VR Clean Pass! And Updates!

 Hey everyone! 

It's another busy week here at FIEA, but I've been working hard on some animations that I'm excited to share with you all! 

While I have also been working hard on the quadruped walk cycle project and my own portfolio animations, I have also been hard at work on my VR animations!

This week, Team 3 has been hard at work on further developing our animated character, Dr. Frankenstein. Aimee worked hard on re-topologizing the mesh for animation and it looks great! I had much better results with the animations this week. Less breaking bones and more fun to be had! It was a good time! 

Thanks to Bailee for the stellar rig, too! She made a really fun rig to play around with and I was stoked! The clavicles and shoulders were awesome and gave the character an extra dimension of animation! 

This week, I worked on some new and updated Dr. Frankenstein animations! I continued on the trend I set from last week, giving him more dynamic ways to interact with the environment.

This week's animations are much the same from last week's general ideas, except they move a lot more smoothly and naturally. Thanks to the new rig, I was able to make the hit animations more dynamic. Like, he goes flying now when he's hit in the sides, front, and crotch. I had to keep that in there because you know what people want to do when they get into a VR game... hit things where it hurts! 

One thing I learned from the playtest last week is not to set the Skeletal Mesh in the environment for animation, but instead to set the Blueprint in the environment. I was curious as to why the state machine wasn't working at all, so that was definitely it. Once Bailee put the proper version of Dr. Frankenstein in the scene, it started moving again! 

As for the State Machine, we are still working on it, but with Thanksgiving, progress has been slower than I've wanted it to be. Thankfully, the state machine does work... I just need to find a way to get all the collisions to properly detect. And I need a way to get the Booleans working.

Unfortunately, since the due date for this round is tonight, I haven't been able to find a backdoor solution for these problems, but over the break, I was planning on getting my hands dirty and figuring it out! 

Speaking of backdoor solutions and impromptu problems... PERFORCE!

So, Perforce gave me a bit of a hard time with my animation blueprints today. Like, an abysmally hard time. So, I go to re-connect Bailee's new skeleton to the existing Animation Blueprint, I add the new animations, compile... And then...

I get an error. That I can't write the file to Source Control. Something about having an old version of the file, despite updating it literally minutes before adding my new changes. 

I try to bypass and nothing happens. I try to check out the blueprint. Still nothing. Better yet, I can't check the file back in.

So, out of options and uncertain of what to do, I.... 

Duplicated the blueprint. 

And added THAT to Source Control.

So, Dr_Character_AnimBP is no more.

Now, our new blueprint is Dr_Character_AnimBP1 is our new juice and jam.

I have no idea what happened or how to fix it, but I at least was able to find a way to submit my work for this weekend! I'll discuss solutions with my team once we all reconvene.

Besides the glacial speed of Perforce when I am away from FIEA, the project has been going smoothly! I was able to push all of my animations into the Depot and the VR project yesterday and they were properly implemented into the State Machine and engine today. While technology is always a fun issue to deal with when you are remote and on holiday, I feel like I was able to cope with these issues effectively to help my group out.

Speaking of Perforce, yes I am now aware that I submitted screenshots of my Workspace in my previous post, so I am excited and utterly stoked to tell you that I have taken pictures of the Depot this time! Woohoo! Progress and Rookie Mistakes!

So, where else am I going with these animations? Well, I'm going to seek further feedback from my peers and teachers and continue to iterate on these animations. Now that Dr. Frankenstein has better topology, I can make him raise up his hands at an angle or back up anxiously. He has much more room to emote now, thanks to the awesomeness of my teammates, and for hat I am eternally thankful.

Also, thanks to Patrick suggesting that my initial HitLeft Animation looked like Dr. Frank shooting up illicit substances, now, DrFrankDoesBadThings.fbx exists! 

So! Goals for next iteration!

• Fully figure out the State Machine
• Make more dynamic tentacle/claw animations
• Figure out the grabbing mechanic for objects at various sizes
• Continue to iterate on Dr. Frank's animations
• Figure out what the heck happened with Perforce

So, yeah, that's about it! I hope you enjoyed reading a little bit about my process today! I hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving with all of your friends and family!

Peace! 

VR Animation Progress - State Machines and Character Animations!

 Hello everybody in the world!

It's me and I'm BACK with another weekly progress update for my VR Project. This week, I've been busy creating some fun animations and implementing them in the engine! It has been a lot of fun getting my animations in engine, while also working closely with my team and adjusting some animations based on feedback and the overall VR experience. 

So, this week was my first time EVER using VR at all. It really felt nauseating but it was also a lot of fun. It also showed me first-hand some of the pitfalls associated with my VR animations, so I'm back to the drawing board with a few of the tentacle and claw animations. 

One thing I noticed is that the remotes and props kind of "phase" through my arms due to the fact that I didn't animate them to scale with the remote. So, something I will be trying to do this week is animate them with my props directly in Maya, so I can make sure stuff isn't clipping through the hands. 

Thanks to wonderful collaboration between me, Zach, Aimee, and Bailee, I have been able to really get a feel for animating with VR in mind. My stuff is far from perfect, but the more I iterate on it, the more comfortable I get.

So, before I really get down to the brass tacks, let's check out a quick reel of everything I did this week! 

So, we have our first proxy model of Dr. Frankenstein in engine! I was having issues with some deformation due to issues with geometry, but it's a proxy model, so that is to be expected. For a proxy, Aimee really did an excellent job and I had a lot of fun doing wacky things to Dr. Frankenstein! 

So, I mentioned that things were put into engine. The question is HOW? Well, I uploaded all of my animation states for Dr. Frankenstein and then popped them into an Animation Blueprint. Then, the real magic started to happen, as I brought an animation state machine to life! 

Above, you can see the animation state machine pumping life into Dr. Frankenstein! In the video below, he's actually moving and breathing in Unreal! I've recorded all the work I did with the Animation Blueprint and Character Blueprint as well. I'll go into further detail about those in just a little bit. Here's that video first! 

So one of the coolest things about this whole process is I got to watch my animation come to life before my eyes through the power of Booleans and animation states. It was cool to watch Dr. Frankenstein go from static to moving with just a few clicks of the mouse! 

What's even better is that he moves in the simulation of our game. Wanna see? Come check out THIS video! 

For further reference, here are those animations in engine. As you can see, each of them is in a unique pose, which corresponds to the animation I created in Maya. 

And here is where the magic is located! I made an Actor Blueprint Class and Animation Blueprint. Bailee set up the Skeleton and Physics Asset, while I stuck to making my animations work both in and outside of engine. 

For further clarification, here is that State Machine again. I have the Idle, Action, and two hit poses. I've also added some "fun" poses to the mix, which I commented out separately. These poses include a crotch hit and a ragdoll animation. I want to work to make them work succinctly in engine, but I am happy with the result I've gotten this week. That just means I'll need to iterate for next week! 

Here is that Event Graph for you as well. This is part of the Character Blueprint and essentially lets the engine know whether or not to start a particular action. As you can see, I have assigned some Booleans on the bottom left--  IsMonsterNear, IsGettingSlapped, and IsIdle. These names are subject to change, as I would like to discuss them with the group after this week's workshop. 

Here's another look at my Character Blueprint! One pitfall I had was I was having issues with getting the white sphere out of the picture. I couldn't select or move it, but other than that, I had no issues assigning collision and a capsule to my model. Now, he's got some collision for our monster to interact with! I do want to speak with the group regarding the size of the collision, but I think this is a good start for a character proxy! 

And here is that moment you've all been waiting for-- PERFORCE! Here is a screenshot of me adding about half of my files to the project. I took this after I'd added my animations, which I will show you below this image.

And here is the VR Depot folder, where all of my animations and .uassets live! This is where I uploaded all my Doctor, Remote, Claw, and Tentacle animations in the past. We also have an Art Depot, which I will show below all this. But yeah, it's a lot of files and I think my group has done a great job of creating helpful directories for everyone to follow. It definitely made doing the state machine much easier. 

Speaking of directories, here's that directory structure! I tried to include my FBX, MA, and MB files to make everything easy for my team to find. And don't worry, I'm also importing the files in engine correctly too, so I can get the .uasset files! I just like keeping this structure so my team can find stuff no matter where it is. It's like a failsafe inside of a failsafe.

Since the structures are the same, I've decided to open up the Art Depot file structures, so you can see what I've submitted over the past few weeks. These are all the FBX, MA, and MB files. To clarify where there are so many types of files- FBX is what Unreal needs, MA is what my team prefers, and MB is what I prefer, so I figured a happy medium would be to save them all in the Depots! 

This is the spot I put all of the Dr. Frank raw files, so no .uasset files here like above! These are all my new animations. All six of them have been saved in the appropriate 3 formats.

Since you just saw the Dr. Frank file structure, it should not surprise you to see that the Remote file structure is largely the same. Three file types, multiple animations. That way, the object has plenty of states. Pressed, unpressed, and being pressed! 

Now here's where the real fun starts... the TENTACLE! You can tell I've iterated on this a lot because there are a ton of individual animations. I added a new Slap animation this week, which is in this picture. 

I called it TentacleSlapBigger because it is a bigger slap than the previous one. I wanted to add it to the tentacle state machine, but wanted to get feedback from my group before doing anything too dire. So, we will see if they like it tomorrow. I just didn't want any surprises to hit anyone over our workshop in Common Art. 

And here is the same thing I did as above, but for the claw this time! I have been working hard on this too, which is why I added a couple of new animations to the reel at the top of my post. I'm still trying to make the crab claw more dynamic, but since crabs largely use door-hinge physics on their claw, there is not a lot of exaggeration I can do without the animations looking uncanny.

But, huge props to Bailee for keepin' it real and helping me with all of the feedback! She was an MVP when it came to helping me with my art process and animations. She was great with giving me helpful advice on how to make my VR animations look better and interact with the environment more.

Alright, so yeah. That's my file structure and that was how I spent a lot of my week. I will continue meeting with my group to get the animations right for workshop! 

See you all next week or during the workshop! 

Animation Progress- Walk Around the Clock!

 Hello everybody in the world! Mackenzie's back with a whole new bag of tricks! 

I'm still learning, but I'm delighted to share with you that I have learned a lot more about Maya in the time since Industry Review! While I'm not perfect (nobody is), I'm happy with the strides I've made in my animation, tech art, and 3D modelling since starting at FIEA.

But you came to this post for animation, now didn't you? 

So, let me show you what I've been up to! 

So here are my animation projects for this week- I took Box Fox and Boney and made them do a little walk. I wanted to have time to get to do the run and idles, but you know how time goes. It never stops moving! 

Maybe I can have my animated characters help me prep for my upcoming 5K... we can run together!

Okay, that was just cheesy! But, it's true. I'm going to keep working at my animations and try to attempt a run cycle in the coming days. Look out for it!

But, in the meantime, I've taken it upon myself to learn a little more about MotionBuilder this week. Not just because there was an assignment... Well, mostly because there was an assignment. But honestly, it's cool to know how to apply the motion capture data that we take in our MOCAP workshops. 

And also, one of my favorite games is almost entirely motion capture. If you know me well enough, you know which one. 

But Wonderworld aside, I attempted a MOCAP animation! It's not perfect, but I'm happy I was able to actually pair the magnets properly to my actor. My first rendition looked like a Slenderman-esque creature. Glad I didn't take any video of that nightmare fuel. 

Okay, seriously now! 

MOCAP incoming!

Sorry the video is so long. The MOCAP data itself was long. And trimming it is not a power I have yet. So, each walkaround is about 38 - 40 seconds, hence why the whole dang thing is almost 5 minutes. As you can tell, in my first renditions of the MOCAP experience, I had issues with his hand bending. I kind of fixed it as I went on, but I still had issues. 

Overall, I learned a valuable lesson with this assignment.

There's a lot that I don't know yet!

So I'm gonna keep learning. 

See you soon! 

VR Progress

 Here is some of the stuff I did for VR this week:

I will continue to iterate on this, as I keep working with the rig more. Between last and this week, I have done at least 10 different animations for the claw and tentacle. 

I am excited to see how this all looks in engine. Overall, I am slowly getting the hang of animating in Maya, which has sped up my process a bit. Hopefully, I'll keep getting the hang of it, as I will probably have to redo these again.

Not sure, though. But we will see.

Thank you for reading. I'm overall happy with the results of this animation session. Gonna keep at it.

VR Animations... TAKE TWO!

First post of November! 

Here's an update regarding some of the stuff I've been working on! 

I've been hard at work on project after project after project, but I figured I would drop in and let you know about the progress I've made on the VR project for this week! 

I hope you liked the way everything turned out! There are some static poses in there too, just in case we need them for the state machine. I tried to think of everything, but I am always open to suggestions of other poses. 

The most difficult part of this whole process would have to be the crab claw. In my first iteration, my animations showed too much of the crab claw moving, when in reality, just the pincher opens and shuts like a door hinge. So, I had to use mainly just those parts of the rig. 

Funny thing is, even when crabs are running or moving quickly, they keep their claw pretty still and extended directly out in front of them. They only move the pinchers when grabbing food, looking for a mate, or attacking something. So, that's why the rest of the crab claw doesn't move at all. It wouldn't be accurate. Super-props to Aimee for the diagrams she sent regarding this! I definitely looked at those and some crab gifs to get inspiration! 

The diagrams in question are above and below this text!

As for the tentacle... there aren't many images of octopi grabbing things from a first-person perspective, so I had to use my imagination. Of course, I'm also open to feedback on the movement, too. I do think I did much better on this one than the original iteration. The first was too all over the place and it actually broke the mesh in very many places, so it was a necessary change.

But yeah, that's pretty much the process of creating the stuff. 

The easiest was the button, which was just a single object moving down.

I am looking forward to getting my group's feedback! I will update this post if anything changes!

I am going to sleep now! ZZZzzzzzz