jPCT Birthday E-Card

[paulscode]

My wife's birthday is in a couple of weeks (May 3).  She likes personalized things like home-made cards, crafts, etc.  She prefers gifts that you have to spend a little time to make, rather than taking the easy way out and buying her something.  So I decided to make her sort of a 3D "E-Card" using jPCT.  (She never reads these forums, so it's safe to talk here )  I'm thinking a 3D animation of a guy and a girl who embrace, music in the background, and a message popping up.  I've already finished the man character and am almost done with the woman character.  I am using photos of my wife and me to texture them.  They don't look a lot like us, but it is an acceptable approximation.  I'll post my progress here, as well as the finished applet (after her birthday, of course, so she sees it first).  Any ideas are welcome, although I may not be able to implement them since I have a pretty tight deadline for this project.

[Melssj5]

I would do a video 3 studio max instead of doing an e card.

[fireside]

It's good practice, but when you paste photographs on humanoid figures it usually ends up a little creepy.  Art is all about abstraction and symbolism. The point is you did it rather than going out and buying a card, though. 

[paulscode]

I would do a video 3 studio max instead of doing an e card.

I will be creating the animations in max in order to create the keyframes, so I suppose that is always an option if I run out of time.

It's good practice, but when you paste photographs on humanoid figures it usually ends up a little creepy.  Art is all about abstraction and symbolism.

I like creepy  .  Seriously, though, I noticed that before, so I tried to avoid the creepiness when creating these humanoids.  The models themselves are very organic, asymetric, low-poly.  Then, rather than try to fit the models to the textures, I cut, pasted, resized pieces of different photos to create a low-res UV map, giving them a somewhat abstract quality.  The end result do not look like they are trying to be perfect , but still recognizable as representing us.