Summer's over already!...

Hey.

We're going through a pretty rough transitional period at the moment. We've had time to do this article for Sketchfab however, so enjoy:

Sketchfab Art Spotlight: Frey Couch Scene Sound

This is related to the Fisheye Placebo fanart lipsync scene we've done. We show off some making of pics in the article, and describe our workflow.

There's also this little test we've cooked up, it's an Unreal 4 Blueprint AI system with very basic pathfinding and a few interactive objects.

The interactive objects work via a point of interest system. First, we created an offset for the head that follows the points of interest that the character is closest to (or that has more influence). After those, we've also added attractors and repellers as child blueprints to the PoI-s. The attractor has a chance to summon nearby characters to itself and make them clap, and the repeller can either explode and kill characters that were caught in the blast, and/or send the rest fleeing and cowering in fear. These are all pretty rough and basic, but functional nonetheless. We spent about a day working on them, they were made as a tech demo.

Oh yeah, and the assets are from the World of Warcraft.

Peace!

Summertime!

This month has probably been the busiest we've had yet. We'll just avoid telling you about how much we've worked, day and night, with no breaks in-between, every day of the month. It was exhausting.

So, we'll show you some good things instead! As few as they are.

First, we've been 3D printing a lot! Our most impressive prints yet, in our opinion, are two small figures of Max from Sam & Max, Season 1.

It's a rip of Max's mesh from the Telltale series that we've posed and edited for printing. We still have to figure out a way to properly remove the supports from the print, but we're getting there.

In other news, we've made this scene public:

Frey Couch Scene Sound-Test by ExceptionGate on Sketchfab

This is Frey from Fisheye Placebo, the same model from our Frey Underground fanart, lipsyncing to a voice clip by VisualRaid from their dub of Fisheye Placebo. This has been done for a while now (we participated in Sketchfab's beta for sounds), but we could only make it public after Sketchfab's sound feature was made public. Hooray for Sketchfab Sound!

Sorry if this embed breaks the whole blog. Sound on Sketchfab is still a new thing, and we've experienced problems with embedded files with sound.

See you again next month! Don't get cooked, stay off the hook!

3D Yuumei Fanart: Frey Underground!

Hey!

We've had some free time this month, and decided to mix things up a bit. This is completely unrelated to any of our previous stuff - it's a fanart of Yuumei's Underground picture.

[fanart] Frey Underground - Animated by ExceptionGate on Sketchfab

The whole thing started when we realized that our portfolio was a little... one-sided. Not everyone likes the OLP stuff and style, but until now, that was the only thing we could showcase as a team. Separately we've worked in many different styles, but together we've mostly worked in one. So we've decided to try out different styles and subjects for practice, experimentation, and for our portfolio. This was also a challenge for us, to see how far we can get in about a week and how efficient we are. We've probably went a little overboard, but oh well.

Frey, the character is fully rigged and has a morph target set for emotions and complete lip-syncing. Basically we've created a game-ready character as fast as we could.

We've planned to include a violin playing and a random goofy animation as well, but exporting into Sketchfab-friendly FBX made our work hard. The process was very tedious and took up almost a whole additional day. (We're now convinced that Blender hates us) We can't include those animations in the same scene we've uploaded, and we thought making a new scene just for that would be overkill. Maybe we'll upload it someday, if people are interested.

We've decided on this particular piece because I [Lussy] am a long time fan of Yuumei and thought that shiny PBR lights would go well with her art style. It was refreshing to work based on someone else's "concept art". Can't wait for Fisheye Placebo to continue!

Here are some WIP pics:

Frey isn't happy with his incomplete hair

Attack of the placeholder normalmaps

Frey's violin in Sketchfab's editor

Some of Frey's test expressions and lip-sync

We love Sketchfab, and it's a shame that it isn't more popular. Whenever we show Sketchfab links or embeds to someone, we have to explain that it isn't a picture or a video, and that the camera can be moved. We always have to either explain the exact controls and settings (for example, this model always loads in SD quality and you have to manually set it to HD) in a wall of text, or leave out the instructions and hope very strongly that people will try clicking on the model. We went with the latter this time.

We hope you liked it! We were trying hard not to butcher the scene. Hope we didn't.