For the Warsend project, accuracy is high in the level of importance, especially when it comes to matching the painting up as closely as we can. It was decided early on that we needed to get an accurate gauge of the terrain for the picture, and I was tasked with doing this by using a few different Blender techniques.
Billy assisted with the first attempt, giving me a link to a video that showed off the use of a program called RenderDoc.
Using this, I was able to grab data from Google Maps, and create an initial environment for the terrain.
There were of course pros and cons to this method. Whilst we got a strong amount of detail, it also included items we would not be using in the final terrain, such as the modern buildings not present in the painting. So after some digging, I decided to vary our options and try to use a different method to simply create a height map using data from google maps.
Given that we were planning to populate the scene with models and foliage regardless, having a simple height map seemed like the best course of action, and we went with it for a time.
Unfortunately however, we began to have issues with texturing the terrain correctly, trying to make use of UV projection methods to simulate the same painted effect as the piece we were trying to imitate.
I tried to work alongside Billy to try and get it working, but after some failures, and some advice from other sources, we eventually dropped this concept for the terrain, instead opting for a method of layering pieces of the picture in a way to project the terrain out plenty for the experience.
Whilst my time pursuing this method was ultimately not needed, learning about RenderDoc was a fun experience, and I can see myself possibly using it in the future to grab terrain for far away locations perhaps.
This is my first post documenting the progress I have made on my project as of the date of 28/04/22. I will outline what I have done, what I still need to do, what resources I have come across, and areas I am currently stuck on, as well as reviewing some sources of inspiration.
Initial mood/inspiration board:
These are images I had in mind when thinking about ways to augment the usage of hands. I will keep these ideas in mind as I progress further.
Element 1 – Sword Cutting:
What inspires me – I want to create a system similar to the dynamic cutting one from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. The system is very precise and having something like that in VR would be interesting.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance cutting system
What I have done – The sword cutting element is 99% completed. I am able to cut a box and have the created pieces be made based on the angle of the blade, as well as them having realistic physics. I also added a sound effect whenever a piece is cut for added effect.
What I need to do/Areas I am stuck on -There are a few issues regarding collisions in the center of the box glitching out a bit, as well as pieces falling through the floor and not colliding with the flooring. I also might want to add some kind of visual effect to the cuts.
What resources I have – Billy was kind enough to link me to a useful twitter tutorial for cutting mechanics involving the sharpening of a stick with a blade, as well as a chainsaw cutting wood. Whilst the concept of how to follow said tutorials currently escape me, they may prove useful in future edits to the system. The bulk of the system was made following an old VR fruit ninja tutorial I found on youtube made back in 2016.
What I have done – I have created a rudimentary model to use as controllers for the claw based climbing system. I also spent some time trying to follow a few tutorials online on how to implement it. However, most do not use the most updated XR systems, and thus, were unable to work.
What I need to do/Areas I am stuck on – Finding a way to alter the old code tutorials I have watched to work with updated XR and make my climbing work – Get the fundamental climbing working, and then implement a way of which it is tied to the claws being embedded into the wall, similar to a climbing pick.
What resources I have – Whilst currently not seeming to work, the tutorial by Valem was the most updated I could find online.
Element 3 – Hand Selector
What I have done – Created a UI system available to the player to allow for simple switching of hands for testing.
My initial hand selector UI
What I need to do/Areas I am stuck on – In the long term, I need to develop this UI into a radial menu that the player can access with ease. Something akin to the Half Life: Alyx weapon select system would work well.
Example of the Half Life: Alyx system
In the short term, whilst the UI is present, I am having some issues mapping the buttons to swap controller models with ease. Initially, the buttons were only successfully changing one controller back and forth between models, so I came up with the idea to use tags on the objects to allow both controllers to switch with ease. I have yet to successfully implement this.
What resources I have – N/A
Miscellaneous Notes & Conclusion – My coding knowledge is still very limited, and given all the mechanics I need to create by hand for my project, I may need to find some assistance in a few areas. I’ve done some basic research on development of the whip and cannon and also found I have very limited resources to draw inspiration from on how to code them, so I will need to find a solution or possibly re-evaluate my project and its focus and range.
My virtual trajectories project definitely had its ups and downs, not to mention PLENTY of issues to make completing it a heavy challenge even with help. However, I now know to some degree the steps and requirements needed to design, model, rig, and animate my own character, which is definitely an incredible life skill to have in the industry.
Animating by hand is a skill that definitely still eludes me though. I definitely think without the help from the mocap data we recorded, I would not have been able to get this done on time. Kelvin was also an amazing help with my project and I owe a lot of solutions to the problems I ran into to him.
There were also some outside issues that made completing my project a bit more tricky. My significant other – whom I haven’t seen in two years due to COVID – was visiting during the final weeks of the project, which definitely made it hard to want to put attention to Maya work over her. Thankfully she was very understanding when I decided to sit down and work hard on my project for a few days.
To conclude, I can safely say I owe a lot of the strength my project has to the help I got along the way, but now that I know what to do, I am confident in saying I have some ability to allow me to create and animate a character I need for any project in the future.
Kelvin taught us two different ways of rigging up our characters. Placing the points manually to make a skeleton and connecting them by hand, or by using the quick rig system which I ended up doing.
My character with a rigged skeleton
After getting the skeleton working, I began trying to apply the Mocap data supplied by Billy during one of the in-person classes to the rig.
This caused problem after problem.
To start, I was initially trying to apply the mocap animation to my handmade skeleton. This failed to work multiple times until Kelvin suggested the use of a quick rig.
Then, multiple parts of the model began failing due to weight paints affecting them. The staff and the scarf were the two biggest issues regarding this.
Multiple different skeleton points began greatly affecting the scarf
At this stage of my project, I was reliant on a lot of help from Kelvin. After sending over my file, he was able to get the scarf working, and came up with an idea of separating the staff section of the model to make it its own poly, and then attach it to a point on the rig. Not only did this work for the staff, I was also able to apply it to the scarf section as well, and get the animation looking tolerable to begin with.
From there I needed to tweak the mocap data a bit to remove points where the model had heavy clipping and also try to alter it as best I could to fit the image I had for what the animation was supposed to look like. Once altered, and rendered out, this was the final result of my hard work.
The animation portrays the character calling out for anyone nearby, and when they realise no one is nearby, they become sad.
In year 1, we began learning a bit about the basics of animation. However a lot of what we did use premade animations and simple techniques overall. I still 100% consider myself a beginner on the side of animating anything, and this was pretty apparent when we began learning how to animate in Maya.
A lot of sources have stated that Maya is the ‘industry standard’ for a lot of people when it comes to animation. I can definitely understand this, with many tools and options being available for people to use to perfect their animated characters. However, for someone who has never animated in his life, the number of options quickly overwhelmed me.
For one of our first lessons, we were tasked with animating a sack. Thankfully, it came pre-rigged and ready to work with, but this still didn’t make the job any easier for me. We were asked to try making the sack show emotion, watching a few cartoons and other media to outline the basics of how animation principles work. After a lot of difficulties, I was able to make this:
I tried to make the sack look sad/depressed, having it take a big sigh out before slumping over. I added a small bit where it would look around to see if anyone cared, but then go back to slumping over. While I was given positive feedback regarding my depiction of the sack, I still think I could have done better, with the idea of what the sack feels like being hard to read without me stating it directly beforehand.
Animation is something I definitely need to work on.
It felt nice finally getting back into modeling after so long a break. In year 1, I considered the modeling portions to be my favorite section of all we learned, so I was excited to get back in and start modeling this character.
Using the drawn pictures I made as a basis, I began work modeling up the robed figure. The actual hood itself was a lot more challenging than I expected, and I was glad to have Kelvin around to help me with modeling it correctly.
An error I can see looking back at this now however, is that I did not try to model it symmetrically from the beginning, a point I seemed to miss when Kelvin stated it, and one I would regret later down the line.
The picture above shows how the model looked after a while. With the base bones of the character body created, I got to work smoothing the model, adding the arms, legs and eventually after a lot of annoyance regarding it, redoing the upper scarf-like portion to look more how I envisioned it. Beyond that, I also gave the character a small staff on their back to add to the overall look of the model.
As you can see, I also had begun trying out some material options regarding the color palette of the model, wanting to get as close as I could to the way I had envisioned it overall. After some digging, I eventually found the Toon shader for Arnold, which had an interesting outline feature for materials that I like the look of.
So after painting up the model with shaders and materials, I eventually had this:
I’m honestly really happy with how it turned out when colored. I finally finished the modeling and coloring after a bit of trying out the rigging and animation side of the project. Because of that, you can also see that I ended up making the model symmetrical, to allow for an easier time rigging up and animating my model later on.
With my mood board as a basis, I began to draw up some simple ideas for what I might model my character as. While my artistic skills are incredibly lacking, I like to think I make up for it with creativity in my ideas, and was able to create a lot of different humanoids:
From there, I took the 3 most promising designs and began work on coloring them, using the ideas I learned from other color theory classes during the course to create color schemes for the character, as well as noting down different elements of the model to take into account.
Finally, as much as I’d love to model and rig all of these characters, I needed to pick one for the projects, eventually landing on the white-robed figure.
This was a 30-minute exercise where we were tasked with creating a never-ending VR story based on this picture:
• This man above is the main character • He is a scholar, one alone after being banished from his home • He comes to this rocky cliff every day to climb up to the peak • It is a magical mountain, one that stretches and changes every day • VR element of climbing up the cliffside, each time the trek up becoming more random and dangerous • In the beginning of each day, player can pack supplies to aid them on the climb. (climbing ropes to set checkpoints, food to recover energy, etc) • Once at the top, out from the clouds, emerges a dragon, one that has lived for thousands of years. The dragon is the one who changes the mountain and has lived secluded after living many lifetimes. • Each day, the scholar may ask him one question of his choosing (player given option of choosing different questions) and the dragon may ask one of the scholar (player can answer back accordingly) • Occasionally, the dragon may test the scholar’s knowledge, to make sure they have been paying attention to their talks. (player is tested on the knowledge the dragon has given. If they answer correctly, the dragon is happy, if incorrect, he may become upset) • Depending on how the dragon feels, certain actions/scenarios may take place, • After that, the dragon will fly the scholar back to the base of the mountain. • This experience repeats, with the dragon testing the scholar’s mind and body each time. • Each day, both learn more about one another. The scholar learns of the past, whilst the dragon learns of the present world. • In time, perhaps they may both become friends.
Annie really started this class off with a quote right out of some kind of science fiction piece. Oliver Grau’s definition of virtual reality as a contradiction of itself was interesting to think about and was a fun way to start off this class about what reality is.
Given the subject of my final essay piece, I will come back to the recordings of this session quite a lot I believe. The VRChat video we were shown was very interesting to listen to, as well as discussing the different levels of reality, and the concepts of hyperreality. The Harry Potter set we were shown even brought up fond memories, as I had visited said set prior with my significant other. The question ‘what is real?’ (besides bringing up memories of watching The Matrix) is a very interesting point to make when regarding the gaps between virtual reality and what we perceive to be the real reality.
I’ve stated in the past that I do not believe virtual reality should ever try to focus its attention on emulating the true reality as closely as possible. Rather, I believe the technology of VR is best suited for creating experiences BETTER than reality. To take us to places we could never see, to do things we could never do, as people we could never be. I think these things are what makes virtual reality such an amazing creation.
To begin this lesson, we discussed some subjects regarding the accuracy of sites such as Google, touching on the concepts of fake news and such. The Palestine issue – where it was removed from Google Maps – is definitely an example of when the conflicts of social injustice can impact technologies.
In regards to the subject Despoina broached such as search terms and points of truth on search engines, I personally do not believe these are large issues. Whilst the example of a body given during the presentation isn’t accurate to every person, it never could be. Search terms allow for much-needed points of truth that mimic ones found in other areas such as science and geography. As shown, these points of truth can be skewed such as with Palestine, however, this is primarily done through human efforts, and not the result of search terms. There are reasons these images, sites, etc are popular- and that is because the majority of people quite commonly hold them as standard, and as such, sites such as Google will continue to strive for practicality over perfection.
Moving on from that topic, we discussed the concept of cheating in video games and other mediums. During the class, I gave the example of ‘Screen Cheat’, a game entirely based around the concept of cheating to win. However, given the premise of the game is based on it, and the ideas are part of the rules set in the experience, can it actually be considered cheating? Beyond that, cheating in a competitive sense is strictly looked down upon, especially in gaming, so I do believe that whilst there may be room for cheating in games, there is definitely a time and a place for it, and it should not always be present.
