I love how this class finds work around for things. Last week we learned how to animate without coding and this week we learned how to make characters without 3D modeling. Mixamo is a program that lets the user create a character based on a set of options similar to the character creation system in videogames such as the sims and skyrim. Fuse lets you pick body parts, clothing, and even textures to create your ideal character. Once a character is created, it can be uploaded onto the mixamo website where one can choose an animation to apply to it. 

I downloaded fuse onto my personal computer and got hooked on creating characters. I decided to recreate some of the characters from the matrix. It was fun looking at a reference picture of the actors and trying to replicate that in 3D. I was able to make Trinity, Morpheus, Cypher, Switch, and of course, Agent Smith. In my scene, Agent Smith is standing in front of an army of clones while our heroes are standing(and sitting) across from them. I added a storm particle effect for the atmosphere and downloaded an audio clip from the movie and used playmaker to trigger it when you walk towards Agent Smith. I did not have time to design the environment, but for the next assignment I hope to get some more assets so that I can recreate some of my favorite scenes from the movie. 

There were some difficulties when working with mixamo right off the back. Although the program has a wide variety of options, there were some things that I just could not model. For example, the actor who played Morpheus has a very distinct texture on his face. I was not able to replicate that with fuse. A program like mudbox would be able to texturize his skin properly but fuse does not have that function yet. Another thing that I found annoying was that I could not unbutton the trench coats in fuse or dress the characters up by layer. I would just like to see more customization with the program in the future. It is a very useful alternative to 3D modeling and a lot more fun!