Monsters in the Orchestra
The monsters I personally created are fully animated in the video clip above, showcasing dynamic movement and personality created by the animators. The Monsters not animating, I oversaw their development, ensuring they aligned with the project's vision and their topology were constructed with proper edge spans to support a smooth deformation during animation.
"Monsters" was an innovative real-time A/R experience showcasing AMD's cutting-edge research and technology. The project featured 17 fully animated monsters and 3D audio to dynamically track the music of individual instruments. The installation was fully immersive which also included a "live" conductor to direct and move characters around with hand motions to sync their movements with the audio in real-time.
The project premiered on a 30-foot dome at CES 2014, featuring 36 speakers and three levels of 3D audio. It was later adapted for VR and showcased at SIGGRAPH's Emerging Technology show in Los Angeles.
This project was designed to highlight AMD's technology and hardware capabilities.
My Role:
As the Lead Character Artist, I played a pivotal role in developing the 17 fully animated musical monster characters featured in the experience. Personally, I created 7 of these characters including the main character Maria and directed a team of 7 outsourced artists in crafting the remaining 10 monsters.
My responsibilities included:
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Digital sculpting characters and transferring model details and textures to optimized Low poly mesh.
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Overseeing the modeling and texturing pipeline for all character modeling contractors .
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Creating PBR materials in Unity and tweaking textures to ensure visual consistency and quality.
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Collaborating with riggers to test and then hand off completed characters to animators.
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Exporting and in-game (Unity) setup of final characters for the demo
This project was incredibly enjoyable and rewarding, showcasing my expertise in character creation, art direction, and collaboration within a diverse, multidisciplinary production pipeline.
Full AMD - CES 2014 Presentation
CES 2014 - AMD presented the Monsters in the Orchestra. Shown on a 30-foot dome with three rings of speakers at different heights with a total of 32.4 speakers. The real-time demo consisted of seventeen characters all being tracked with 3D sound and controlled by a live conductor using gesture controls.
Examples above show Maria's Digital Z-Bush sculpt. In ZBrush I used zspans to layout the flow of the low polygon generated mesh prior to export to Modo for cleanup and UV layout.
The dreaded T-Pose really comes to life when the character is posed and animated.