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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Virtual actress Move Test
Steven Stahlberg
Original: Virtual Actress Move Test | 1778 * 1098px | 1.8 MB
I did the animation Virtual Actress Move Test during 97 to test the joint-bending and deforming of my recently completed virtual actress's body. In it's original form it was 200 frames (PAL), designed to be smoothly oscillatable. A simple 100 frame cycle is repeated while the camera rotates around her. To catch any flaws, I used Alias Power Animator version 5 on an SGl lndigo. To build the body I mostly used Bi-rail and Skinning, inserting and deleting isoparms, and rebuilding, and spending hundreds of hours pushing and pulling cv's (Iooking back now I feel l lacked proper references, but at the same time I learned a lot from all those mistakes).
Most of the defarmations were done with the Character Builder Bulge tool, with additional "editing" using tailar-made clusters linked with expressions to a joint. PA was very slow. In fact, when I tried to attach constraints to her skeleton, each one would freeze the computer for several hours! So I skipped constraints ... I did the animation not even using IK, but forward kinematics -I found that gave me better control. The trickiest, slowest part of course was keeping her feet flat on the floar. That took a lot of keyframing. The hands are actually available in fully animatable versions, but I didn't use them here in this test - these hands are merely "frozen" versions with skeletons deleted, and 10 BlendSurfaces with their construction history removed. This makes them much smaller in file size and very much faster to render.
I want to thank Alain Zaugg and Alain Chevalier, owners of Optidigit in Kuala Lumpur, for their support, and Jesse Tan at the same company, for a great editing job - without their help I couldn't have entered Prix Ars Electronica.
Most of the defarmations were done with the Character Builder Bulge tool, with additional "editing" using tailar-made clusters linked with expressions to a joint. PA was very slow. In fact, when I tried to attach constraints to her skeleton, each one would freeze the computer for several hours! So I skipped constraints ... I did the animation not even using IK, but forward kinematics -I found that gave me better control. The trickiest, slowest part of course was keeping her feet flat on the floar. That took a lot of keyframing. The hands are actually available in fully animatable versions, but I didn't use them here in this test - these hands are merely "frozen" versions with skeletons deleted, and 10 BlendSurfaces with their construction history removed. This makes them much smaller in file size and very much faster to render.
I want to thank Alain Zaugg and Alain Chevalier, owners of Optidigit in Kuala Lumpur, for their support, and Jesse Tan at the same company, for a great editing job - without their help I couldn't have entered Prix Ars Electronica.
Steven Stahlberg (AUS), born 1959, grew up in Sweden. Although CG has been his dream since he was 17, it only started coming true in 1992, when he could afford to buy an SGI. At that time, he had just moved to Hong Kong, doing freelance illustration. In 1996 he got his first job in CG with OPTIDIGIT, a company doing TV comercials in Hong Kong and in several other Asian countries.