Introduction to Character Animation

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En provenance du cours de University of London

Building Interactive 3D Characters and Social VR

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University of London

Building Interactive 3D Characters and Social VR

31 notes

Cours 4 sur 5 dans Specialization Virtual Reality

Meeting another person is one of the most amazing experiences you can have in Virtual Reality. It is quite unlike communicating through any other medium except a real life face-to-face conversation. Because the other person is life size and shares a virtual space with you, body language works in a way that cannot be done on a flat screen. This course will enable you to create realistic social interactions in VR. You will learn about both the psychology of social interaction and the practical skills to implement it in Unity3D. We will take you through the basics of 3D character animation and how to create body language. You will learn about how to make characters that can respond to players’ speech and body language. You will also learn about avatars: the virtual representation of other players, and agents: computer controlled NPC characters and how to implement both of them. As many people have said before us, social is the future of VR. This course will help you become part of the future of Virtual Reality social experiences.

À partir de la leçon

Introduction to Virtual Characters

In this module you will start to learn about the role of human-like characters in VR. Characters can represent other real people: avatars, or they can be computer controlled: agents. Either way they are the very foundation of social interaction in VR.

Introduction to Social VR and Virtual Characters5:09

Virtual Characters | Realism5:56

Agents and Avatars5:25

Applications of Virtual Characters11:59

Introduction to Character Animation3:00

Designing Virtual Characters7:38

Rencontrer les enseignants

Dr Sylvia Xueni Pan
Lecturer, Department of Computing
Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr Marco Gillies
Senior Lecturer
Computing Department, Goldsmiths, University of London

Animating human like characters is much more complex than an animating other objects.

Humans generally do much more complex things than tables or

chairs and we're much more attuned to human movement than to that of other things.

We will notice very small areas in human movement

which we just wouldn't notice in the movement of the car.

We generally divide character animation into movement of

the body and movement of the face and use different techniques for each.

Body movement is all about movement of

the skeleton and bones are hard so they don't change shape much.

Instead, most of the movement comes when we rotate tied joints like the elbow.

This means that the skeleton is the key thing that we animate.

The face, on the other hand,

only rarely has one movable joint, the jaw.

But there are still very important movements and social signals in

our facial expressions that come from small movements of the muscles of the face.

The eyes are probably the most important part of the face when it comes to

social interaction and they use different techniques again.

Like bones, it is very much about how they were tied to look at things.

There are two basic ways to animate characters for VR: using

prerecorded animations or generating movement using procedural simulation.

A prerecorded animation is a sequence of poses

of the character that can be played by it to create movement.

They can be hand animated using keyframe animation or

recorded from a real person using motion capture.

This kind of animation is not that flexible.

You can only play back what was

recorded and it can't be adapted to what you need in the moment.

But you can use different techniques to select

an appropriate animation clip in response to what is happening.

Unity uses a method called state machines.

The benefit of prerecorded animation is that you can

achieve complex and realistic movements so,

it's well suited to sophisticated full body or facial movement.

Procedural animation is about generating movement in real-time from code.

A script controls how the character moves in response to what's happening.

It's much harder to create complex realistic animation using procedural animation,

but since the animation is generated from scratch as the program runs,

it's much easier to respond very exactly to what the players doing.

It's good for things like eye animation where the movement itself is quite simple,

just rotating the eyes in their sockets but,

you want the eyes to point in exactly the right direction.

In the next couple of weeks,

you'll learn a lot more about animating characters.

Both how to animate and what to animate.

And very soon, you'll be creating realistic VR characters.

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