Gaming

Performative Avatars / Week Eleven / Final Project Concept /  by Pippa Kelmenson

Assignment:

  • Working alone or in collaboration you will create a virtual being. This may be a completely new character, your 3D scan, an existing person (ethically), or something in between. It can be based on the 3D work we've done in class or an entirely different form (2D, puppet, knitted stuffed animal). With this virtual being you will create a short film, an interactive experience, a performance, or a digital intervention that responds to the conceptual topics explored in class. You may give a live demo in class (time permitting) or a presentation on the project with documentation. Your presentation on the final day of class should be 7-10 minutes.

  • Things to consider:

    • What form does your virtual being take?

    • What platform makes the most sense for your virtual being?

    • How does this virtual being and the project around it respond to discussions and topics we've explored in this class?

    • What is the best way to present this project to the class in consideration of the time you have?

Moodboard:

Response:

Performative Avatars / Week Six / Race / Wrap3 / VRChat Interviews /  by Pippa Kelmenson

Assignment:

  • Morph your 3D scan using Wrap3

    1. Write a blog post with screenshots or screen recordings of your 3D scan in DAZ

      • What worked and what didn't work? What did you struggle with in this assignment?

Response:

After resizing and orienting my 3D scan in Maya (video here), I was able to morph it in Wrap3 (video here), and then rig it in Mixamo (video here). I still have yet to import the textures into Mixamo for animation, and reformat my avatar’s eyesockets in Wrap3.

Performative Avatars / Week Five / Gender / 3D Scanning / Parallel 3+4 /  by Pippa Kelmenson

Assignment:

Using one of the scanning apps work with someone to scan your head. Write a blog post with a photo or screen recording of your scanned head. What was difficult about the 3D scanning? What worked and what didn’t? Does this scan feel like an accurate representation of your head? Any technical challenges you had with this assignment?

Response:

Since I haven’t been tested for COVID-19 at Tandon in the past two weeks, I discovered that I’m now not allowed to physically go to ITP until my next test this week, so unfortunately I couldn’t take advantage of the itSeez3D camera at school. Although my roommate and I tried numerous times to scan my body with both the ScandyPro and Capture apps, it was incredibly difficult to settle on a scan that we were happy with. After trying many different methods (scanning with an iPhoneX front camera while mirroring to another iPhone 11Pro, having my roommate walk in circles around me, and keeping her still while rotating myself in the shot) we finally got a usable scan, only to find out that ScandyPro would only let me download the .obj file if I subscribed to their monthly services. We found the best method to be when she held the phone while I rotated slowly, but even then the scan would cut off parts of my legs and arms due to my distance from the camera and movement. I decided that this week I’ll get my COVID-19 test and return to ITP to have someone scan my body properly with the itSeez3D app and associated hardware.

Update:

After days of trying to get a useable 3D scan with ItSeez3D, I finally got one! As it turns out, the app only reveals that you’ve captured details like noses and hands in your 3d sketch after rendering them to the cloud in Hi-Res.

model_preview.png

Performative Avatars / Week Four / Violence / Remapping Bodies as Canvas / Parallel /  by Pippa Kelmenson

Assignment:

Work with your avatars and the Sequencer tool to create a short film (1-2 minutes). Use your third person character and this tool to record you controlling the character and then bring it in as an animation to work with Sequencer. This short film does not need to be overly polished or considered.If you feel like going for it great, if you are just learning the tool and trying some stuff out, also great!

Why did you make this film? What concepts in Unreal Engine are you still struggling with? Any technical challenges you had with this assignment?

Response:

Addressing the topic of Unreal Engine’s Sequencer tool this week, I had trouble distinguishing the difference between BlendSpace 1D, Animation Blueprints, and State Machines. When making a new animation, do I use BlendSpace 1d or do I use a State Machine? Do I need to set up new State Machines for different action sequences? How do those correspond to objects in the scene or to keypresses (that aren’t space = jump)? First off, I wasn’t able to launch the sequencer due to an error message claiming that I was out of video memory. After changing the Paging File of my PC, I got fewer errors, but also learned to save more frequently!

For my environment, I imported a pre-made project of a subway train reminiscent of the MTA in New York, but couldn’t figure out how to adjust my character’s jumping velocity/height to be so that she could jump onto the subway seats, while not hitting her head on the top of the train. I then wondered how I could approach my animations in different positions—for example, since I only downloaded a sitting animation (rather than a sitting pose) from Mixamo, I imported that alone into my project, rather than importing my character’s Animation Blueprint and applying the animation to it. After spending hours playing with the different cameras embedded in the project’s template, I found that the Unreal Engine interface made it difficult to alternate between cameras and to control each camera’s position. In the future, I would love to find out how to smoothly control cameras’ movements diagonally, while being snapped to a grid, as well as how to include duplicates of a character (~30) while all performing 1 synchronized animation.

The film I ended up producing is a short depiction of how I have been feeling riding the subway since the COVID-19 pandemic. Oftentimes in my neighborhood, I can’t walk a single block without running into at least 1 person who is without a mask. When it has been necessary for me to take the subway this year, I have been incredibly frustrated that several of those people are on my train and are willing to put others at risk in an (already dirty) enclosed space. Add that to the dumpster fire that is 2020 and the MTA, and you have this:

Performative Avatars / Week Three / Ownership / Digital Spaces / Animation /  by Pippa Kelmenson

Assignment:

Continue working with your skeletal mesh in Unreal Engine 4 to expand its movement and animation capabilities. Write a blog post with a screen recording of your skeletal mesh with an example of a more complex animation. What concepts in Unreal Engine are you still struggling with? Any technical challenges you had with this assignment?

Response:

This week, I tried Fuse for the first time to create a 3D avatar that resembled me (without scanning my body), which I found to be much more helpful than Daz Studio. That said, however, exporting my character from Fuse into Mixamo gave me some problems: while the app offers the ability to import the avatar directly into Mixamo, it kept giving me errors about logging into my Adobe Cloud account. After a few tries, I instead exported my character from Fuse as a .obj file, separately from my materials and textures. I was then able to upload my character, with its associated textures and materials in their own folder, to Mixamo in a T-Pose—which I then uploaded to Unreal and sorted into folders accordingly. I then tried applying my textures to their materials (bodymat, shoemat, bottommat, topmat), but got stuck at 0% in Unreal when uploading the files. After disabling Incredibuild, I was able to follow this tutorial for materials & textures, and later Matt Romein’s playlist on Blendspace1D, Animation Blueprints, and State Machines.

Some issues I ran into include:

Exporting my Fuse character with associated materials and textures into Mixamo seamlessly

My avatar being separated from its animation capsule, resulting in the character gliding across the screen with the up/down/left/right arrow keys, while performing the assigned animations*

An incredibly slow computer!**

*I found out that the error was due to an unchecked “in-place” box in Mixamo, resulting in glitchy animations

**I also got access to a newer computer for the semester, so hopefully now it won’t take 30 minutes to open Unreal Engine!