Today is my last full day to work before the exhibit! Let’s git errrr done. And by errrr I mean these animations!
I set my test graph up so that I could keyframe a single value and drive the entire hand close animation.
This isn’t practical for my production setup because it’ll limit me when I try to animate the any other hand state animations. For now, though, it makes things a lot easier because I can keep my animation on loop while I iterate the graph values. Unity really didn’t build the Animator system for VFX graphs.
Aside from using a secondary attractor to draw the particles back to their start position, I’ve been playing with the idea of giving the particles a velocity vector pointed back towards the start position. The idea is to reduce how much velo gets added the closer the particles get to their origin. Still, I can’t seem to create the suction effect I want—this looks more like a low poly tornado that a vacuum hose.
I do think this will look better with my 3d particle meshes.
I’ve been going at this animation for about three hours now and I think I’ve finally gotten it. This whole time, I was missing a one-minus node and multiplying my direction velo instead of adding it. Boolean logic and arithmetic can drive a man nuts, but I’m honestly enjoying it.
Now I need to extrapolate this demo graph onto my main one and recalibrate. Plus, I need to keyframe individual parameters instead of relying on a slider.
Holy smokes this has been stressful. Unity bug after unitybug. It seems that Unity has a legit issue lerping between SDF positions in the animator.
I figured that maybe animating too many values concurrently was causing the issue, so I moved all my animation to a single slider like in the test scene. Check it out.
:)
You can’t make this stuff up. This is the exact same effect applied to two players in different locations.
With all of this animation stuff gone to hell, I need to do what I can to make sure the rest of the experience is quality. I’ve already found some major bugs, and I already fixed one—the camera overlay not being matched with the body. It was slightly left, probably because the Kinect’s color camera is to the right of its depth sensor.
Small victories yeah! Need some more of those. Next, I need to fix the single hand mode, because something about it ain’t working right.
I take that back—I guess it’s working now. I needed to clamp the hand tracking states to only report Open and Closed.
So, what exactly were the bugs I alluded to earlier? It seems like VFX graph is having a hard time recognizing its own instance in the scene, as well as the transforms/positions bound to its exposed params. Once this presentation tomorrow is done with, I’m gonna go ahead and submit a bug report to the Unity dev team. I’m hoping that once this is fixed, I’ll actually be able to incorporate the vacuum animation into my closed hand entry state.
This has been an important lesson for me—I got all giddy switching to the latest supported and recommended Unity version and ignored the potential for new bugs.
That being said, it’s finally time to CODE FREEZE and BUILD!!!
Build completed in less than 5 minutes—God bless this beast of a PC. Now, I need to test it on my laptop.