This is a Photoshop painting I just finished. It was meant to be a quick one, but I wound up working on it most nights for about two weeks. Since “finishing” it I’ve found that some image applications don’t display colour properly (Like the Windows 7 image preview) and you pretty much have to view it with a black background (which this blog doesn’t have).

I’ve been working on this image for the past few days.  It’s just a simple export out of sculptris and into 3DS Max.  I’m still trying to figure out how to get rid of the lines in the low res version of the head though.  If anyone knows, please let me know.

A cartoon duck:

After that I spent a little more time and created a female body.  I’m still not the greatest at drawing photo realistic characters, but it was easy to achieve for the most part.  It’s still a 1.0 release but what I found a little lacking was there was no real way to delete parts of the mesh I screwed up on.  I had issues with the fingers on the hand and quite a few with the head of the character.  In both cases I wanted to revert it to a stump and recreate it but I couldn’t.  What I wound up doing is reducing the polygon count and using a combination of smooth and the inverted draw tool to push it back.

I also had issues with the masking features.  It could have been my fault being new with the software but I couldn’t figure out how to mask things and them move them around.  My characters face was too far out and I wanted to push it back, but every time I did something unexpected happened to it.

Besides those minor issues I had with it, it’s an awesome piece of software and being available for free makes it even better.  I suggest everyone try it out.

Once I did that, and remembered how to program in C++ (I’ve been using C# for over a year now – I’m a bit rusty) it only took me a couple hours of reading documentation to write a basic app that does edge detection of a web cam image in real time.  It’s still not perfect and it’s night time so the low light is throwing it off, but it worked out well.  I just have to find out how to reduce the background noise and I’ll be able to do more with it.

It seems to be pretty good at tracking eyes. I just need to figure out how to tell which edges are the eyes and which are the outside of the head.

On a side note, on April 1st Microids announced that Syberia 3 is on its way. While it was an April Fools joke, I hope they’re working on it. I’d love to see another part to the story. If you get a chance to play the first two they’re a little slow, but well worth playing.

I’m assuming they are contacting me because of the false prediction that was going around the net in September of 2001 taken from an essay written by another Neil Marshall. Although he lives/lived in a nearby town and went to University at a similar time as I did, I can assure you I have not written any essays on Nostradamus. If I did, they would be atrocious.

I can only hope that they are going to make a show about debunking the predictions. I wonder if Neil Marshall the horror film director is also getting these emails. I could do some 3D animations and he could direct the show.

…or it is just a new spam email that is getting through my filters.

Wintermute looks promising.

The interface leaves a little to be desired, but it appears as if it is capable of creating a 2D or 2.5D adventure game.  I haven’t tried importing the raincoat girl yet, but the 2D portion of it looks like it works.  I was able to create a simple room in which the default character could walk around and as it walked into the screen, it automatically scaled in size.

Try out Dirty Split. Its built using Wintermute and it’s pretty good. The art in it is much better then the default stuff that comes with the engine.