I had a hankering to try building a test character using implicit surfaces since that’s what that game Spore used.

Basically instead of describing a surface with verts or NURBS, you use of fields which generate spheres, capsules, boxes and whatnot. When the fields get close enough together, they start to gloop together to create a continuous surface. These objects are known in Blender (and probably in many other 3D apps) as metaballs whether or not they’re ball-shaped.

In Blender at least, metaballs are something of a pain in the arse to turn into characters – you have to parent individual metaballs to individual bones instead of just the usual Armature modifier, and there seem to be weird little rules about what you can and can’t do with them.

There’s an especially weird trap where they are influence-grouped by their name (“family”). One ball becomes the master ball for that “family” and other balls named after it will interact with other members of that family.

Metaballs of the same family all have the same material and threshold of influence. If you want to put a metaball in a different family, you have to rename the object. You can have multiple metaballs per metaball object – the nose and horns on this guy are all one metaball object.

Metaballs can be positive or negative. Negative balls can sculpt away positive balls. As with many things in Blender, extra fun is often to be found by hitting TAB with objects selected. 🙂

So. Not as nice to work with as verts, but as you can see you can make metaballs move around and look vaguely characterish. Even if they’ve got no arms. (The problem with walk cycles is that you can spend all day tweaking them and I have to go to bed at some point. Hence why this sucks a bit.)

Also, IK necks – how good are they? Damn good. Definitely doing more of those.

Barcelona Rooftop HDR background image from here. (sIBL Archives.)

The constructed language has had a first pass in interlinear text. So instead of rushing into writing down actual words, I’m writing down glossed grammatical structures like ART-3s_SENT [planet]-GOAL [far away] fly-PASTPERF-3s_SENT. This lets me sketch the language at a high level without having to invent words or even choose the range of sounds that make up the words first.

I don’t know how this first language fits together well enough to actually translate all the dialogue in the screenplay yet, so I have to go back and decide that some time this week. I’d probably have figured it out tonight if I hadn’t been messing around with metaballs. 🙂