Chris Thornton will be giving Robert the Bruce a virtual lease of life this summer (2012).
We asked him for a quick progress update yesterday.
“I have been modelling the appearance of the Robert the Bruce Avatar, so his face and body shape but most of all his clothing which is a suit of chain mail with a robe over the top. I decided to make mesh clothing for him as opposed to just making a texture. The mesh is made in blender and allows far more variety in terms of shape. The most challenging part is getting the clothing to move as it is expected when the Avatar moves.”
“This is a screenshot of the development of the clothing mesh in blender, it covers almost his entire body leaving only the head exposed. A texture is then developed using the UV of the mesh exported from blender and applied using the Second Life browser. I also have connected to the Avatar using the libopenmetaverse C# library so that it can be controlled by a program. So far I have programmed this to talk to people through text using a keyword or key phrase look up of a database of responses. I plan on extending this code to allow the Avatar to move around the Cathedral and possibly to interact with the users in a game like way.”
Great work Chris.