Skeleton-based diverse creature design tool for mass production

彬彬

1 Motivation

The purpose of our project is to develop digital tools that will help

to simplify the task of creature design in large-scale media projects.

When working on an animation or game that requires hundreds of

unique creature designs, many artists find it challenging to maintain

consistency and quality in every new design. As a result, even the

most creative artists must often go through a long and tedious period

of revisions before they arrive at final creature designs that are

satisfactory to the director. To reduce the amount of time and resources

needed for this critical revisions stage, we have designed a

prototyping tool which can use existing designs to rapidly generate

unique iterations.

2 Backgrounds

There have been attempts to create prototyping tools in the past, but

with limited success. Asset management software programs such as

Shotgun have prototyping capabilities, but are not integrated into

standard workbenches such as maya and thus are not part of most

artists’ workflows. Genetic Algorithm (GA) based creature exploration

tools have also been used for generating new designs automatically,

but this software allows for an infinite number of possible

combinations, requiring substantial human input to focus its

designs to match the originals. In response, we have designed our

software to interface more seamlessly with existing animation tools,

as well as simplified its functionality to make it more intuitive for

artists.

3 Current Workflow

The One Art Director then reviews the new designs to determine if

they match his or her original concept, and will ask for revisions

when necessary. This is a vital step, because it is often the Art Director’s

last opportunity to make sure that all the creature designs

are aesthetically consistent with each other and with the environment

of the game or film. After the designs are approved, they are

modeled, textured, and rigged for animation and final rendering. At

this stage, it is difficult for the Art Director to modify unsatisfactory

designs. As such, the Art Director will sometimes restrict character

designs from passing through the 3d production pipeline, until all

the designs for the characters have been finalized first as concept

drawings.

e-mail: shirai@mail.com

4 Skeleton-based diverse creature design

We propose a software solution which will speed the iterative process

by designing creature skeletal s***ctures before sketches and

mesh modeling. The advantage to this new order of stages is that

by modifying a simple skeleton, artists are able to create and judge

new designs semi-automatically much more quickly than if they

must fully re-model the character for each iterations. This faster

work-flow can also be used to test less conventional creature designs,

such as radical monsters or mechanical designs that have no

predecessors in existing media. This tool is s***ctured by 13 buttons

of template s***cture, 1 scale slider and 4 relation controllers which

is written in 319 lines of MEL (Maya Embedded Language) script.

Artists can load this MEL tool in earlier stage of their workflow to

explore their own creature. It based on template s***cture like Human

body, head, arm-L, arm-R, leg-L and leg-R or Dragon body,

head, wing-L, wing-R, leg-L, leg-R, tail. Artists can add body parts

by clicking a button and change their scale and relations by other

controllers. They can explore the character design by adding, removing

and moving body parts in 3D view. This tool can be ignored

and it has a compatibility in current workflow.

5 Result and Conclusion

User testing provided essential feedback during the development of

our software, indicating both its successes and possible improvements

for later iterations. In our most recent tests, an artist who

can create tarot 22 creatures in 20 days in sketch based workflow

was able to create 10 base creatures in 3 days with skeletal s***ctures

and sketches. Evaluating artists also found the value of our

tool, it can expand creature diversity with biological growth and

it can also useful to avoid conflicting with past similar creations.

In future versions of this software, we hope to make the graphical

user interface (GUI) more s***ctured and intuitive, and to include

more creature types, such as mollusks, insects, and plants as additional

design sets. We also hope to better integrate our tools with

physics simulations and artificial intelligence engines for increased

compatibility with other programs.

Our goal is to streamline the workflow of professional production

pipelines through the design and implementation of innovative digital

tools. Interacting with professional designers has informed us

of the challenges they face in their everyday work, and helped us refine

and focus our software to become a powerful imagination aide

for artists.

彬彬

菜刀吻电线

我看看就走，你们聊！

晃晃

很经典，很实用，学习了!

菜刀吻电线

我看看就走，你们聊！

晃晃

顶!学习了!阅!

晃晃

其实楼主所说的这些，俺支很少用！