[Freddy]

Guys, this is real time animation.  There's no over night renders here, it's all done live.

[Data]

Guys, this is real time animation.  There's no over night renders here, it's all done live.

With your PC Freddy you might Haswell 

Sorry, couldn't resist. 

[Freddy]

  It is performing well I have to say.

[Freddy]

Unity keeps amazing me. I bought a terrain generator and a few things to use in the landscape like trees, bushes, grass and plants etc. I'm going to give my AI character somewhere to live

I have been playing with this little world for a couple of days, here's what my world is looking like so far...

The media section reduced the quality and I compressed it a bit so it isn't huge. It's gives a good idea I hope.

[Data]

That is gorgeous 

The lighting, textures, detail, all really nice indeed. 

[Freddy]

Thanks, cool isn't it. 

The terrain generator cost me a bit, but I'm really enjoying playing with it. You can use loads of settings to make a terrain, you can control mountain height, textures, tree/plant/grass density and so on. There's loads of plants and stuff in the Unity store, so I bought a few of them which you can see in the screen shot.

A lot of fun

[Art]

Freddy,

Lovely scene!

Some time back Bryce X.X (maybe 7.X or so), was given away free and it's a great landscape program as is Terragen
and Vue. There was one other called Natural Scene Designer but I think it was a pay program.
Bryce used to have a very large following with a pretty accomplished Forum for help and sharing.
Terragen used to be quite capable and was free but can't say for sure now.

I use past tense as I am no longer very active in the 3D world as I once was.

[8pla.net]

Here's an idea...

You could make your A.I. a god, with its face, the sun, shining over the earth.

[Freddy]

  I like it - reminds me of Teletubbies.



But I think I would prefer her to be wandering around the landscape, or be able to move her around. Perhaps a combination of both.

[Freddy]

@Art, yes I played with Bryce a few times a very long time ago.

It's still being offered by Daz3D for $20.00 : http://www.daz3d.com/bryce-7-pro/

I did pick it up when it was free. I'm not sure if they do much work on it now, it seems unloved.

And I remember Terragen too, that was nice.

What I like about the one I bought for Unity is that it is integrated into the editor, so it's easy to use. Instead of the often troublesome ways of getting models to work between different programs.

On the avatar front I think I have worked out my work flow now. It took weeks of experimenting to get things playing nicely with each other. I wrote some tools myself to help me with all the importing and making models compatible.

Over the next few days I am going to try to get her talking again, this time in Unity. It might be simpler than what I have done already as things like morphs I can incorporate into the model of her. Well touch wood. I did get TTS to work in Unity so I am part way there.

[8pla.net]

Blender Festival Lipsync  (100% Linux)



This is an early lipsync test run of Blender 3D model to Festival text to speech engine.  The visemes are custom for testing. So, they are not part of  the original blender model, which is so well-done...

This Mechanical Face Rig was created by
Gord Goodwin / Feel-Good Comics
(http://gord-goodwin.blogspot.com/)
 
Created for the Blender Artists Rigging Thread:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=158111

[Data]

Lets not forget Nvidia FaceWorks, capable of doing this in "real time" already.

[Freddy]

@8pla, that's looking good. With a bit of tweening I think that will work well 

@Data, I had forgotten that, thanks for the reminder 

[Freddy]

As I mentioned I switched my project over to Unity as it does a much better job of the graphics.

I'm using my own MaryTTS server which I also mentioned somewhere. The server generates a WAV file and I also request a set of timings for the occurrence of phonemes and I use that to trigger the mouth shapes.

The voice is quite good. I'm keen to try making a custom voice at some point.

I think she animates quite smoothly, I probably need to tweak a few things. Aside from having to write my own timing system, using the morphs (different shapes) was pleasant to do. It's written in C# still but thanks to the way Unity uses models the amount of code has been reduced significantly.

The next stage will be to try the same thing but with a full figure character.

If you can't quite work out what she says :

Hello everyone at Dreams. My name is Jess and I have been created by Freddy. I hope to explore a wide world some day, but for now I only exist in a box. Well it was nice to meet you. So you all take care and I will see you soon.

[Art]

OK!
First, that was very nice Freddy! You're a man of many talents! She's lovely as you do have good taste!

Now for the critique, you knew it was coming....

At first I couldn't quite put my finger on it then after two more views, I got it. Not lip-sync or mouth movement not
expression at all. In fact those seemed fine.

The one thing that was bothering me until I figured it out was that the inside of her mouth is or appears to be lighted instead of somewhat dark like a real person's mouth when they talk.

Is there any way to tone down this light effect inside her mouth? If you can then I think you'll have a winner for sure!

It might be something related to the manner in which Unity processes the frames or something and I'll also bet you're aware of it and already digging about.

Keep plugging, my friend! You've certainly come a long way and I'm proud of your accomplishments over the years! Go on!!