facial expressions, capture of emotion for avatars in real time

These Tiny avatars were first created in Second Life, this short was not shot in SL machinima. Instead, Till tells me, they recreated the Tinies on other platforms to make them more commercial: "This is real animation like you might see on TV or an animated movie from Pixar or Dreamworks," he says. "All characters were created (once the looks had been fleshed out via sketches) in Maya. Every aspect created from scratch. UV's, hand paintings, skin weights, etc. We hired talented people to then rg the characters, which is adding a complete muscular-skeletal system for each character. The environment which in this instance is the jome, walls, tables, couches, all the things big and small that make the surroundings that the characters inhabit was done in Blender and Maya. Exterior shots are matte paintings. There are many other points that are transparent to the viewer that needed to be done as well. "Yes," he acknowledges, "it's much more expensive then shooting machinima in a virtual world but you also get something that looks much closer to what you would see on the big screen or television." Now comes the even harder part -- taking this assets and finding big mainstream entertainment companies to partner with. Wish them well, and read the full update on the Raglan blog here.