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This is actually quite an old video I made back in February, I just forgotten to publish it lol. Anyway it’s a short, quick and dirty motion capture test with my Kinect camera.

Tools used:

2 Kinect XBOX 360 Camera

iPi Mocap Studio

Source Filmmaker

Vegas Pro 14 

Credits:

dewobedil - For porting Kizuna Ai model for SFM

Kevin MacLeod - Musik (title: Interloper)

Freesound.org

www.kizunaai.com

theFaceless - Lost Forest SFM Map 

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Making a Dragon Live2D avatar!

Back again with a Live2D related post (damn I almost forgot I had this blog...)

Last month I got a commission to make a cartoony dragon Facerig avatar. Now here’s the thing, most of Live2D samples at least has human facial feature. There’s so few furry Live2D models out there, let alone a dragon!

When I’m taking account on how the face would looks like when it’s turned, I want to make it as real as possible, by ‘real’ I mean as it’s not looking like a flat mouth on a 2D face, but kind of 3D-ish. At this time I realized perhaps I’m gonna take a path that has not tried with anyone else before.

^ At the time of making Live2D Cubism 3.0 is just released, so I took the bullet and used the new iteration of the software for this model. 

^ For rigging the mouth, my technique was separating the lineart and the color from the model. I also split each stroke of the lineart so I can have more freedom on customizing the shape of the mouth. 

I took some cartoony dragon head reference to help me picture how the mouth should looked like from all angles. For this character I found Spyro is the best reference I could found. I load up my Garry’s Mod and took some pictures of Spyro head in all angles:

And here’s the Live2D process started!

^ I began the mouth rigging by shaping the lineart to make it into shape I wanted. 

^ When it’s done, it makes me easier to work with the colors. 

Now I managed to make the head turns from the side to side, now the next challenge is to make the mouth actually talking!

This part also very tricky to do, extra precision is required and I have to take account that every vertex is positioned correctly on each keyframe! DUH!

THANKFULLY, Cubism 3′s new soft selection tools is much improved than v2.1 one, I can say many improvements in Cubism 3 has saved me a lot of time. I cannot imagine if I worked with v2.1, I could have taken longer in this phase.

Here’s the result!

Another challenge to face is to make the face turns up and down, also I have to make sure I don’t mess with face rigging that I have already made before. So I sketched up some up and downs view for reference:

Then I translated it to the model I work on:

In the end, after a month of various effort and THREE corrupted projects....(yes, I broke the new Cubism Editor many times on the process of this model)....

I’m very proud of the result, and this is also proves that Live2D is not limited to 2D anime-ish face. :)

You can see this dragon live on his owner Twitch stream, AzurTheDragon.

Now for the shameless plug, do you want your own 2D Facerig avatar like this? Hit me up on E-mail/Discord/Skype, you can see my contact and commission details on this link. (still working for a proper portfolio page... I will update this link when it’s done!)

See you on next blog post!

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This is another little experimental project of mine, basically a Live2D desktop wallpaper! All possible thanks to Wallpaper Engine, a little powerful piece of software that could put non-image files as your desktop wallpaper. It can be a video, webpage, or even mini games! Interactive wallpaper is also one of them.

I made this wallpaper in HTML5, in theory it uses less RAM than any other existing interactive wallpaper, which was based on Unity. I couldn’t even imagine how a Unity app constantly running in background let alone become a wallpaper!

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I did a little sample of lipsyncing for commission work, done in Live2D Animator. Creating perfect shape for animation lipsync-ing is possible, depends on how well you rig the model ^.^

And yes I used voice lines from Tracer lol

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Probably this is the most complicated lips rigging that I’ve ever done

It has 25 parameters in contrast to 9 parameters in my other models.

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Another Live2D experiment I did, featuring Mina, my first Facerig avatar. I made this for “alive2016″ event in Japan, in which they will feature community-made models in a giant touchpad! Much bigger than my tablet screen here of course, lol. I really wish I can attend the event and see the model by myself...

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I have acquired myself a Live2D PRO license! I have to admit the price is kinda hefty but I believe it's a best decision for long time investment. The software keep steadily growing and they're preparing for a new groundbreaking technology that mixes 2D and 3D model into play. I believe this is going to a big thing, and when the demand comes I'm ready to work on them.

Also for those who contacting me about commission or some contract work, I'm sorry but my slot is full at the moment. I'll let you know when I'm available via Tumblr post.

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A kind of ‘special animation’ for commissioned Tristana Facerig model, I like how it turns out lol

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Progress of commissioned Facerig avatar, this time is Tristana from League of Legends!

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Contest winner has been announced and I won regular prize! Well I can see those special prize winners from miles away lol, I ran out of time to polish the model. To be fair it’s my second model so I’m stumbling around the software, but I learned a lot of techniques during creation of Mina. Hopefully I can do my next model way more efficiently.

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Clip Studio’s vector eraser is so fuckin’ rad.

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Please rate my model on Steam Workshop, thank you! ;) http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=627208193

For starters I’d like to show my recent work, it’s a digital avatar made for Facerig. This is my entry for ongoing contest hold by Facerig and Live2D, inc.

I love playing with this software, for the record Live2D allows you to add interactivity to your still drawing, just like 3D models! You can make your drawing blink, moving their face, and so on. This software is popular in Japan and the technology has been used to plenty of popular Japanese games.

Give the software a try! Live2D is free for personal usage. Most of their learning resources are in Japanese but English documentation are available albeit it’s outdated. But there’s plenty of good Live2D tutorials too in English (my favorite goes from a Youtuber named imst, look it up!)