New character workshop - first glimpse

I promised you a look at the new character shop as soon as I got something from the team in Cambridge. I found this waiting for me when I got up this morning, so here you go. I haven't even had breakfast yet!

Moviestorm Dave

Note: This is still work in progress and quite rough in places, so you'll see some broken icons on these shots. There's also a noticeable neck seam on these characters: Dave's fixed this, but the new neck code hasn't been integrated with the character workshop code yet. However, this will give you an idea of what the new face creator and character workshop will look like, and how much more you'll be able to do with Moviestorm 1.3.1 compared to the current version.

These don't show the more extreme characters we can do - this is just to illustrate the user interface and the range of controls. See shots of the new heads here!

First off, we've replaced the old grey background with a dressing room. The set isn't final, but already it feels much more friendly and fun to use. You also get a sense of what these characters will look like in context, which makes an enormous difference.

Now, this is the bit most of you have been waiting for. Check out the new face morph controls. (Click on the images to see them full size.) You get a huge array of sliders to play with, allowing you to control:

• Ethnicity - this allows you to mix between different basic ethnic head shapes
• Head Variant - several different face shapes
• Nose shape & size
• Ear shape and size
• Mouth shape
• Lip shape
• Eyebrows shape & size
• Eye depth, size and shape
• Eyelashes

Let's take a closer look at the eyebrows, and see the range of variants available. Twelve different shapes, all of which can be tinted.

Next there's the new make-up. Add a design and colour it. We'll have some more conventional make-up, of course, but we can also do some more extreme things.

So there you go.

Now, where's my coffee and a cinnamon bun?

A handy performance tip from Overman

Here's a little twitter exchange between myself and Phil Rice earlier:

zsoverman: Had to restart master render of First today. 200% speed boost after blowing dust off heat sink. (!) Sony Vegas says 1 hr to go... tick tock

mattkelland: @zsoverman 200%? blimey!

zsoverman: @MattKelland I know, right? Dang thing was crawling, crashing... a little compressed air and voila!

So, give it a go. Pfft!

(Strangely, I did the same thing to my air conditioning last week, and that works much better now too.)

Thumbnails

Another little snippet from the commit log:

• Revision 24087 Committed by dave: - Changed the angle for the body part's thumbnails
• Revision 24088 Committed by ben_sanders: - Resaved the parasol thumbnail
• Revision 24081 Committed by ben_sanders: - Updated thumbnail on the beachfront set, and added boulevard set

This is the kind of thing that you don't normally think too hard about when you're starting out building something like Moviestorm. You know how your character & mod shop and prop choosers are going to work: you have a bunch of different things to choose from,, and little pictures of them which you click on to select them. Not exactly rocket science.

Then you come to implement it, and it all looks a bit meh. In some cases, you can't actually find the thing you want. Turns out that the angle from which you view a 3D item is far more important than you might think. If you don't get a good thumbnail image, what you see is confusing and messy: in extreme cases, it's like one of those quizzes, where you have to identify a common household object from an unusual angle.

In our original version of the prop chooser some time ago, we had an automated thumbnail tool which took a snapshot of each item from a standard angle and distance with a standard lighting, and then cropped it to fit. When we re-did it, we replaced many of the automated thumbnails with hand-made ones. This involved employing an intern for a month or so doing nothing else, as it's a time-consuming and tedious job. However, the results were worth it.

Body parts are generally a lot easier to standardise, so we're sticking with automated thumbnails for the new mod shop and character shop designs. However, we're still experimenting with what the best angle is. It makes more difference than you realise.

The hip bone's connected to the what?

Following yesterday's blog post featuring log entries the changes to the main codebase, here's one that will intrigue a few of you:

• Revision 24026 Committed by dave: - Fixed new symmetric female01 skeleton remapped female01 anims for symmetrized skeleton

As we mentioned in the forums this weekend, we've been going back and re-examining some of our design decisions from three or so years ago with respect to the way Moviestorm characters are constructed. We've found ourselves loading more and more onto the characters, and we now expect them to walk, use a prop, look at something, have a facial expression, speak, and gesture, all at the same time. And look good while doing it. And do it all in real time. And while retaining some measure of acceptable performance.

Now we're asking our characters to have morphing faces as well, so every facial animation and texture has to be adjusted to fit the final shape. We're looking at more extreme morphs than we've had before, so we have to be very conscious of the extent to which that distorts both the animations and the actual characters.

Our existing facial structure simply wasn't up to the job, for all sorts of reasons, so we decided to rebuild the heads. While we were looking at that, we spotted that the eyes were very slightly asymmetrical, and nobody had actually noticed that before. That's one of the reasons the facial expressions always looked a bit odd. So we've changed that, and the new faces should look much better. As Dave put it, "it's amazing how a small mistake early in the project comes back to haunt you years later."

Since we were messing with bones anyway, we figured out we might as well do the bodies. That way, when we get round to looking at body morphs*, we shouldn't have to go through all this again. So Chris has created a new skeleton, and the team are now figuring out a way to make all the existing animations and costumes compatible with it. We really, really don't want to have to rebuild every single animation and costume!

Hopefully you won't see any difference at all when the new skeletons eventually replace the current ones. Everything will just work exactly the same as it did before. However, this is important groundwork for several things we're planning later.

For those of you who've been impatient for us to release skeleton schematics, this is one of the reasons we've held off for the last couple of months. Once the new ones are in, working, and fully tested, then we'll see about letting you guys have a go.

I'm also intrigued by this one:

• Revision 24021 Committed by julian_gold: - Tarted up textrenderer interface so i can do some cooler textbased stuff in crv. (Cutting Room View)

That could signify some neat new titling options, perhaps?

* Don't hold your breath. Even if we started looking at them right after MS 1.3.1, actually releasing body morphs will still be some way off. It's a big job.

** That's definitely not going to be this side of MS 1.3.1. I'd say after 1.3.2 at the earliest.

More tantalizing hints

You can glean a lot about what's going on from the feed of the updates committed to the main Moviestorm codebase: here's just a few entries from today:

• Revision 23995 Committed by amos_willbond: - Updated icons for morph regions (character shop).
• Revision 23996 Committed by amos_willbond: - Further changes to morph area icons (character shop)
• Revision 24001 Committed by chris_ollis: - Extra face textures for morph male
• Revision 24012 Committed by ben_sanders: - Mouth height separated, and full morphs added
• Revision 24013 Committed by ben_sanders: - Added blood and blemishes to the skin detail
• Revision 24014 Committed by ben_sanders: - Beards added
• Revision 24015 Committed by ben_sanders: - Copied beard thumbs from core

The new character workshop is definitely taking shape!