Blog
VRoid Studio, meet NVIDIA Omniverse
May 10, 2023I am exploring the ability to import VRoid Studio created characters into NVIDIA Omniverse for animation and rendering. NVIDIA Omniverse is based on the USD ...
Is USD + 3D Browser the next HTML + Web Browser?
May 5, 2023Today's NVIDIA Omniverse livestream featured what, to me, was the most compelling vision of the potential of their platform I have seen yet. Meta placed ...
Writing Great Dialogue
May 4, 2023In a movie (or in my case, an animated cartoon), dialogue can make or break a scene. For animation, the visual aspects may take a ...
NVIDIA Omniverse and Backing Project Files to the Cloud
April 29, 2023I want to create NDVIDIA Omniverse projects with a backup of all my files in the cloud so I don't lose everything if my desktop ...
NVIDIA Omniverse Shot Scene Standards
April 24, 2023The "Omniverse Basics, Create for Production Part 1: USD and Layers" video describes how things work technically, but I found the "why" hard to understand ...
3D Animation Technical Styles
April 23, 2023There are a wide range of approaches to achieving 3D computer animation, each with its own pros and cons. In this blog I summarize many ...
AGRoL, Avatars GRow Legs at Meta
April 21, 2023I love the progress Meta are making (https://dulucas.github.io/agrol/) on animating the lower body from just a VR headset and hand controllers. Personally I would love ...
NVIDIA Omniverse Unity Connector
April 18, 2023From the NVIDIA website, "NVIDIA Omniverse™ is a computing platform that enables individuals and teams to develop Universal Scene Description based 3D workflows and applications." ...
AI 3D Model Creation
April 13, 2023Just as generative AI has been stirring things up with 2D images, people are also looking hard at 3D models too. One great little video ...
NVIDIA Canvas
April 13, 2023NVIDIA Canvas is an interesting app in the NVIDIA Omniverse suite of tools. It can create a 360 view image of plants, rocks, mountains etc. ...
Generative AI Video vs CG Animation
April 12, 2023Is video created via generative AI going to kill off CG animation (like Pixar movies)? I don't think so. I do think generative AI is ...
Universal Scene Description (USD) format from Pixar
April 11, 2023USD (Universal Scene Description) is an file format originally developed by Pixar for describing 3D scenes. A scene can include a collection of sets, characters, ...
2D to 3D Background Artwork
March 29, 2023There is a lot of buzz going on around AI generative artwork. Rather than art generation, I am personally interested in AI tools to speed ...
Entity Extraction for Screenplays with ChatGPT
March 24, 20236:15 PM I am exploring assembling scenes for computer animation from text based on AI. This is partly because I would like to speed up ...
Unity Tree Editor and Shader Graphs
March 15, 2023I have a number of assets from the Unity Asset Store some paid, some free. I hunt around in them for various models that I ...
Sympathetic vs Engaging Characters
March 14, 2023Are sympathetic characters the same or different to engaging characters? This was a topic on an old Writing Excuses podcast (episode 9.10). The answer is ...
Applying Machine Learning Classifiers to Screenplays for Animation Automation
March 10, 2023In my last blog I introduced this new series on applying machine learning to screenplays with the goal of automating some of the tedious steps ...
Machine Learning for Assembling Animation Scenes
March 6, 2023This is a first post in a new thread looking at using machine learning to speed up my process of assembling camera shots in an ...
Emotional speech synthesis for animation is here!
March 2, 2023For my hobbyist animation efforts I started with friends as voice actors. However, not having many friends… I mean, it is hard for my numerous ...
Unity Recorder Output Format Wars
February 28, 2023Back in 2021 there was a forum thread on video quality for the MP4 recorder. A few people reported getting poor quality MP4 files recorded, ...
Selecting Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) HDRP volume settings in Unity
February 23, 2023Ambient occlusion is a lighting effect that increases shadows where two surfaces meet. In real life, there is less light bouncing around surfaces in corners ...
Precise positioning with walk animations in Unity
February 16, 2023When you use a walk animation in a Unity Timeline using an Animation Track with Scene Offsets applied, you may come across a problem where ...
Conflict vs Tension in Storytelling
February 8, 2023To make stories more interesting, do you need conflict or do you need tension? Can you create tension without conflict? I was just listening to ...
Implementing Captions in Unity using UI Document
January 29, 2023Here is my current implementation of captions in Unity, the writing you see at the bottom of the screen that shows what the character is ...