Ludic Spaces

It's been a while since I've journaled my interests and research... a big area when I get time to explore is Digital Puppets... this has continued to be growing as an area for the last few years, with lots of subvertable content like SparkAR or SnapChat Filters - through to the explosion of Vtubers. Anywho, the big moment in the summer of 2021 - was the release of Metahumans for Unreal Engine Some impressive visual quality harnessing the Unreal Engines Realtime Rendering... the TrackingApp on the Ipad - Live Live Face that gives cheap realtime facial tracking that can be mapped onto the Metahuman, or any appropirately rigged character in Unreal. The Metahuman experience itself is reminicent of Adobe Fuse and Autodesk Character Generator of old - just taking it to the next level of rigging, blend shapes and some excellent hair simulation - so this isn't a revelation in itself - but is part of the evolution of creating a Digital Human / Clone. Quixel bridge is the to...

Mini win of the Day! For my usual tinkering around on some level of research for teaching - I finally sat down to figure out how to use Adobe Character Animator into Microsoft Teams, without having to output as a stream from the program into Youtube or Microsoft Streams... To the rescue - the ever useful OBS Studio was used to bridge and capture the display output from Adobe Character Animator ( my trick was to capture the 2nd monitor display using OBS ). So far so good, the key is to download a plugin for OBS - called Virutal Camera - download link here and install it... https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.949/ With this enabled in OBS - the studio output can be activated as a Camera Feed in your Teams or Zoom software ( so change your device settings to accomodate this ) I'm still playing with the setup - to improve latency and sync with sound... but its a fun alternative to having not to comb my hair for those crucial meetings! - When its perfected - I...