I've always been a big fan of the late Sir Terry Pratchett's novels, so I thought I would pay my respects by trying to make an animatable 3D model of him. My goal for the contest is to use that model in an interview setting that captures one of his snappy answers or quotes, and of course I will use the audio from the interview with Acculips for the lip-syncing.

The first step, of course, is to create the character. Here is a short video of me creating his basic likeness using a combination of Headshot and SkinGen.



Stay tuned for the next part in which I attempt to model his hat in Blender...

In this next part, I decided to take a stab at modeling Terry's hat in Blender...

I did not have the time, patience, or skill to model his eyewear from scratch, so I modified a pair to suit my needs using Blender:

Now it's time to give the poor man his clothing:

I picked an interview segment to animate - the first 22 seconds of the following video:

This is the first render of my Sir Terry Pratchett animation and is the result of four hours of hand animation in iClone. It was a lot of work, but I think it is starting to look like something. No motion capture was used, but I did use the face puppet tool for the interviewer's head movements. The rest is all key-framed.

Here a few Iray test renders:
75% of original size (was 671x19) - Click to enlarge
75% of original size (was 671x19) - Click to enlarge75% of original size (was 671x19) - Click to enlarge

Here is a brief overview of my animation process:

I looked at your clothing video for Terry where you were making morphs and said you are looking for ways to make it in CC. Couple of points.
You do not actually need Morphs Creator and iClone to make cloth morphs. You still need a Blender though.
If it very easy and much more efficient to use CC > Blender > CC routine.
And the advantage is, that you can make any number of morphs for any number of cloth items with one Blender session and one export/import.

In a nutshell:

* Note the layer number for each cloth to be morphed. Save character. Strip everything from the character which does not require morphs. Save all materials for cloth items to be morphed.

* Export as FBX (Clothed Character). Blender profile. Mesh only. Uncheck Embed Texture. Pose is selected automatically depending on a base version (A for CC3+, T for CC3).
.FBX as well as .FBXKey files would be generated. Import .FBX to the Blender.

* For every cloth item to be morphed add 2 shape keys. There would be a Basis and Key 1. Select key 1, go to Edit mode and start morphing.
You can add another key, select it and make another morph. Then you can select another cloth item and do the same.
Same BTW goes for teeth, eyes and accessories if you wish on a fly to have retractable vampire teeth or scalable pupil for instance in iClone.
There are no limits what you can do in a project before the export.
(but unfortunately body and tongue shape keys are reserved by RL for face blend shapes only and any new shape key added here in Blender is getting stripped on import to CC)
 When done with Blender morphs project, export character to FBX (uncheck "Add Leaf Bones" in Armature export settings).

* Import model back selecting Create > Cloth, Hair, Acc (with FbxKey). At the prompt navigate to exported model and FBXKey generated at the beginning.
At the next prompt, make sure cloth items have correct type and layer number noted at the beginning. Change if necessary.

* Load all saved materials for the cloth items (most maps should be preserved when importing character back, but some might be missing - opacity for the one).
 Check cloth morphs here in CC and in iClone. Save the cloth in appropriate folder for the type. Load saved character and replaced the cloth with the one you just saved.

I should probably make a video tut at some point for this.

Now, the reason your jacket morph did not show up in the list at first is, that CC has this little bug with refreshing.
To see the morph, click on any other in Morphs section and then back to the item with morph. It should be visible now.


Good Luck with contest! :)

Terry Pratchett Interview - Iray Test Render (No Audio)
I have two computers rendering the Iray version right now. Not all the frames are done, so I'm missing some from the middle and the end. I wanted to see if it even looked nice before I wasted several more days of rendering. I think it looks pretty good, how about you?