Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Virtual Talking Skull

As I mentioned earlier, I'm hoping to get a few new Magic Mirror-like digital puppets out there for people to use in the 2006 haunt season. Thanks to all the work I've been doing in 3D lately, I've been able to really raise the bar on the look of the digital puppets I can create. Here's what the talking skull is going to look like:
Talking Skull
I'm pretty happy with how he turned out. He looks pretty cool floating there, and his jaw moves nicely with the shift key - much smoother than the original Magic Mirror puppet.

Here's a question for people who read my blog. What should I name him?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I guess Skully or Bonehead would be too obvious. Yorick would be a dead giveaway, too...

Deathtouch said...

Now that is going to be cool. I can't wait to see that. any chance at adding a press a key feature so kids can just press A, B, or C and get a different treat? Juice box etc.

Thank you very much for the comment on my blog.(About mom) It helped alot.

CC said...

I was actually thinking "Yorick," since I've always liked Shakespeare.

Mark, trust me, you don't want me to do that. The last thing you want to do is put your keyboard out there for kids to bang on, drool on, touch with their sticky fingers, etc. The choose-your-own-reward idea is a good one, but you might consider constructing your buttons (or some other mechanism) into your facade.

One thing you might try doing is something similar to our Blackwood Mausoleum - put long, dark holes in your facade, and have the kids reach in to get their prize. Freaks 'em out, and it's very memorable.

But whatever you do, don't put your keyboard out there.

Anonymous said...

Oh, no, I wasn't planning on doing that. I bought arcade buttons which light up. I made a circuit that will relay which button they pressed back to me. Then I will press the button. Now if I could hook that up to usb and relay that back to your program, now that would be cool. But you are right. You need to charge for this puppet.

Jon C said...

This is GREAT. I'm going to be purchasing your virtual skull today. However, my spare machine that I'd like to run this on is on a Linux machine. I think you distribute this as a Flash Projector, so people don't need Flash. Is it possible to distribute the Flash file by itself? I think then that will work on any system that has Flash installed, including Linux, but I'm not positive.

CC said...

Actually, it's not a Flash file - it's a Director file. Flash cannot do the cool 3D stuff that Director does. (At least, not without a lot of incredible headaches.)

And unfortunately, Macromedia/Adobe have not deigned to release a Linux engine for Director content.

Sorry that you cannot run Yorick on Linux, but there's no reasonable path to that for me until Director is supported on that platform. Trust me when I say I'd prefer to be able to deliver on more non-Windows platforms...