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”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.
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. 🙂
Updated the design of the VR game and added rag doll skeletons. It’s been a productive morning!
Over the last couple of months I’ve been busy prototyping several shooting levels for a potential VR Game. They’re all extremely rough but I’m quite happy with most of them and am planning on expanding them into a full-on, actual game. Some of my favorite prototypes are a whack-a-mole style shooter, dodging asteroids as you’re shooting them apart, and defending against waves of humanoid attackers.
As you can see in the screenshots, the prototypes all take place within an office environment. I like the idea of a video game existing within augmented reality, with your co-workers unaware of what you’re actually doing, so I think that’s the direction I’ll be going in for now.
This office/AR concept also lends itself to a lot of interesting juxtapositioning of things. Like deers grazing beside a water cooler, vikings attacking around a conference table, or space ships flying past the building’s receptionist.