April 18, 2012 update. A little more progress this week, on the SolidWorks (software) designing of mechanisms that will become moving 3D objects in the Control Panel.
Continue reading “3D mechanics for Control Panel buttons” »
May 12, 2012 update. Work nearly done to reduce the polygon count of the bowtie from 31,000 to 1,500.
Continue reading “Bowtie” »
Here are a few pictures showing samples of eyebrow raising that the Moose will be able to do. There is a central midline “spot”, a spot over each eye, and a spot more laterally over the eye. Each of these spots can be raised up or down independently, and in any combinations, as well as move forward or back a wee bit too. So all these possibilities for eyebrow positions will be controlled by a random-generation algorithm, to keep the eyebrows looking lively.
Continue reading “Eyebrows” »
Taking a lesson from computer games, and Making your Intro not Suck, (a fine article on Gamasutra), Most good software automatically shows new users some Easy and Interesting instructions on how to get started. I’m going to need to give some thought to this.
New users are going to need something Fun, even at the stage of ‘Should I click this “INSTALL” button’? I have made no plans for that yet. But this post will at least remind me to do so later, and hopefuly I’ll add updates to this post, as good ideas gradually come to. I’m pretty sure that I’ll at least create some animated gifs, or animation videos, that give users a sense of what this software will do,
I made this animated gif, frame-by-frame, just rotating the head and the eyes, because I’m anxiously waiting to judge if all our work on making the moose cuter, is going to work, or not. Pretty soon, our applicaton will make everything come to life, eyebrows, ears, nose, smiling, lip-sync speech, blinking and winking, head and neck motions. But I just couldn’t wait, so I made this frame-by-frame. And I like it!
Some quick photoshop mockups, of a few hats on the Moose. I was just curious how they might look.
Continue reading “Hats” »
Should the Moose have a beard? What style?
Continue reading “Beards” »
I though you’d enjoy seeing this current little problem we’re having on the coding side. The eyelashes are supposed to be transparent, but the problem you see, is that the transparency effect is also being transmitted to the skin behind it. So you can see background words from a webpage, showing around the eyes. (I’m sure we’ll figure this out eventually.) March 23,2012: Fixed it.
Here are a collection of pictures from different angles, of the new moose model, with its skin showing the colors and bump textures and shinyness. (click picture to get a bigger view.)
Continue reading “Finished skin color, of new talking moose” »
Gamasutra had a short but useful article about implementing a WebSocket server. It’s apparently kindof like making the moose be a Web server for HTTP, except it ends up being faster and for custom messages. Continue reading “The Moose as WebSocket server.” »
