animation

Marvin in action

I have been meaning to post some videos forever, and today I finally got one uploaded. Going to be posting videos for both a Direction controller demo and the “get out of my way” demo from the sandbox when I find a good way to capture them.

For now enjoy watching Marvin super imposed  on top of me stepping out of the way of my friend.

*update*

Uploading more stuff so thought id add them here directly. This is a number of step animations:

Richard

Steps for a rainy day

With Marvin and me getting along well I set out to create a number of steps for stepping out of the way. Now I am new to animation and the part that I find the hardest with human motion is getting the inertia just right. In order to reach a better result I have done some motion tracking using camera footage. Me and my Ixus and a couple of my friends spent an hour filming the other day in order to achieve this.

The idea was that I would film myself doing the movement and then super impose Marvin (the rig) on top of myself and animate inside of this frame. The motion tracking gives me the scene and animates any camera movement, letting me watch the scene as with augmented reality.

Each green marker is where I have tracked pixels, the one in the far left corner of the corridor is set as (0,0,0) in 3D space. The one on our left bottom closest to the camera is + in Z, and so forth. Taking down the measurements for each post-it in the corridor I could apply these directly into the program, thus making it very easy to compute the exact camera position and corresponding 3D scene.

All in all I am really happy with the result. Might post a video of the result in the future.

Richard

Meet Marvin

This is Marvin, he is the AiGameDev rocketeer, stuntman and puppet of choice for any AI and animation related project done in the sandbox. A project of mine has been to give him some new moves, and in order to do this we needed to come to an agreement concerning exactly how to communicate with each other.

To help Marvin express himself I am able to…

Move the feet around and use a footroll slider for lifting the heel and toes.

Controls for the hands, elbows and shoulders.

Complete support for the spine that was made using the Awesome spine! It includes hips, back and upperbody controls.

Control for head and gaze.

Richard

Teaching autonomous agents to get out of your way

Or for short, taatgoyw.

The coming months I am going to be working on my thesis project. My goal is to solve a pretty simple problem in an interesting way. I see this problem all over the place however, games where the NPC doesn’t even blink to indicate that you are running into them.

The work will be done using the AIGameDev.com sandbox. The benefit of this is an array of great people to ask for help, a website with a lot of information on my subject and an engine with all the components I need to start working on this project.

The idea is to from a simple model of the interaction, design a system that can solve this. The system will use reinforcement learning and a policy aimed to teach the agent how to step out of the way off the player. With everything in place a demo will be constructed to show this behaviour.

  • Design a simple model for the interaction.
  • Animate a number of steps appropriate for this behaviour.
  • Learn the sandbox animation system.
  • Implement using Reinforcement learning in the sandbox.
  • Create a small demo.

My goal is to work with reinforcement learning as an area that seems to need more work before it can fully bloom. Hopefully the result will be simple and effective, and give way for other uses for the system in an animation context.

Richard