there too but I'm sure there's some sort of NDA attached to it - wonder if it'll go away inlight of the closure and subsequent reopening under a new name...

Also - I done bought myself a new computing device from the dell outlet centre. I can categorically state that a Dell precision t5400 is a very powerful computer - even after you've crippled it with Vista.
The best part? a quadcore xeon, 4gb of quad channel memory and a gtx260 cost me less than 800 notes.

anyway - to what I loosely define as "the art"....

First up, I finally won something. Something being the low-poly comp on 3dtotal. You can probably tell it's not actually finished if you look closely and as ever I don't think I quite captured the charm of my concept..






I did a little more work on the scary naked lady robot too. She's not been getting my full attention due to these competitions, Stalker:clear sky and far cry 2 but work has commenced on the high-poly, I have a strategy for normal map generation and I think I know what I'm going to have to do with the rig.



I started this for a bit of sculpting practice - I'm hoping to get a nice render or something out for my son Ted since he's quite keen on dinosaurs.




And finally - the 3dtotal halloween comp. This is the first full zbrush focused workflow I've tried. I'm intending on doing the bare minimum in max and photoshop on this one cos I want to teach myself to use zbrush properly. I've also decided to pop out of my comfort zone a bit and create something that doesn't have it's tits out
There's still a couple of weeks or so to go so I'm hopeful about finishing in time...

Flamethrowers

I did some more.

We have flamethrowers

Wee! computer finally set up

To honour the occasion I added large claws to my robot