Warner Brothers

ISBX pro­posed for an inter­ac­tive game mod­eled after the pop­u­lar video game fran­chise, Talk­ing Tom and Friends. ISBX apt­ly named the in-game expe­ri­ence, “Talk­ing Hap­py” which fea­tured an inter­ac­tive ele­ment based on cer­tain touch ges­tures by the user and a cor­re­spond­ing ani­ma­tion after each inter­ac­tion. Some exam­ples of these ani­ma­tions include:

In addi­tion to this, ISBX designed and built a mem­o­ry game sim­i­lar in for­mat to the clas­sic “Simon Says” game. ISBX’s take was to use a series of drum beats per­formed by the ani­mat­ed char­ac­ter, that the user would then dupli­cate by tap­ping the cor­re­spond­ing drums, with each suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion cul­mi­nat­ing in an appro­pri­ate ani­ma­tion. After com­plet­ing three pro­gres­sive­ly chal­leng­ing and ran­dom­ized beats, the user was reward­ed with longer cel­e­bra­to­ry animations.

The final fea­ture involved an actu­al talk­ing ver­sion of the “Talk­ing Hap­py” char­ac­ter, which con­sist­ed of the abil­i­ty for a user to record their voice for any dura­tion of time and then wit­ness the Talk­ing Hap­py char­ac­ter recite the exact same phrase back to them. The user could then save this record­ing and post it up to their Face­book page for social promotion.

In order to per­form the com­plex ani­ma­tions of the fea­ture char­ac­ter, ISBX request­ed for the deliv­ery of the orig­i­nal 3D asset from Warn­er Broth­ers Stu­dios. As a result of licens­ing restric­tions, ISBX was instruct­ed to recre­ate cer­tain fea­tures of the char­ac­ter includ­ing the eyes, skin tex­ture and fur.

To sum up the work involved to cre­ate a sin­gle 3D ele­ment such as fur, would require expla­na­tion of self­shad­ow­ing each fur fiber, ren­der­ing of each indi­vid­ual poly­gon and fur tex­el, under­stand­ing of ver­tex nor­mal and direc­tion of hair growth and a gen­er­al under­stand­ing of 3D com­put­er graph­ics. In short, the recre­ation of these ele­ments was an incred­i­bly labor inten­sive process, but noth­ing ISBX was not up to. After recre­at­ing each of the required ele­ments, ISBX’s team then had to rig the mod­el in order to prop­er­ly artic­u­late the sim­u­lat­ed move­ment of the final char­ac­ter. Each ani­ma­tion was painstak­ing­ly cre­at­ed, frame by frame, from the rigged 3D mod­el and required thou­sands of hours of com­put­er ren­der­ing time in order to cre­ate the sum of all ani­ma­tions. These ani­ma­tions were then con­vert­ed over to a video for­mat and then sliced up into frame-by-frame ani­ma­tions for use in the final application.