Week 10: Sprinting [through] the Fog

Progress has indeed been made, everyone! Welcome back to a slightly more polished project and a considerably more optimistic blog post. This week, I’ve tackled most of the “loose ends” I was referring to in my previous post: weight painting, revised/smoother animation clips, and backgrounds…but, unfortunately, no facial expressions yet. 

I. Progressing Through Everything BUT the Face

Before we grieve over the sheer impossibility of getting facial animations to work, let us first rejoice over the other areas in which I have made progress this week! After last week, in which I smoothed over Vixen’s webbed-armpit-looking chunks of clothing so that he didn’t transform into a flying squirrel every time he raised his arms, I tackled Kai’s issues next. His most glaring problem was the fact that the plates of armor on his chest did not seem all too rigid when he moved anything in his upper body, since they would twist and mold to the shape of his movements. To make the armor seem more METAL and less FABRIC, I figured out how to parent the armor mesh to only a singular bone so that it would only conform to the movements of that bone rather than those of his skin/clothing. As for his “wings,” my own shoddy workmanship in creating his original clothing mesh proved a fatal handicap in weight painting—I could not manage to smooth out the problematic faces without carving gaping holes or strange undulations in the fabric in the process. Thankfully, Kai’s “wings” were not as egregious as Vixen’s from last week, so after smoothing out all that I could without utterly deforming his clothing, I reimported both characters into Unity and began the process of revising the animations. 

With the help of RADiCAL Motion (Remocapp’s replacement software, mentioned last week), I was able to re-record much more fluid versions of some of our choppier Rokoko Vision clips. As you readers might recall, however, obtaining access to this new software wasn’t originally supposed to provide a means to refine old clips—it was intended to pave the way for the elusive “Tier 2” of my project, the movements of the face. Unfortunately, this is where all the animation progress screeches to a grinding halt. Try as I might, I could not get the facial expression data captured in RADiCAL Motion to transfer to my armatures in Unity, despite both characters’ faces already being rigged. This new roadblock definitely calls for another deep dive into internet forums and research, since I cannot come up with any reasons for the animation malfunctions at the moment. 

II. A Fresh New Look…with More to Come

On a brighter note, I have FINALLY begun my work with the 2D backgrounds this week, starting with the title screen:

From here, I’ll continue churning out more backgrounds for all the different scenes of the script—and if I can finish all of THAT by the end of next week, I can potentially get started on illustrating the black-screen-white-text “cutscenes” we currently have in the game. On the beta-testing side, Cindy and I will likely be sending out questionnaires to everyone upon their completion of the game (or what we have of it so far). In this way, we’ll be able to evaluate how convincing/immersive each of our contributions were, thus providing us with results for the entire project!