With as much success as I had last week making progress and getting the project set up, the end of this week put me several steps backwards.
I started out prepping some of the audio clips we need for the project, because so much of this experience relies on these mob members yelling unrelentingly terrible things at you. In the past we recorded a few basic chants that we heard in our research and put them in as placeholders on repeat with a few individualized phrases yelled from avatars. There’s a little more dialogue in this version, and Tori recorded a variety of different mob interactions so that we could create a more dynamic audio experience. I went in and cleaned up each of the clips, balanced the audio, and then compiled some of the takes into a “group chant” to help ease the load in the Unity scene.
Group chant compilation in Adobe Audition.
With that task complete, I started in on getting the car introduction completed. I had all the avatars in last week, I just needed to separate some of the animation clips, set up triggers, and begin timing it out. I quickly got in over my head setting up all the parameters for all four characters, so I scaled back and began just getting the timing down for Federal Marshal 1 (driving). Then I added in the second Federal Marshal and Lucille Bridges. There was a slight scripting issue I had with the audio repeating, but jumped that hurdle and got to where all of the characters were reasonable aligned.
From here I was ready to develop the transition from the car to the sidewalk for the user. At the end of the video above I noticed an issue with one of the marshals snapping back into the drivers seat - as it turns out, the rig in Unity was still set to generic, while the Walk animation was imported and set to Humanoid. The walk animation wouldn’t play, and the avatar resets. I switched the rig, and chaos happened. The rotations of the rigs were causing some intense offsets to happen from where I originally had the avatars set, to the point where making the adjustments was near impossible. I brought the problem to Tori and we discussed it a bit - this is a video I sent her last night of the issue I was having:
We decided the best move from here was to just have Tori animate the sequence in Maya with the car model, so all I would have to do is bring it in and apply the scripts. It’s going to take a little time to get that process going so I’m currently at a bit of a standstill (also waiting for the rest of the mocap characters). Once I have that animation back it’s probably going to take a bit of adjusting of the script to get everything cooperating again, but at least all of the characters will stay where they’re supposed to be on-start.
Next Steps
From here, it’s kind of a waiting game. I need to get the assets from Tori to move forward. Once I have that, I’ll set up the intro sequence again and get them moving down the sidewalk by the end of the week, ideally with starting the interaction at the end. It’s a bit of a setback but I think I’m still in good shape to finish out this coming week on schedule.