I have now been working on this project for 46 weeks. Posting an update every week. But this week was a bit different!
This has been a slower week for Echoes of Somewhere. These past weeks have been busy as we started a closed alpha on out game Pax Dei. However I have snuck in some hours to my adventure game project! Here is a bit of an update to what is coming.
City Hall interior scene
The city hall interior scene is advancing nicely. The base for the 3D mesh is done and I wrote a script for the camera to follow the player character within a set range.
This scene is still middle of development as it has free moving camera and this changes things. I need to make the model quite detailed and create a more complete texture for the location, filling in all the occluded part that are missing unique textures.
Gestures and lip sync
This is one big chunk of work that I have already done, but have not yet written a blog post about. I am working on it, but it does take time and I need to capture material for it.
For the lip sync and facial emotions I used a plugin called SALSA. It is not very accurate, but I am pleased with the results it gave me for facial expressions and mouth movement.
For body gestures while speaking, I relied on the tooling offered my Adventure Creator. Both of these tools and creating the facial morphs will be explained in the upcoming blog post.
Using Midjourney to generate additional images of pre-existing subjects.
This is an interesting one! This is an exploration into if Midjourney’s vary region could be used to generate new angles from vehicles and other things while keeping the model the same. TL;DR; it can!
The work is still on-going and once I have this car modeled, I will write a blog post how-to about this.
Speeches about the project.
There is one more thing that has eaten a lot of my time from this project, carving me of my blog back-log: speaking about the project in different events.
This far I have been talking at Turku Animation Film Festival at Turku, Horizons Bordeaux at Bordeaux, Kind of Art at Copenhagen and GamesNow at Espoo. These have been great opportunities to network and see new people and takes on AI.
I will be posting this speech as a video on the blog later so you can all hear it. It is mostly based on the project blog and will serve as a great introduction into this project. The reception at each event has been great!
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