XSIBase Lipsynch Contest Winner Congratulations Nicolas! Congratulations to Nicolas Longchamps from Montreal, QB, Canada, who has won the January/February XSIBase Lipsynch contest. Nicolas receives as a prize the Mesmer Press book XSI Illuminated: Character signed by the author Anthony Rossano. About XSI Base Community (www.xsibase.com) and the Image Contest Every month XSI Base holds a contest about a creative topic. People can show their technical as well as their artistic skills. The artists who reach first, second or third place receive a prize. The new topic is always announced at the beginning of each month. XSI Base.com is a Softimage community. Besides the forum, you can find the latest news about Softimage XSI, industry news, interviews with professionals from various industries, job openings, learning resources, tools and scripts. About Nicolas (aka Zenboy3000) E-Mail: nlongchamps@hotmail.com Nicolas' Webpage Coming from a fine arts background and a family of programmer analysts, CG arts was a natural career orientation for Nicolas. In 1999 he enrolled at the National Animation and Design (NAD) centre in tv & film 3d animation and CG effects. He was hired straight out of school by 4-elements, and later moved on to Tube Images, where he worked mainly as character rig lead. He is strongly proficient in Adobe Photoshop, Softimage|XSI and |3D. Currently at Digital Concepts, he is aquiring experience in game production. Watch the Final Sequence here! mpeg-1, ~4.3mb Output stats: Cine35 1.66 @30fps / quarter-rez (512x308) 720 frames Passes: Base, Shadow, Iris, Eye spec, Hair Compressed with TMPGEnc Modeling I concentrate on having good topology in all my modeling. Fluid edgeloops affect everything from subdivision to shading to deformation. Shape Creation Shapes are cool :) Face Animation I stripped down the character of all things unessential to the shape animation and animated in a seperate scene. This was to acheive the best possible playback which is important for good lipsync animation. The mouth is hand animated through custom params, whereas some secondary features are animated live via a mouse device driver. The final of this scene is exported as an external action clip. Body Animation Again done in a separate scene. Skin is replaced by non-enveloped lowrez models for optimal playback. Also exported as action. Lighting and Rendering Action clips are loaded to final character. Scene is lit and partitioned to passes. FX Tree Eddie was a powerful compositer. And i'm very happy they brought it back. Passes and Final Here are the base passes and the final result.