Meeting Notes and Weekly Goals:
This week’s meeting entailed how the rig issues that previously prevented the animation stage from starting are now at a malleable and workable stage in which all beach scene animations are a priority and should be completed within the course of the week. As well as this good progression was made on the Ice cream mini-game, as well as the development of the unity/ Maya rig tests.
This week’s Aims:
.Complete all personally assigned beach scene files (Interaction 4)
.Resolve any last issues that may prevent gameplay function in Unity
Issue Resolution: Non-Functioning Rigs in Unity
an Issue Marianna encountered when animating one of the interactions was that the animation, when imported into unity, would not apply to the models. After meeting with the VR students, it became apparent the importance of finalising the rig and model before importing and animating sequences intended for unity.
Using a process I discovered the last term when I had a similar issue regarding a non-functioning rig containing well-developed animation information, I exported Marianna’s animation for interaction 3 as an Anim file and imported this onto the most updated version of the rig in which I had fixed some issues regarding the rigging and skin weighting of the beak. While most of this importation was safely transferred, I had to reanimate the beak speaking in time with the relevant audio as the information could not be transferred onto a rig that did not previously exist. Despite this, the resolution was reached and functioned just fine in unity after engaging in a Microsoft teams meeting with our teammate Cal so we could test directly how well the process worked. Due to the nature of animated games, in which a finalised rig is required to apply animation information in the games engine, animated films can use a referenced rig that updates with the animated information. Proceeding with this information in future I will assist to create a cleaner pipeline in which myself and the other animations are definitely working with the same rig. This will further be prevented by the fact that my and my future collaborators’ rigging knowledge will be more in-depth, especially regarding functions in engines such as Unity, that will prevent issues needing to be consistently fixed.
Animation
As mentioned by Fothergill and Flick on the ethics of human-chicken relationships in video games, the idea of chickens being symbolic of cowardice and domesticity is strongly associated with its comedic effect (2015). While in the context of our project, seagulls in themselves are viewed widely as irritating and inconvenient to humans on a daily basis, which gives a further implication and suggestion for the use of violence in-game. A key aspect of the gameplay for our project is the ability to pick up objects in the environment and use them to attack the seagulls, especially in regards to this interaction here, and bring to attention an important aspect of gameplay. Due to society’s embedded behaviours, it seems obvious to a player without specific instruction that the intention of the game is to inflict violence on the bird who is causing you the most personal irritation. This is expanded by Bucher, who suggests that a key element to the success of a player to advance in a non-linear narrative is the “continued reliance on linear logic” which in its own way implies that the player themselves is the key driver to the narrative rather than a camera (2018,p.84) I feel societal association works to our benefit for this particular project, however, leaves questions for more ethical considerations in future. Violence in video games is something taken as a given, even in its comedic form, and especially for a game that in its aesthetic appearance seems harmless in presentation. It insinuates potential underlying factors that create the product to have a problematic ethical response. Especially in the first person, fully immersive experience of the Oculus rift, where it seems far less distant than simply watching a narrative play out through the confines of a screen. As discussed by Matthew Cotton, Immersive VR systems are considered “empathy-arousal” tools that can be utilised to ‘stimulate empathetic engagement towards marginalised or vulnerable peoples’ ( 2021: 113). In this instant, by using violence as a comedic effect it brings to attention a line perhaps that should be drawn through this incorporation that will be beneficial to consider, especially by what it represents in anthropomorphic characters than embody some kind of human experience. This being said, seagulls in our current climate are in some danger brought to attention by environmentalists, which may spread a negative environmental image to players.
The nature of this interaction is to engage with the viewer and their place as a ‘seagull’ who is part of the conversation at hand. The use of the ‘stick’ or piece of washed up driftwood for the player to take first-hand was something interesting to consider when approaching this piece, as the use of constraints in Maya was something that would not necessarily function the same in unity. Taking this into account, I broke the animation down into 5 separate FBX files that the VR students could then trigger and engage in based on player interactivity. File 1: The triggered initial dialogue between seagull A and B. File 2: The Looping animation, engaging the viewer to take the stick. FIle 3: The interactions between seagull A and B after the stick has been taken. File 4: a looping animation that awaits the player to hit seagull A with the stick. File 5: The interactions between Seagull A and B once this action has been triggered.
Breaking these down into the different files proved very useful for the VR students when coding into the unity file the different interactions. However, I feel this is something we should have regarded earlier on in the project, as the structural ‘shot’ planning could have been produced more effectively.
Speech Bubble Design for Sky Scene
For the sky environmental scene, the only ‘animation’ required was the speech bubbles that will be interacted with the skyspace. For this, I used my previous designs to work in cooperation with Marianna to create bubbles that appear rudimentary in concept but paired with movement appear to have a charm to them. Reflecting on our overall use of speech bubbles in regard to this project, I feel we perhaps could have considered character and emotional portrayal more with the linework involved. For example for the stupid seagull, creating the lines is a specific way that encapsulates his ‘simplicity’ such as lots of easily curved lines, whereas we could have used sharper, more dynamic lines for seagull A to accentuate his frustrations and more depth of thought and feeling.
I think that by incorporating a more ‘foul’ linguistic approach, it tries to separate itself from a younger audience despite its inherent childlike aesthetics that perhaps will assist in pushing forward the use of animated media in the adult world associations.
Critical Reflection on Animation Process
During this week we were productive in our endeavours to complete the first three scenes, the Beach, the Pier and the Sky, which was our minim aim for the 10-week project. This being said, we still needed to develop enough to at least begin animation in the city environment. Going forward with game student collaboration, I feel I have a much deeper understanding of how Maya works in relationship to game engine requirements, and will allow a much longer and more developed contingency time for aspects such as rigging, and will produce animated FBX file tests much earlier on to identify issues sooner.
References
.M. Cotton. 2021. Virtual Reality, empathy and ethics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
.B. Tyr Fothergill and C Flick. 2016. The Ethics of Human-Chicken Relationships in Video Games: The Origins of the Digital Chicken. SIGCAS Comput. Soc. 45, 3 (September 2015), 100-108. DOI: hht://doi.org./10.1145/2874239.2874254