I can’t believe it, I’ve handed in my dissertation! It is such a strange feeling knowing that that is my last piece of university project work complete. It’s been an amazing four years, and I’ve learned so much, it’s weird to think that it is over. But I’m really looking forward to the next chapter of my life!
I have to have a major shout-out to Unreal Engine for this one. This tutorial series was fantastic, and without out I could not have set-up my character in-game! (Zak you are awesome)
I only have three animations in at the moment, an idle, walk and run, but she is completely controllable and it works on device! From here I can start to add to these animations and make everything more complex!
After my tests of bringing in the rig to an empty scene, I thought bringing the rig into my honours project would be a simple test, but turns out that unreal really did not like it.
Eventually I worked out it was because Maya 2014 was not exporting the .fbx file cleanly, and I needed to export the .fbx, re-import it to Maya, clean the scene, then re-export it. So what I thought was going to be a 10 minute process ended up being a four hour of faffing trying different exports and import setting, and lots of unreal crashes before I managed to fix it.
I have to remember this exporting method, as I will have to do this for all animation files (with the addition of baking the animations).
Todays task was to bring the rig into unreal engine! I had worked through this process in EUCROMA, when I had to bring rigs into Unity and thankfully it was a fairly straightforward process, with a friends help. The only part that I will have to be careful with is making sure I select the correct joints when exporting my animation cycles.
To test the rig out, a short animation was created and you can see the two main poses below in engine (screenshot).
The next step will be creating some animations and trying to link them together using Unreal’s animation controller system.
I finally started putting together my assets inside Unreal and I have a working build on my tablet!
I have a lot of work left to do, but I am really pleased I have something working on tablet as this is my first time using Unreal and building a game. I need to work on the shader, as currently everything looks kinda plastic, and I obviously need to replace the blue man with my character, but this is a firm step in the right direction!
Today I finally started working in Unreal Engine 4, which is all new and a little scary. During Dare I never worked in engine, so Unreal is foreign to me. I have used Unity before, so I have a little experience with game engines which helps, but I am effectively going to be learning a new software package this semester – so fingers crossed!
I imported my test scene, and I’m glad to say there were little issues with scaling. I can see I have some reversed normals on the windmill, but that is easily fixed. I’m using the third person blueprint template for phones and tablets, which has the character controls already configured to what I am needing. This meant I had the default character running around the build in a couple of seconds, which was great.
The only issue I am having is performance. My computer is four years old now, and unreal really slams it, without having a high poly count/lighting/effects. This means I am going to have to work smartly and try and do everything in Maya. My plan is to work on a map with the untextured base landscape whilst setting up all the controls for the animations and applying the blocking volumes. I will then have a seperate map, with only the windmill hill in it, which will be used to set-up the shader and basic lighting rig. Another map will act as my final map, which will combine the set-dressed level (exported from Maya) add in the shader and lighting and the animated character.
I have been looking into animating performance in movement for my next set of tests and these are notes on papers I have read relating to character performance and believability.
Below quotes from:
El-Nasr, M.S. et al. 2009. Believable characters. In: Furht, B., eds. Handbook of multimedia for digital entertainment and arts. Boston: Springer US. 2009. pp.497-528.
https://www.trinitylaban.ac.uk/sites/default/files/imports_2834
“Rudolf Laban is considered one of the most important movement theorists of the twentieth century and the founding father of modern dance in central Europe…. Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) is an open theory of movement that is applicable to any area of human movement investigation.” [57,58] (p.517)
“Another concept of importance is phrasing. Phrasing describes how we sequence and layer the components of movement over time. A movement phrase is analogous to a verbal sentence, or to a phrase of music, in which a complete idea or theme is represented. A phrase unit involves three main stages: Preparation, Action and Recuperation. Our uniqueness is expressed through our movement phrases: individualized rhythmic patterns and preferences of Body, Effort, Shape and Space.” [57] (p.518)
“Warren Lamb worked closely with Laban in the late 1940’s… [19] His interest in behavioral analysis led him to create a theoretical model and assessment technique called Movement Pattern Analysis (MPA), which relates decision-making to non-verbal behavioural styles.” (p.519)
[19] J.Hodgson, Mastering Movement: the life and work of Rudolf Laban: Routledge, 2001.
[57] P. Hackney, Making Connections: Total Body Integration Through Bartenieff Fundamentals:
Routledge, 2000.
[58] C. L. Moore, Beyond Words: Gordon and Breach, 1988.
I’ve been jumping in and out of Ed Hooks “Acting for Animators” so here are some other points I have been considering.
Seven Essential Acting Principles (p.11-12)
1. Thinking tends to lead to conclusions, and emotion tends to lead to action
2. We humans empathize only with emotion. Your job as a character animator is to create in the audience a sense of empathy with you character.
“The way this works is that they see what you character is doing, and then tune into the emotion that led to that particular action. In the dark street example, if an audience was watching you reach for your pepper spray, it would recognize that the way you are doing that is a result of fear. And the people in the audience will feel fear, too, because of empathy.” (p.14)
3. Theatrical reality is not the same a regular reality
4. Acting is doing; acting is also reacting.
“A character’s reaction has everything to do with that particulars character’s values… My point is that different people react in different ways.” (p.22)
5. Your character should play an action until something happens to make him play a different action
6. Scenes being in the middle, not at the beginning
7. A scene is a negotiation
//To me, 1, 2, 4 and 5 are the most applicable to what I am doing. If humans only respond to emotion, and actions are emotion-led, then one way to improve player engagement would be to add more emotion in to how a character completes actions. Acting is re-acting is what I’m stressing in my project.
Seven Basic Emotions
There are seven basic emotions that are universally recognized: (p.63)
Happiness
Sadness
Anger
Fear
Distrust
Surprise
Contempt (a feeling of superiority).
Videogames
1. Eyes
– “Eye contact is a status negotiation” (p.68)
2. Empathy
– “One of the requirements of empathy is distance. What that means is that a game player cannot empathize with a character he can control. Cut scenes work as they do primarily because, while watching one, the player cannot control the behaviour of his character.”
– “The way to evoke a more nuanced emotional response from the player is via “buddy” or “Companion” relationships. ICO was the first came I know about that featured such a character, the blind girl Yorda.” (p.70)
3. Humour
– “Games are chock full of deadly serious, angry characters.” (p.71)
4. Motion Capture
– “Motion Capture (mocap), which is used by many if not most game companies, is inherently flawed in terms of acting… Mocap makes everybody, actor included, think about movement too much. When you think about your movement, it automatically stiffens.” (p.72)
5. Credibility
– “The reason we see these kinds of unrealistic reactions in games is simply because honest and believable reactions take more time, and cost more money, to animate. The produces figure it is a game after all, so probably nobody will notice. This kind of reasoning will have to change en route to stronger performance. Character behaviour must reflect what real humans actually do…” (p.73)
6. Dialogue
– “Remember, acting has almost nothing to do with words.”
7. Male/female relationships
8. Can a videogame make a player cry?
– “Speaking as acting teacher, I have to say yes, of course it will eventually happen. When designers finally solve the empathy problem that is inherent in games, tears and all the other emotions will not be far behind. Empathy is key.”
Walt Stanchfield ‘Drawn to Life’ Volume 1
“It is utterly impossible for a person to do nothing.” (p.126)
After reading Sloan’s paper yesterday on ‘Agency in Animation’, one quote stuck out:
“Procedural animation is often employed within game play to ‘automate’ the actions of characters to a great extent, emphasizing lifelike adaptive movement more than performance.”
What I plan to do today is see if I can bring in some character performance to what are normal physical movements. Having spent a couple of days doing walk cycles, I want to try the next basic movement: running.
As its been a while since I last animated a run, I started with a generic run. For reference I used a run on 6’s from Richard William’s ‘The Animators Survival Kit’. However, once I exported it I realised it was far too fast for I wanted and looked more like a sprint than a run.
To help with the timing, I dug out my old copy of Skyward Sword and had a run around skyloft with Link. I discovered than running on 6’s is what Link does when he sprints, but his ‘normal’ run is a little slower. I played about with the timings and found that running on 8’s is closer to the speed I wanted. It looks more of a fast jog, but I think the slower timing makes the animation more readable, and give me the couple of extra frames to play with posing and overlapping. Oh, I also realise there is a bit of a weird pop in both cycles, to help with looping the cycles, I’ve now animated the camera to follow the character (as I want to keep forward translation so I can adjust the posing easier and not have slidey feet issues) but it’s not perfectly aligned hence the slight ‘pop’.
I know I said I wanted to bring in performance, but unfortunately this took a lot longer to do than I had thought (6hours instead of 2 because I spent ages experimenting with timing) so I’m going to use the above run as a base and over the next couple of days, I’m going to start animating variations.
Honours Year 