A Japanese website provides the world with free papercraft steak dinners (for downloading and enjoying yourself),
meanwhile
I present to you a slightly less believable (but eminently more huggable) roast vegetable and sausage dinner of my own concoction:
The good news is that we’ve completed scanning the band members of Dappled Cities Fly, and it looks like I’ll be co-directing (and doing the majority of animation for) a music video for their song Holy Chord.
The bad news is the warehouse I was set up in has been sold, and so I have no studio. I have a fair few models scanned however, and have work that can be done on them without the need of more scanning.
I’ve just finished scanning and animating a stuffed toy bear. Making scanned people walk is pretty obvious (though I think pretty great), but there’s a world of fun to be had bringing toys and objects to life! The bear has a slightly uncanny creepiness about it’s fixed expression and tireless walk. You can almost hear it moaning “huuugggss”.
Check out more of the 3d scanning project at http://3d.neonascent.net
and available at http://3d.neonascent.net
The above video show my face recreated for use with the full-body model, using FaceGen software. The geometry of the face includes movable eyes, teeth, and tongue and so can be easily articulated for facial expressions and lip-syncing.
The “SI” on the forehead is an watermark of the software, and would obviously not be present in the finished model.
The last few days I’ve been working with a new capture of myself for the purpose of experimenting with animation. The capture was done in a neutral pose, which makes it much easier to work with in this next stage. Using Milkshape (a lightweight game-mod development tool), I’ve articulated the model using a skeleton from the game Max Payne 2, and have been animating it using pre-recorded actions that come with the game. At this stage the model can be used to import into the game (which is quite fun in itself), where it can be used as an actor for producing Machinima. Alternatively, it can be animated directly from a 3D rendering package.
Interactive model and You tube video of animation in next part of entry… (more…)
I’m posting a rough model created using my 3d photo setup. It is smoother than the final model, as I haven’t finished interpolating the angles and so have averaged out everything to make it look better at this stage. Thought I’d post something just to show I wasn’t slacking off. 
The Java applet allows you to zoom (Shift+Left mouse), move (Ctrl+Left Mouse), and rotate (Alt+Left Mouse). It will slowly spin without your input. It is also quite large - in the region of 400k - so I’ve stuck it in the second half of this post to speed up loading of the blog.
I’m currently working on a photo egg and digital camera array to allow me to produce 3D digital models of people (see previous entries).
Progress report: I’ve just completed the wooden framework of the egg. There is now a Flickr photo set tracking the progress of the egg. In other news I’m close to finishing installation of the last few remote trigger mechanisms in the cameras.
For your viewing pleasure; an interactive version of the results of my test-run. As mentioned earlier, the face and arms are a little distorted due to the process taking a few minutes and the model moving/changing expression. This will not occur in the final system, as all information will be captured in one go.
The model runs as a Java applet, and may take a few moments to load.
(more…)
I’ve just completed a quite successful test run of an idea for modelling people in 3D. There were some slight problems, but these were all caused by movement between shots, which will not happen in the final system. As a general note, I have realised I will need to get quite wide-angle cameras in order to capture the entire registration matt and model. The images in the Flickr set give a good idea of the process.