Performative Avatars

Fusion

Sep 7, 2019

By Carol (Keru) Wang and Peiling Jiang. Special Thanks to Brandon (Boyang) Yu. Anglerfish, which is famous for it’s natural lure that could draw its next meal nearer, also has a astonishingly weird mating process. The male anglerfish is significantly smaller than the females ones. When a young, free-swimming male angler encounters a female, he latches onto her with his sharp teeth. Over time, the male physically fuses with the female, connecting to her skin and bloodstream and losing his eyes and all his internal organs except the testes. ...

Mirror

Oct 8, 2019

I experimented basic sequencer and related video making features with Mirror, a one-minute short clip. During the process, material making, planar reflections, blending animations, and Unreal Engine sequencer were tired, broken, fixed, broken again, fixed again, and finally helped me make the video possible. With former experience of Premiere and DaVinci, I would say the sequencer part is not the hardest to understand. However, the material of mirror, or any kinds of reflective material, really took me hours to make. ...

Wrap

Sep 23, 2019

Remesh # Now it’s time to wrap the scanned model to eliminate broken or undetailed parts. Using Wrap3 and a base mesh, I re-meshed my scanned model and made it closed, less polygon and control points, and detailed in terms of hands and face. However, a few things didn’t go very well. Feet. I was scanned with my shoes on while the base model has bare feet. What would happen (and happened) is that if I didn’t select foot parts as isolated polygon (and the scanned model would be more important during morphing), the feet and fingers would turn into strange squeezed shape with separated tips still there. ...

itSeez3D

Sep 16, 2019

This week I scanned my whole body with itSeez3D app and Occipital’s Structure Sensor for capturing color and structure information. The app did a decent job for well capturing overall information including my height (a little taller) and body shape; and details from the words on my t-shirt to acne on my face. My partner held the iPad and scanned me for 3 times while the first trail was a total failure and we didn’t keep it. ...

I, Avatar

Sep 7, 2019

Hundreds of Avatar making softwares are there for tuning our digital representations as the expectations. Specialized softwares like Adobe Fuse and MakeHuman; Sculpting softwares like Cinema4D and blender; Social media like Facebook and twitter; Mobile apps like Memoji and Kapu… Here I used Fuse (beta) and Kapu, a newly released app by Tencent (the largest game company on the planet), created two very distinguishable Avatars of me, and analyzed the differences. ...