Technical Artist, Technical Director, CG Supervisor

Its been a while since I have had time to work but here is an update. This is all WIP. I will be posting alot of WIP asset images in the next few days but all contents will be BACK POSTED according to when each portion was completed. I find it valuable for my own knowledge, despite only working nights on this project, what order each phase occurred and how long approximately each step took.

I have chosen Unity as my engine for Project Bystander. I cannot express enough how completely amazed I am how easy it is to use Unity. I think for rapid iteration game prototyping it is super user friendly for both artists and programmers not to mention a technical artist. I can’t wait to share knowledge at work from what I have learned about Unity.

As I am still at heart an Artist first and a Tech Artist second. I found the need on this project to force myself into a rapid iteration mentality. Too easily could I get consumed with iterating on the models, textures, normal maps, rigging, animation, physics, shaders, and not to mention ui design. In addition, since it is so fast to implement features in Unity 3.5, I found it very easy to get excited and go off on tangents not related to the scope of this character customizer.

As I have explained in previous posts, my goal is to get the core functionality and bare bones art in place before I do any polish.

As you can see below, I now have a full character animated tracking a light source. The target controller assigned to the light source will later be assigned to the game camera which will be used to focus on the full body or head similar to the posted Eve videos. Note: I’ll be trimming the compression off the beginning when I have time.

In the days to come, I will also be posting modified Unity tutorials I used to accomplish what I have here. From these posts you will learn how to import assets, apply animation, and setup the head look controller just like the above.

My largest influence for Project Bystander has by far been Eve Online’s Incursion Character Creation by CCP Games. I’ve set this not only as my visual bench mark but as part of my technical bench mark as well. Most character customizers have very similar functionality and features but the execution and presentation of this one in particular makes it my favorite.

Project Bystander is strictly being developed for my own knowledge and not for commercial use.

By now, I’m well into the first phase of Project Bystander. So what is it? What is the goal? How am I gonna get there?

Project Bystander is my own version of a character customizer based on all the things I’ve learned over the course of my career. The end goal is to have a fully functional, and hopefully polished, interactive character customizer working on a platform of my choice. In addition, I want to be able to dynamically update the customizers asset library. Along the way, I will be blogging all major concepts and considerations to complete the project. Where needed, I will be writing scripts/macros to assist me whether they be in python, mel, maxscript, or vbscript. Eventually, I will also discuss platform features I will need to code.

Below is a broad stroke diagram of the project. I will break down each stage and my process as completed.

I rarely muse Vimeo but every once and a while there are some real gems that get posted and virally make it through studios. More often than not it is a reel or video from a French student who recently graduated from Gobelins. I don’t know what it is but man the French are such talented animators and story tellers. Check out this video “My Bloody Lad” sporting the Skrillex-esk music. Zawesome.

Some visitors to this blog may not have been a kid when the original Tron hit the theaters. Just goes to show how old I am. But if you were a kid and a gamer back then, with your Atari, you understand what I mean when I say it was epic. As you can see, even my blog theme is a bit Tron-esk. Well, kinda. Tron was my Star Wars and it was amazing to see it reborn recently with Tron: Legacy.

Did you know though that a lot of the VFX for Tron 2 was done right here in Vancouver? Digital Domain is just one of Vancouver’s power house VFX studios and have even more recently worked on X-Men: First Class and Transformers: Dark of the Moon! I have not confirmed yet from friends if all the facial mocap and head assets were done in house but its still pretty damn impressive. Here is their behind the scenes video.

Note: Looks like they used Maya. More edits for this post to come.