Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Testing...123...testing...hello? This thing on?

I don't know about you, but I am very tired of Basic Guy. He was a model that I created almost 8 or so years ago for just personal animation and rigging exercises. Well, as you may know, he turned into way more than that. He has been downloaded thousands of times and has been all over the world (thank you all for the very nice emails)! I have been having so much fun with seeing him travel the world that I want to share more rigged models with you all. This time I will not be modeling them (whew!). I am working with a co-worker on hopefully 3-5 characters (to start) to share. Each character will have a wardrobe and accessories to choose from. How fast those assets all come out... I'm not sure (hopefully faster than slower). I'm also trying to figure out the best way to release these assets to you all. Do I just release unskinned assets? Or, can I create a pipeline for you all that is a lot faster (as in I skin and you all use a tool to "build" a character to animate in some kind of UI)? I'm leaning towards the latter. I know that most people that download rigs are animators that do not want to rig. So, I'm one of the "weirdo's" that loves both aspects. In my absence (from my blog) I have written an auto rig script that will rig characters in minutes vs the hours upon hours of manual work. So, it would be a very fun challenge to figure out a way to allow you all to build your own character and let you get to animating!

Anyway, above you will see "Zane". He is being modeled currently. But, when he is done, I will rig him up and share with you all. I'm VERY excited to get back to public releases and hopefully seeing my characters show up all over the place again!

cheers and thanks for stopping by!
Tim