See the AR project HERE. You’ll need a webcam and a printer.

By pure coincidence, this is my second dinosaur project to end up showing at the Natural History Museum

Thought Den have done a pretty good job describing the project here, so I will only talk about my role, which was producing the 3D.

Yeah, so basically I did the 3D.

My tasks were split into 3 major sections – the first was to produce the Spinosaurus skeleton to be manipulated in the Flash AR environment – I chose to  rig the skeleton in CAT, which meant I could easily add, remove and edit bones; the second task was to create a fully skinned Spinosaurus, again in realtime for AR; and finally, to produce a looping animation segment examining an Egyptian dig site, that you can see below.

Modelling the skinned Spinosaurus was easy – I bought it from Turbosquid; To be be fair though it was a high poly model and was textured in a bit of an old school way with multiple sections pasted into multiple subobjects. So basically it was a simple ‘render to texture’ job followed by the proOptimizer.

The animation was pretty straightforward too. I used MentalRay’s daylight system and created a looping animation, moving the camera with a bit of old-school motion capture. I enjoyed this animation immensely as I knew it was for the kids – I always remember being a kid and looking at those science books that had incredibly detailed illustrations which could lose you for minutes at a  time. I tried to pack in as much detail and information as I could, from tent pegs to Indiana Jones hats – but alas, there is only so much you can do with a desert dig-site and 4 days.

I would also like to give special thanks to Mike at Everything Dinosaur who’s help was invaluable on this project.

The idea is that you can select all sorts of plasticine bits out of a typical Aardman Model-makers toolkit and create any kind of face you like, choosing eyes, noses, mouths and even festive christmas hats.

Once your face is made you can save it, share it to Facebook, use it as a profile pic or even get your own stamps made!

I was hired to create the 3D models of the body parts, which I did using 3DS Max – transferring effortlessly to Maya where it was rendered in Renderman.

https://www.wallaceandgromitstamps.com/createyourself.php

This is a racing game I began years ago for Ford. The job was halted before production finished so the game is incomplete; there are a few bugs and problems I do not have the time or inclination to fix. I still think at stands as an example of my level of Action-scripting ability.

Notable features include: two player mode; computer controlled cars; inertia and other simple phyics; changeable external maps; adjustable vector rendering quality; power-ups; 3D graphics; and a PHP scoreboard.

For some reason I received an ‘editor’s choice award’ for this, at a time when Flash game programming was in its relative infancy.  At the time Flash racing games were all cutting corners whereas I didn’t compromise on any details – things like collision detection or CPU controlled cars were always missing.  Nowadays this game is put to shame by what some people can achieve, but I’m proud anyway I learned a lot – anyway, if you’re thinking of hiring me for a job involving interactive menus or a bit of Max Scripting I hope this shows I’m able to do it.

Keys

Info Panel

Known issues:

Too numerous to list – come on, it’s been years since I’ve touched this, and it was stopped before it was finished.

• Track 3 is randomly refusing to load now.
• The embedded typeface seems to have lost some punctuation.
• Another typeface is missing, presumed dead (didn’t have permission to use at the time due to copyright).
• Sometimes the cars will fly backwards.
• The PHP high score table points to a location on a server with some guys I used to work with who have since taken it down.

If you do spot any bugs:

• I don’t care.
• Don’t point them out to me unless you are going to hire me to fix them!