The Mushrooms of Mushrooms Labs

The Mushrooms of Mushrooms Labs stay for a set of promotional contents I'm making to attract people towards my projects. The main goal here is to explicitely send a message to artists around the word:

Yeah! You can even make toon characters with Curved Poly and the Shadow Framework

Concept

Mushrooms Labs are virtual laboratories making research on Computer Graphics Techniques and developing many Computer Graphics Applications and Games. Everything work around the promotion of Curved Poly and of the Shadow Framework, the two most important things ever made in the labs. The Labs are leaded by a real person (Alex, that is me), with the help of 9 little virtual assistants, having the look of humanoid mushrooms puppets.

The choice of the Mushrooms theme is not casual. The mushroom shape (which is the icon behind all my projects) was the first model ever made with the Shadow Framework and for a long time it has been center of a lot of tests and experiments. So it has mostly a symbolic meaning in the whole project history by now.

Moreover, each mushroom is the icon of something which relates to their owner and creator. So each one shows parts of my skills. Clearly, Cody and Proofy represent some of the most important of my professional skills, that is coding, researching and teaching, but this is not enough. There is much more since I wish to support this project on every aspect and make everyone know the many ways Curved Polygons Nets can be integrated in virtual reality projects, especially for Real Time Applications.

Yes, I know you think I must have been smoking mushrooms at some point. I didn't. Indeed, I was mostly influenced by some recent animation movies, the most important being 9(nine), which is the reason why there are 9 mushrooms. Also, I've been influenced by Despicable Me movies and stole some interesting ideas while watching the anime taken from The Seven Deadly Sins. Maybe, not everything is clear to you now, but it's going to be much more clearer once all the mushrooms will be revealed.

Meet Cody

Cody is a smart Software Engineer and he knows a lot of different programming languages. He is a bit fat, and he enjoys put his keyboard on his own belly. He uses is mouse like a handgun. Both the mouse and the keyboard are wireless and he can code everywhere without the need of screens, so he can keep both of them always attached to his belt. He is always pretty enthusiast about everything, but he may look a bit rude when other people find it hard to understand his technical reasons.

At Mushrooms Labs he has a lot of responsibilities, being the only engineer and therefore the only one having a deep knowledge of any technological aspects of what we make. Since the labs are virtual, everything needs programming code to work and Cody can fix everything with his tools.

You will see him many times on this site. I plan to have him accompany me mainly during technical tutorials. He is also the guy (sorry the Mushroom) working on technical issues on the site.

Meet Proofy

Proofy is a dedicated researcher and the mind behind the theoretical aspect related to Curved Polygons Nets. He has spent the last months trying to fix the math behind the Filling Algorithms of the ShadowFramework, which are the most important key for the success of our projects. This way, he allowed all of us to proceed generating the contents we are sharing on our site, and started the development of real applications.

He likes spending ours around math formulas and he never miss his notebook and his pen. He also likes a lot to explain everybody what he has find out after hours of researches.

You will see him many times on this site. He will be my best companion during many tutorials and lectures, especially the ones requiring theoretical digressions and less coding.

Development

The Mushrooms have been the hardest thing to model with Curved Poly, since they have been created during the alpha of the project of the most important of its tools. I've been using everything here, that meaning I had to work around any missing, broken or bugged feature from the ones in Curved Poly - Shape Control and Curved Poly - Maker , and still (to be honest) not every detail of the models is as perfect as i wish.

Cody was the first one. I've tried to make it at least 4 or 5 times. Proofy was much faster and took 10 hours modeling overall. During the modeling, I've spent many time getting back on the code and trying to fix stuff which was clearly not working as intended. The developmnent itself of the mushrooms models has been an important test case to understand what was good and what was wrong in Curved Poly. That said, each time something get improved, and I definitely believe the modeling on next Mushrooms will go smoother.

Furthermore at the time this article get written, the Mushrooms are still more shaped than animated, but of course I'm working towards an animation solution (if you want to know more, you should read the article about the Lizards in My House project). Soon, i should be able to release a few Augmented Reality short videos with me, Cody and Proofy as protagonists on my Youtube Channel.

What's next

Cody and Proofy will be my assistants in a set of animated tutorials and video lectures I plan to release soon, most likely this summer. The objective of this tutorials and videos will be to make it more accessible the knowledge required to understand Curved Polygons Nets and all the technology on this site. The use of this little virtual assistants will play an important role in making the lectures more entertaining and eye-catching, since che concepts behind Curved Polys may be hard (this is pretty common in Computer Graphics), and I will need all the attention possible from people trying to understand them. Of course, all this make sense since i mean to reach the biggest audience possible. I also plan to have some short sketches, in order to allow the audience to rest a bit in the middle between two different parts of a lectures.

The remaining seven mushrooms are connected to specific projects which are on my schedule and which are still a work in progress. They will be revealed at a second time. I plan to reveal at least 4 during 2019, and the others during spring 2020.