Week 9: Scrambling to Find Our [way]

Oh, what high hopes we had last week…

…but hello, everyone! Apparently, the Assorted Softwares I Have Never Had Prior Experience With (mentioned last week) proved to be far more formidable foes than I had originally expected them to be—to no one’s surprise, of course. Sit back and relax as I struggle to find a suitable path with which to continue pushing this project along!

I. Remocapp, How You Have Let Us Down…

The software I had showered with such optimism in my last blog post—a software that should have worked perfectly IN THEORY—ended up bringing us nothing but disappointment this week. Try as we might, Cindy and I simply could not get the second camera to connect or calibrate with the software, despite how smoothly the same process went with Rokoko Vision previously. (It was such a shame, really; Remocapp claimed on its website to capture full-body motion simultaneously with facial expressions, on top of its fluidity and markerless technology. Would have worked perfectly!)

It was back to the mines for me, then, to scour the Internet for possible alternatives. From v-tuber applications to simple personally-designed softwares floating around Reddit forums, I looked through pretty much everything that sparked even the tiniest bit of hope. Eventually, Cindy and I agreed to settle on a rather shaky solution: using Radical Motion, a browser-accessible and normally paywalled service that captures bodily movements alongside facial expressions just like Remocapp theoretically should have. This software’s free version technically only allows one user to export 3 files per year…but Cindy and I figured that, since we were going to rely on free trials and loopholes anyway, we could gather our numerous alternative Google accounts to create numerous alternative Radical Motion accounts! 

Thus resumes our conquest of the second layer of our project, the realm of facial mocap. So far, Radical Motion seems to be working as it should, and so are our numerous accounts—but of course, we really don’t have a track record of smoothly progressing through new stages. 

II. Cutting Off Vixen’s Wings…

…in a good way. 

You see, a previously mentioned problem with our character models was that parts of their clothing (armor, accessories, tricky armpit areas) would move incorrectly as if glued to the wrong parts of the body, thus completely distorting their appearance. I’ll admit, I had been putting off fine tuning this problem for a long while due to the daunting prospect of having to learn weight painting in Blender. As it turns out, learning a singular tool isn’t actually as terrifying as, say, learning an entirely new software. I managed to marginally clean up the “wings” under Vixen’s armpits (pictured below), but there are still some rough bits that evidently need to be polished. 

Next victim—Kai! 

III. “That Last Lap in Mario Kart Where The Music Gets All Fast and Stressful”

As we enter the home stretch, all the remaining loose ends that still need to be tied up are piling up at an alarming speed. Backgrounds, weight-painting fixes, animation clip tweaks, facial expressions, finishing up the game dialogue alongside Cindy—it all seems almost dizzying. Thankfully, we should at least be able to push out some beta testing later this week, so we’ll at least receive some much-needed feedback on the functions and visuals of our game thus far!

That’s it for this post, and see you one (hopefully very productive) week later!