Animating Generi

Well, I've spent a bit of the afternoon playing around on Maya 3D 6 and Generi looks like he may be just right. It's quite amazing what he is capable of doing, all possible movement (including some that humans can't do) and quite a range of facial expression - more importantly he comes complete with the ability to lip sync thanks to a range of lip movements. Just perfect!

All that remains now is trying to make him work. You see, the problem that I have discovered is that he's going to be difficult to control. From within Maya itself it's fairly easy to modify his pose an element at a time, with the intention of creating a frame by frame animation. However, I want my character to be live and autonomous. I am somehow going to have to embed the character I have into a program, and control him from that. Keeping him within the Maya "editing" space would just look too cluttered.

I may have to wait until I can speak to someone better at 3D animation before I do that. It just so happens that I have a module this coming term on Virtual Reality - hopefully this will lead to me to an expert in this field. It looks like my research will have to move onto the AI of the character.