Thesis Project:
I made a lot of way on re-coding the way the program runs. I schedule some time this week to finish it and do a full test to make sure its 100% working.
Character Creation Pipeline:
The character is getting there. Slowly but surely. I am retopoing the creature before I add the fine details. Here is a screenshot so far in Blender:
Character Creation Workflow: Character so far:
Project:
Still working on it. PAX last week which ate most of my time. This week I will finish up the re-coding to get it done and move on to audio.
This week I worked on re-working the story and the character responder script. The main reason for the change was the complexity and scope of the project. Now, the project is easier to work on without the fear of fall too fear behind. Here is the algorithm: I made for the AI.
I am about 50%-65% done. All of isIdle is true is done. On the false side, I got the main run with random sentence selecting working. I have a plan to combine everything which should speed up the workflow to finish this. Hopefully next week, I can finish the code up and move on to the next part which would be recording the audio.
This week, I met with my mentor and discussed the status of my thesis project. After the meeting, I reworked some story. Currently 5 is “done” for now. I am going to ask my studio writter to help on this. Hopefully he can follow the layout the way I have it. If I get the go, I will start to rework the code to make it work out correctly.
I also worked on the character for the concept class. So far here it is:
I am dreading the polish pass of the sculpt. I will need to do some hard surface modeling and detailing. After that, it should be pretty easy to retopo and uv up.
This week I worked on some of my character in zbrush – he is coming together well. I need to clean up the muscle grouping and finalize the back armor. I think I am at a good point as of now, Worked on and 3d printed a part for a vintage Fuji camera, fixed up my thesis paper from suggested edits, and worked on my presentation outline.
This week I have worked on fixing some locking bugs. I got lipsync, audio, and animation to work with the storyID. I have a method developed and now have to implement it into the project. I am expecting a couple of hours to work it out. The major issue right now is locking the system so it does not loop but rather wait until it is finished animating.
Character Creation:
I worked on the base mesh. I am pretty happy with the overall character. I need to rework the torso and armor shapes but it is going in the right direction.
Concept art for character creation course:
Studio To Do List:
Set design sketch (ROUGH) for the installation: 
This week I will be focusing on trying to get some type of demo voice for the character done. I am not quite sure what he will sound like but I will be voicing him. Hopefully I can a few done to start work on the state machine. I am hoping it will go smooth considering the time and effect we put in last semester. It will be exciting to see the character to finally talk…
Back to classes for the last semester of my MFA. Lots to do in a short amount of time. I am excited to get to this part of the journey and I am looking forwards to the installation of my thesis. But as of right now, I am focus on finishing the last parts of the project.
Over the break I went ahead and modeled, re-lit, and adjusted the scene. Here are some screenshots of that work:
I am happy with the overall scene and now have to look at what is left. Off the top of my head, I know I need audio for the old man and to setup the animator states. I will dive deeper into it later this week and create a to do list to cover all that needs to be done.
Personal Project
Over the break, I wanted to flex my modeling abilities a bit. I figure why not make another weapon. This time I decided on a Winchester 1866. As of now, the high res model is about 85% done in less than 24 hours. (It was separated between days, a little here and there – originally I wanted a weekend showdown…) Not much is left on the model, most of it is polish and some micro details. After I finish that, I will make a low poly version.Here are the screenshots: ALSO all was done in Blender 2.81 (that was a requirement for myself, I do miss parts of Maya though…)
Procedural Modeling
Me this weekend with Houdini:
Over the past few days, I have been hard at work finishing up my car generator. With the crashes with Houdini and Unreal, it was frustrating to say the least. Luckily, I swap over to Unity, and fix some code which saved time as it was not crashing as much. Besides the craziness, I believe the experience was worth it. I finished the project and got to learn Houdini in the process. Here are some Screenshots and Video:
oh Houdini…..
I have been working on my procedural course final. I decided to go with creating a procedural generated car. As I dug deep into the nodes and more complex everything got, the more the crashes. I ended up re-working some of the networks. It seemed to help but I still got some crashes. Along with those issues, I noticed the rand() method is weird. It always gave me the same number even though I generated another number from that rand. It seemed to be pulling one number and not re generating a new number. The work around I found was to re-write the code using python. Using python’s random, it was randomly generating new numbers every time and worked for my needs.
In studio, we are progressing nicely. Although the end of the semester is coming, we are finishing up a few things before we have to stop and record for presentations. There is still a lot that needs to be done – art, adding content, and messing more with the Kinect. I do believe the hard part of creating all the methods for the dictations and keywords are done. I am looking forward to break and finally get back into modeling all the parts I need for the project.