Devlog 03-02

This class is really getting to me. As of right now, I am the only person sitting in a classroom working on this devlog in the dead of night. Don’t get me wrong, this has been an interesting assignment, but at the same time this project had a shorter timeframe than the others and that is stressing me out.

But work is work, so I’m going to do it. The main things I did were research for the White Paper and working on animations. When it came to research, the special thing is that I found nothing special. And I mean nothing. I have only found two games that use blink detection. The first game, as discussed last log, is Before your Eyes. And no, I haven’t played it yet. Still wish I could. The second is one called Soliris. A cute little game about stopping pollution.

Animation Woes

There were two ways I could make the animation. The first is that I make a fluid animation. Hope that the programmers have a way to pause it whenever someone’s eyes are open. The second is that I could make individual poses that the game would jump to whenever someone blinks. Personally, I wanted to do the first option. If this prototype had people watching, I think it would be fun to show a smooth transition. Think of the weeping angels. From what I know of them, their positions show that they were in some form of movement before being stopped. However, it was not meant to be.

There are two main mistakes that prevented me from using that option. The first is the way I weighted the model that I’m using. The model was done with auto weights and as I have. Never made a model with so many bones in the face, I just assumed what they gave me was correct. It was not, and I would find myself struggling to move the cheeks up without moving half the face.

The second mistake is the Rig I decided to use. I went with a humanoid rig provided by a Blender add-on. As said before, this rig looks nice, but it has a lot of issues in the face. The only reason I went with this rig was because I had already attached the hair rig to it. By the time I quit, there were over 30 items being modified by the animation. And just to let you know, this animation isn’t even completely done. He’s in a partial T-pose for the entire thing.

So instead I went and “animated” 4 different poses. The reason I said animated is because I made the poses through the animation tool. The idea is that whenever someone blinks, it would update a response to move it on to the next animation. This animation is only one frame long, so it’ll just loop on forever.

Well, I wish I could do more… but I’m stuck with what little time I got. Just hope I can finish the surveys in time.