xtranormal showcases tool to create 3D scenes and characters (9)
xtranormal just gave a sneak peak of their technology to bloggers and conference attendees at DEMO. Webware has a great review of the product
In the demo I saw last night, Xtranormal’s Paul Nightingale wrote a simple script, where he wrote a few lines for two characters, added some emotion tags and gestures, and put them in a setting with a prop. He pressed the “render” button and generated a cute little animation. Quality was very good–certainly better than Saturday morning cartoons. The cuts and angles were automatically generated and kept things engaging.
The product does text-to-speech conversion so you don’t need human actors, but it will also lip-synch recorded speech if you want the voices to sound real.
xtranormal’s homepage shows a few samples. To my knowledge, it’s the first time that a company does 3D scripted scenes and interactions via a web interface, and I see huge possibilities for blogs, or any other social network allowing widgets, for that matter.
Also, I couldn’t help to think about LEGO characters when viewing these videos. Now, I know the lego star wars video games had a lot of success (which is an understatement), but I hoped previously that they would do something similar to The Movies game, where we had life-like characters and realistic scenes.
Of course, it’s just too early to tell. This is just an early release and they are going to do some significant work on their product in the following six months.
In related news, Standoutjobs also presented their product midday at DEMO and you should be able to re-view the video presentation tomorrow.
Greetings:
The short animated videos of XtraNormal do not work on a FireFox browser.
They only work on Internet Explorer.
Regards Robert
hey rob,
that’s weird, because they work for me. can you go to blip.tv and see if the videos there work for you?
Hi Heri,
Thanks for the review. We plan to make more realistic characters as well, and we have the technology for that, it’s just more difficult and time consuming to create (in a art point of view).
Concerning the videos online, we use the latest version of Flash so you should maybe upgrade.
Hi Heri — that’s not a terrible picture of me at least!
Late last night, the Demo 08 conference organizers awarded the coveted DEMOgod award to xtranormal.
Congrats to the team on this accomplishment.
[...] won a DEMOgod award yesterday for their presentation of the service (from Maple Leaf [...]
Ben - yeah, i think it’s a great picture.
Fred, good luck for xtranormal! i think this has lots of potential
Thanks Heri.
Winning the DEMOgod award was a pleasant surprise for us; people seems to like the service :)
[...] are endearing at first, but could eventually grow old. Fred Brunel, an employee at Xtranormal, says on MTW that more life-like characters are on the way.We’ll certainly keep a curious eye on this new [...]
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