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The Dancing
Baby of Ally McBeal fame is back, and this time he can
talk about it. He’s now a real-time animation created
by Gary Jesch of CHOPS & Assoc. Live Animation, to
perform and interact with people at corporate special
events and tradeshows around the world.
Jesch collaborated
with the original designer, Chris Creek, now art director
at DAZ Productions, and Tom Knight, a commercial 3D artist
who owns ImaginationWorks (www.iw43d.com )
in Southern California, to bring the baby animation to
life. The realistic 3D character was named “Baby
G” by Jesch, who said he was inspired by his own
baby pictures, when he received a request from a special
client for a natural-looking baby.
The character
was used in its first corporate product launch by Grupo
Live’s Juan Pablo Neira in Cartagena, Colombia
for the company, Familia Sancela, which makes paper products.
The product launch was in September 2002, and included
Baby G, plus four other Live Animation characters in
the same show. (See our story about this show – “Virtual
Family Unites for Colombian Product Launch.")
One of the challenges facing Jesch
and Knight was reducing the overall resolution of Creeks’ mesh without
disrupting the quality of his work. Creek had done
improvements to the original character about four
times since it was drawn, the most recent being to sell it as a Poser
model on the DAZ website ( www.daz3d.com )
Knight worked on it by hand for about 40 hours to cut the number of 3D
faces in half, after he and Jesch experimented with automated poly-reduction
software. The programs weren’t able to discriminate when they eliminated
faces, resulting in a very disorganized and rough-looking mesh, so Knight
and Jesch decided to do it all by hand. 
Another contributor
to the Baby G project was Carol Imhoff, whose realistic
texture maps were used to give the baby its final appearance. “Carol’s
texture map and modifications to the eyes were the finishing
touches to reach the quality we were looking for, once
Tom finished the mesh,” Jesch explained.
Baby G runs
at about 40 frames per second on Jesch’s Digital
Puppeteer ™ system, which animates him in
real time, controlled by a Face Tracker for lip sync,
a trackball,
MIDI sliders, foot pedals and virtual glove. Jesch also
received support from the creator of Geppetto (www.quantumworks.com ),
Steve Tice, and programmer Jeff Lander, who needed to
extend the capacity of their animation program to accommodate
this highly complex 3D character, with over 25,000 poly
faces.
 Jesch
anticipates that Baby G will be an appropriate character
for other companies who sell baby-related
products. Imagine walking by a tradeshow booth with an
18-month old toddler
talking to people from a video screen, especially when
he sounds like an adult, and has a sense of humor that
is slightly different from what you’d expect an
infant to say.
The character could also serve as Master
of Ceremonies at New Year's Eve
functions and other venues in the special events industry.
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