Monday, February 25, 2013

Some Progress!

Finally got my puppets rigged up (more or less) with the attack moves via Animation State Machines. I've parented two cubes to the hands for swords, but it's a little makeshift. I'm going to have to see if there's a better way to do that.


Sunday, February 24, 2013

Tic Tac Toe

Update: Tic-tac-toe is correct now! It can simulate automatically and also play with a user. Finally! Back to figuring out Unity now.

Ah!

So I initially brought the mocap sword animations into Unity by having them all on one model, importing the model with animations, and then splitting them using frame numbers in Unity. This seemed to work, but after some reading I realized it might be pain to add on more animations to this model, which I would eventually want to do since I'm starting out with a small subset of motions,  so most of yesterday I tried importing the animations with different files.

I read that you could import just the model.fbx, which contains the mesh and the skeleton but no animations, and then for every animation you can import model@animation1.fbx and Unity will link the two automatically. I'm not sure what I did wrong but I could NOT get Unity to recognize that they were the same. I tried all kinds of different export settings from MotionBuilder and different names but it would NOT work. So I started investigating how I can link them up manually by creating an animation controller and building up the animation state machine. This is good because I wanted to make a motion graph for my animations anyway, and the animation state machine that Unity provides seems to do the job. I know there are built-in 3rd person animation controllers in Unity but again after some reading, it seemed like that wasn't the best option for what I want to do and that I should build one from the ground up.

... we'll see. It's frustrating that this is all such unfamiliar territory but like I said before, I guess that's the learning process?

On the game tree side, I realized my tic-tac-toe game had some issues as after extensive testing, the computer didn't always pick the best option. Trying to nail down where those errors are now.

I haven't left my house since 5pm Friday... going a little stir crazy! Thankfully my mom sent me a few pictures of my (12 year old) baby dachshund and the newer addition to our dachshund family at home to keep me motivated.


Thursday, February 21, 2013

Some Practice

On the advice of Dr. Lane I made a Tic-Tac-Toe game to practice implementing Game Trees. I wrote it in C# so I could get use to the syntax differences for Unity. It was actually a bit trickier than I thought it would be, there are a lot of things to consider (and a few different ways to implement it)

I also brought my motions into MotionBuilder and exported them as fbx files that I can use in Unity. I chopped them up but am still working on the character controller. I haven't found a good clear method for doing it with imported animations and I'm confused as to how Avatars come into play.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Slow Progress

It was a really busy week (thank god Alpha reviews got pushed back) because we were hosting a Relay for Life event on Wednesday --- so much work!

BUT I did download a couple of c3d's into Motion Builder and I've been working on cutting them up into individual actions (they were all one long file). It looks good so far.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Motion capture is cool but...

I met with Dr. Lane on Monday to go over the papers I've been reading, where I'm at, and what I should be most concerned with going forward. We decided the most difficult part is going to be implementing the game tree search (unsurprisingly) but I finally feel ready to get some actual things showing up on my screen now.

He showed me the CMU database for captured motions and they actual will do just fine. I think motion capture is one of the coolest things ever, but in the interest of time I'm going to try to work with these motions instead. It's not everything that I want but it's a good start and if need be I can always capture a couple.