Stuff about the thingies I’m working on. :P
I’ve been messing around with these optical illusion 3D portraits. They’re made by photoscanning someone with Polycam, creating an object that has an inverted relief of the scan within Blender, and then 3D printing the resulting object.
Continue reading “Optical Illusion 3D Portrait Tests”For some reason it seemed like a good idea to make a ZomBerry Box so here we are. The solvable maze on the back was neat to work on as well as designing how the actual bits of cereal would look.
Continue reading “ZomBerry Box”Here’s a test render of this ZomBerry character I’ve been messing around with using Lighting Boy Studio’s shader and Auto-Rig Pro. I figure the Thriller dance is probably as good of a rigging test as anything, right?
Continue reading “ZomBerry Test Animation”For Ludum Dare 48 I teamed up with Eric Goodnight and Yousef Danak to make a game. Eric handled the graphics, Yousef the sound, and I did the coding. The theme was “deeper and deeper” and we ended up creating a beat em up game called “Just Call Your Mom”. In it you play as “The Kid” who’s trying to fight his way out of corporate office depression by trying to get to a phone and call his mom. It’s a pretty silly game but was fun to make and has been pretty well received by the Ludum Dare community.
If we had some more time it would have been good to have added a block button, some more varied enemies, and a more fleshed out story — but overall I think we did a fantastic job! Aside from being a bit rusty with Unity I think everything went extremely well. I definitely need to start teaming up with more folks. It was nice bouncing ideas off of each other and not having to do everything myself for a change.
Here’s a video of the game in action:
We were particularly proud of the “call your mother” voice over on the title screen.
If you’re interested you can play “Just Call Your Mom” on Itch.io. 🙂
Some quick progress shots of the cat flip books I made last week. The animation was done in Blender using its Grease Pencil tool. Drawing with a mouse isn’t great so I used Astropad and an iPad to make drawing quite a bit easier. The pages were printed on a card stock by the old HP LaserJet printer my friend Keeley gave me a while ago. The holes were made using a screw punch and plain old string was used for the binding.
These were a lot of fun to make and I’m pretty excited to see what folks do with them. Heather said she was going to color hers — which will be neat to see. 🙂
Here’s a little game prototype I made over the weekend with my pal Keeley.
You’re a little ghost possessing other characters in order to make it through each level. It was pretty fun to work on so far. Maybe we’ll spend some more time on it and build it into a more complete game.
I participated in Ludum Dare 46 last weekend by making a game called CP-ARTY (CPR-party … get it). The theme was “keep it alive” so I made a CPR rhythm game where you’re doing chest compressions, mouth-to-mouth, and shooing off lookie-loos to the beat of a haphazardly thrown together track I created with SoundGrid.
You can play CP-ARTY online either on GitHub or Itch.io. Here’s a video of the game in action:
This is the first game jam where I used Unity and the game’s 3D-based which went much better than I was expecting and was a lot of fun animating the low poly characters in Blender. All of the feedback so far has been extremely positive so I may spent more time fleshing this out into a longer, more polished game. 🙂
Since I’m housebound due to the COVID-19 outbreak I’ve been passing the time by experimenting with AR and photogrammetry. Here’s an AR prototype I did with marker tracking within the browser:
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For that particular one I’m using A-Frame to handle the tracking of custom markers within the browser. The workflow for exporting a 3D object from Blender to a glTF, and then loading it into the Three.js scene is remarkably easy.
In the future I’d like to see how well one of my photogrammetry captured objects renders and see how well animated objects and interactivity works. I suspect as long as you’re mindful of most Three.js rendering limitations you’d be fine but who knows with the addition of the whole AR layer within the browser.
I’ve been experimenting with more photogrammetry tools and techniques. This time recreating 3D human heads using a Blender add-on called FaceBuilder which is developed by KeenTools. Using FaceBuilder is pretty straightforward:
I’ve found that taking photos on a bright, overcast day gets the best results as well as trying to capture the 7 key photos as quickly as possible (before your subject shifts around too much) and well as detail shots around the head to be used to texture paint in anything that may look off when the textures are baked.
This guide that the KeenTools folks wrote helps to breakdown the process and a high level of what their add-on is actually doing.
I’ve been doing some photogrammetry tests using my iPhone 11’s camera, Agisoft Metashape, and a Proko Anatomical Skull. The goal is to accurately convert a physical 3D object into something that can be used within a game. I think if I focus on taking less blurry photos (like the back of the skull were) the results will be spot on next time. It’s interesting how you can see the lack of details translating into the glitchiness of the generated mesh. There’s a bubbling particle-like explosion wherever the details drop below a certain threshold.
Anywho, after I get a workflow to reliably capture a 3D object the next step would be to retopologize and possibly rig the object in Blender. I’m anxious to be moving onto that soon. 🙂
