I finally overcame the problem of animating Makehuman characters and getting them into Unity. More or less the problem seemed to resolve itself when I upgraded to Unity 5. And now my token booth clerk walks, talks and cusses – thanks to dialogue I recorded at 6 AM when my voice isn’t exactly spry.

Only now, I can’t quite get the Rift integration to work – there are a bunch of coding references I don’t get – and one unhelpful person over at /r/oculusdev suggested I ‘learn to code’ to fix my problem. Yeah pal, as soon as I see a programmer start drawing proportioned, balanced and properly shaded figures or demonstrate how they can make texture maps with alpha masks…

Anyway – neat side note: The texture glitched on my guy, and he has a neat cyberpunk-ish feel about him, if I ever do something in a sci-fi setting, I will definitely re-use him.

I was originally inspired to do this by the dad who did VFX shots of his kids – the original was simply comping lightsabers on the kids and a photo of the remote from Ep. 4. moved in Premiere.

Then I discovered camera motion tracking in Blender.

It was rough, as this shot was very shaky, jerked around a lot and had no similar markers from the beginning to the end. I managed to bust it up into smaller clips and track those – but even then, they were atrocious to work with. I’m particularly happy with the pit and vaporators at the beginning of the 2nd clip, I like that Blender added in motion blur to match the shot – now if I could figure out how to make the shadows more intense…

Here is the final for the 11 Second Club January competition:

I did rush thru this in 2 weeks, decided to submit it because it turned out pretty well.

Here is my entry for the 11 Second Club‘s January competition.

I can only take credit for the animation, the model and rig are a free download. Crits are welcome!