Project Updates - Where Have I Been and What Am I Doing?

TET all dressed for the
Peanuts Movie.

It's been almost a month since I last posted in this blog largely due to a family matter that involved travelling back to Western Australia from South Australia to actually be with my family over there. Rest assured I haven't forgotten about this blog and things are still happening on my projects.

JAC Cat
CrazyTalk Animator 2
"I just do eyes..."

Last time I updated you on this character I was drawing hands...so many hands... it's one of the things Reallusion don't actually make clear in their advertising that their character templates are much more involved than drawing seven character views.

Even less obvious is all the work that goes into giving the character a wide variety of facial expressions and the ability to lip sync. After finishing the hands I'm now creating eyes... so many eyes... I feel like that bio-engineer from the movie Blade Runner that says "Eyes, I just do eyes."

Replacing the Dummy Template Eyes with Cats Eyes in five view angles.

Fortunately the eyes are a little less complex than hands so I'm hoping it won't take quite so long. Unfortunately, after that I have to do the nose and the mouth. Thank goodness cats don't have eyebrows because I'd have them to do too.

Hoot Game Creating

The game staring TheseStars' Hoot the Owl is still progressing slowly. As I mentioned last update I've been stuck on the player control system for Hoot for several weeks (more) now. Yesterday, I finally had a break through after rebuilding the control system from scratch using the most promising techniques I've been experimenting with.

Screen Shot of the demo level I've been using to work out Hoot's control system.
That pink box will be Hoot in the finished game.

Turns out building it from scratch instead of trying to plug someone else's code into what I had done so far did just the trick. My control system for the game feels very simple but allows Hoot to really move around and interact within the game levels. I'm sure it's going to be very addictive and hopefully I'll be able to show a proper example of the game real soon.

Still Learning, Learning, Learning...

Last update I was learning Silo 2 so I could create 3D characters for Reallusion's iClone. Well I went through multiple video tutorials and even paid for a Silo course with Digital Tutors (now known as PluralSight) that was excellent. I was all ready to get started after watching some of the best, creating models over several weeks, except I forgot all the basics...F**K! Now I'll have to do a quick refresher before I can really doing anything.

I did have a rough go at importing something from Silo into iClone via 3DXchange and it seems like it's possible. Just need to work out how to use 3DXchange correctly now.

I've also been trying to learn Anime Studio Pro 11 and not gotten much further than the introductory basics. Largely because the tutorials I'm following are the ones that come with the software as a PDF file.

I know SmithMicro have many great video tutorials on their channel but the playlists are confusing and don't seem to be in any kind of progressive order of learning. I could buy their video training course but this is made up of videos already freely available on their YouTube channel. I refuse to pay nearly US$50.00 just to have the tutorials, maybe, sorted into some kind of logical order.

That's about it for the moment. I'm hoping to add a new animated project to the mix now that I finished my iClone, Animation 4 Business promotional video but I've yet to decide what. Hopefully one of my own projects this time.

Anyway, now you're all caught up. I hope to get back to weekly posts to this blog starting from now.

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