Sometime things just seem to fall into place.

I treated myself to a little birthday gift. I was looking at trying to incorporate Papagayo lip-sync data into the .MHX2 rigs and was getting nowhere trying to get the humanoid models to:

A) accept .dat targeted lip-sync data

B) accept and merge multiple motion caption files

C) export all that to Unity and look nice

For whatever obsessive reason, my brain cannot come up with game ideas that involve characters that are static blobs / robots with very little animation / monsters with one or two simple expressions, meh and pure volcanic rage.

Nope – I have to have humanoid NPCs – somewhat realistic, and certainly with enough responsiveness and emotion on par with Saturday Morning Cartoons… Talk about a challenge.

So when I encountered lip-sync packages on the Asset Store, I did some research and settled on LipSync Pro. Having a bit of animation experience I knew the more phonemes a character has, the more realistic dialog will be, and LSP seemed to fit the bill. It even works with Fuse characters, which aren’t as impressive as the .MHX2 rig – which works beautifully with Tore Knabe’s Realistic Eye Movements.

So I installed LSP, downloaded a Fuse model and amused myself with some impromptu dialog recorded from my three year old. I got big laughs from the kids when I showed them a sample of a truck drivin’ redneck dude asking for treats because he used the potty.

Suffice to say, I was impressed with the results and began wondering how else I can use this. I started rebuilding my VR Bum sim because I was getting atrocious frame rates so I’m pulling all my assets back into Blender to see how many polys I can slash off everything and optimize the level. Sovereignty is on hold until I can get some new dialogue recorded and I have a ton of 2D game design before I can start on my platformer based on my kids artwork.

I was scrolling thru some old projects when I happened to see my old 3D animation work folder and I searched it for things that I could adapt into a VR diorama. And lo and behold, my ‘learn Blender’ project  – a music video for Mojo Nixons “Ufo’s Big Rigs & BBQ”

So, I’m chopping it down to a minute length – adding various animations to the Fuse character, a background and will add some 3D animated video to it so it looks like the Fuse character is delivering a performance in front of a screen playing highlights of the song.

I asked on /r/vive if people would like to offer feedback on a WIP and they seemed pretty desperate for any VR content, so that, coupled with the itch / drive to put something out there, will have me busy for a while. VR is only going to get bigger and more crowded, so the quicker I can get my name out there, the better. Here’s hoping its worth it.

So, all Dev work has ground to a halt with the arrival of my Vive.

I’ve been delighting in room tracking (even though my office is standing room only), I’ve been amazed at tracked controllers (now I REALLY want a VR version of Thief, after playing the Longbow demo in The Lab – being able to actually use a bow to shoot water arrows, or use a controller as a blackjack would be indescribably satisfying)

But, with my many an hour spent agog in VR, its hours less spent developing my own work. So, after dragging my feet a bit, I fired up Unity to see what I could do to convert my DK2 projects over to SteamVR.

Its a completely different way of doing things.

I completely broke all of my experiences and in the case of my BUM simulator, broke my level geometry and have to scrap and rebuild it all from scratch. Because I discovered something wonderful.

In the Steam VR examples is a IK scene, that allows your controllers to control virtual arms, attached like real arms would be in the virtual world:

Ye gods, if I incorporate that into my scene, you could shake your cup to rattle it! I am so excited this possibility exists  now the tricky part – figuring out HOW to make it work. My google-fu yields nothing – not any teases on how that got made or how I would adapt it to my character  and if I would have to rebuild my character from scratch, or simply rename parts of it…

On top of rebuilding everything else too…

Last week the Cleveland game devs had a Level Up workshop, focused on Unity and Playmaker – so I signed up, enthusiastic that I could unlock some more of the mysteries of Playmaker and game mechanics.

I was not disappointed. Our moderator, Bill, jumped in with a basic endless runner prototype using primatives and simple FSMs, and soon our cubes were colliding and jumping on command. It got me thinking about the platformer I want to make using my autistic son’s artwork.

I showed the kids my work the next morning, and they gleefully smacked the spacebar to make the little cube hop on command. I started up Audacity and recorded their delighted sounds and snuck them into the FSM. Their eyes grew wide when they heard their own voices yelling ‘jump’ when they hit the spacebar. I made a few more tweaks to reset the level if the player cube got knocked off screen.

I can see how this sort of game is so popular for beginner devs – its quick, easy and has an iterative cycle thats easy to add mechanics and playtest. It makes me question if I shouldn’t focus on one as a means to generate quick income. The HTC Vive is going on pre-order next week and I could really use the money.

So, last week – things got a little sidetracked. Getting ready to go to church and my eldest slips and cracks his chin on the steps. MIND YOU – he was holding the handrail AND MY HAND when this happened. All the times he has walked down those steps holding a load of toys so large he can’t see over them; slip down the steps on his butt, refused to hold anything and do it with a blindfold while juggling chainsaws – nothing. But the minute we’re taking the slightest precautions… BAM – four stitches.

THIS week, my youngest has reverted back to his very needy; meltdowny phase. The running joke is that he clings to me like I was the last chopper out of Saigon. It had been slowly building for the past few days (maybe based on the amount of attention his brother has been getting) but last night he wanted to take his sippy cup into the bath with him. A small, innocuous request – one I easily agreed was fine. And I told him so.

For reasons that will baffle and confound me to the grave – it led to a hour and a half meltdown that no amount of hugging, cajoling, bribing of sweets, threats of all-boys-Christian-scared straight-military- academy, offers to buy him a college education, buy him a mountain of candy, or anything else, would fix. He then proceeded to wake a few times during the night – which led to a co-sleeping session, something I haven’t done with him in many moons.

And yet – game dev MUST continue.

I’ve been listening to a Udemy course on FPS and Playmaker, and while a lot of these courses are retreads of the ‘here is the interface / options / how to get started’ lectures, I do tease out new nuggets of advice and tips each time I listen to one. This time I was able to put together the physics I needed to make a couple of balloons on strings behave like they should, swaying in the breeze and bouncing off each other in a realistic way. I was so impressed with it, I’m tempted to make it the load screen…

I was also able to attend a ‘Level Up’ lecture with the Cleveland Game Dev group – a one in a while chance to hang with peers in the area who have similar interests, and learn a bit about making pixel art. I’m still interested in creating a point-n-click or side scroller based on my eldest and his artwork, so it was a welcome break from kids and the oppressive weather keeping us indoors and the kids constantly battling each other. I’d love to be able to spend more time with the local game dev group, but the demands of daddyhood often leave me tired and they only meet in my neck of the woods every so often.

So – what’s next? I’m currently struggling with Playmaker, Mecanim and getting meaningful acting out of my MakHuman and Fuse characters and trying to learn the new Quixel suite – both of which have been daunting and I’ll be venting about here soon enough.

Or: How I Learned to Stopped Worrying and Love .MHX2

So I just had a major breakthrough (I’m hoping!) with my NPC interactions. I had glanced once or twice at the work Thomas@MakeHuman had been doing, but in my earlier, more sleep deprived days of DaddyDev, I never quite grasped the concepts he was working on.

Ye gods, I’m so freakin’ thrilled I went back to take a second look.

I took one of my MakeHuman characters (the subway token booth clerk) and, after installing the .mhx2 files in Blender and MakeHuman; I re-exported him put him into Blender.  Granted, I had to grasp there was an advanced options switch on the Blender import side – but once I activated the face shapes, I was blown away.

I had visemes (phonemes) already plugged in. I could export expressions from MH. Once I added the MakeWalk addon, I could import Mo-Cap .bvh files and apply them to my rig. Delving into the online manual (and a profound thanks to the dev who still does written manuals, I’m sure I will rant yet again about how much I hate video tutorials) I saw there were even more options to smooth out the mo-cap motions, edit the location / rotation of bones and once I figure it out, append other .bvh files. What really blew me away was the ability to import MOHO (.dat) lipsync files from Papagayo. And I loaded visemes ON TOP of the already loaded .bvh!

With the ability to make a character walk, talk and emote, suddenly a whole new facet of story telling opened up for me. Since I’m not big into programming, I’ve been using Playmaker to handle some of the basic interactivity; and after seeing the dev who made the wonderful Rift demo, ‘Coffee Without Words‘ made an asset that mimics human eye movement – my NPCs came alive.

Be forewarned, my demo video is NSFW; I made a MH woman with some extended clothing assets, I didn’t realize the bathrobe was translucent, so you see some breasts.

Lastly, after having tinkered with this for a bit, I got an email saying that Adobe had released Fuse, a character creation that tied in with Mixamo and the Mechanim animation system Unity now favors. I tried Fuse, made a character, got a walk animation added and plopped it in Unity (and Blender too, just to see what it would do, if I needed to tweak it)

The character worked, it did its walk cycle and looked ok after I changed its skin shader from transparent to opaque. I did notice that it can be lip-sync’ed, but only with a $35 additional purchase, and a new piece of software to learn and try to integrate. When I pulled the Fuse character into Blender, it was huge, distorted and had no face-rig that I could discern.

So Fuse wasn’t all that tempting, considering I’d have to shell out $$ for SALSA, and I suspect Adobe will be quickly adding a subscription fee like all its other products, I’d like to keep my dev budget as free and OSS as possible. Perhaps I’ll just create and export a bunch of random characters to populate my subway scene with, since MakeHuman doesn’t have the widest range of clothing options, the Fuse NPC’s will shake things up a bit visually.

Now I have to sit and watch about 2,000 .bvh animations to find what actions I think will go well with my actors…