theMinnow's Blog

SALSA with RandomEyes Manuals Available Online We've converted our lip-sync and eye-movement product manuals to an online format. Our hopes are that this change will better facilitate potential… View More

We've been hard at work on some new 1.3 features, and we thought we'd take a minute to show off a couple. In RandomEyes3D custom shapes, we've replaced the [Custom Shape Count] field with an add button that adds one new custom shape per click, and added a new delete button [X] to every custom shape, so you'll have granular control when managing your custom shapes. We've also added a new auto-link button that will automatically link all available BlendShapes. Just above the button, you'll find a check box that, when… View More

The response we get from our Unity asset, SALSA with RandomEyes, is kind of funny. People either think,  "Wow, that's awesome!" or "Hrmmm, it's OK, but not very accurate." - primarily focusing on the lip-sync aspect of the Unity package. Unfortunately, the group wanting Pixar results doesn't really understand what the asset… View More

For those of you that have been following our recent attempt to update SALSA with RandomEyes to version 1.2 on the Unity Asset Store, you've seen our pain and frustration with the process. As a potential… View More

I recently had a desire/need to limit the light from my Cycles light panels (lights created from mesh objects with emission materials). I searched high and low and eventually found some indications that this might be possible in the nodes setup of the emission material. The default action in Blender Cycles is that mesh materials are visible from both sides, whether they are emissive or not. This particular behavior is a bit different from what you see in some 3D viewports, such as with game engines like Unity, where the backside of a face… View More

At Crazy Minnow Studio, we are proud owners of a couple of iPi Express edition licenses. We're using the Kinect to capture mocap data and we're generally very excited about this technology. Compared to other solutions we've tried, we've been able to (relatively easily) capture some basic motions that we've used in some of our promos for SALSA With RandomEyes. Recently (about 30 days ago) we discovered a new player in the mocap arena,… View More

Our new SALSA with RandomEyes version 1.2 is feature complete and nearly ready for release. We're going to run it through a few more implementation scenarios just to be sure we didn't introduce bugs along with the new features. Stay tuned for the official release details coming soon! We smell a release celebration sale in the… View More