procedural animation and fairydust
After seeing some FPV drone racing videos, i made a little prototype tonight, just to see if i can reproduce the motion and the feel, and how much fun it might be. Quite a lot it turns out 🙂
WARNING: needs a gamepad to control!
ps. ok the controls are nothing like an actual RC quadcopter but i needed something to start with. 🙂 Watch this space.
Finally someone who understands the problem. This is what i was talking about! 🙂 (well, one of the many things)
http://www.bytehazard.com/articles/vertnorm.html
In short, it bugs me every time that all 3D modeling software screw the face normals of a low poly mesh if we bevel the edges for a better outline; that tiny narrow piece of a face has the same influence on the shared vertices’ normal as the 100 times larger actual face. Grrr. So far didn’t get annoyed enough to implement a fix. So far.
Anyhow, at least i’m not the only one who noticed. 🙂
This weekend Peter asked me about animating his minecraft model to talk. So while explaining him the principles like visemes and the classic 9 Disney mouth poses, i started doing a bit of research on text-to-phoneme(-to-viseme) conversion, and started building some code in Unity to automate the process because hand-animating lip sync would be way too time consuming. But of course couldn’t stop just setting the right mouth pose 🙂 …and suddenly they were alive. Here’s the result: (click on the image to start the Unity browser plugin)
Note that there’s no preprocess on the text; they can read anything. The little blue girl for example got the starting lines of the original Star Wars movie, simply copy-pasted from a website.
Actually, thinking of adding some UI to allow typing in text for them to say live. But only if you promise not to type anything rude. 🙂
A little motorbike handling test. Does not represent the quality of the final product, blah blah blah 😉
I made this thingy last year to try an idea, and the guys at Criterion liked it 🙂
Click on the picture below to start the Unity plugin, then use arrows or WASD to drive. In case it doesn’t react to input, it doesn’t have focus so simply click inside again. Enjoy. And let me know what you think.
Thank you! 🙂
Welcome to MagicMotion! Small step for …anyone who’s familiar with setting up webpages, but a huge leap for me and my little company 🙂
More to come, have lots to look around. See you soon 🙂