15/1/13 - fight or flight part 4

In yesterdays post I used a 7 point Likert Scale when assessing the degree of fight or flight for a reaction as opposed to a 5 point scale previously mentioned in the post. This was because when thinking back to past situations I recorded the reactions I had down were still too extreme for the more gentle interactions, imagine if you brushed past someone lightly and immediately they either started yelling at you or nervously walking away at a brisk speed. Although initially this would be quite entertaining in a game it would annoy the player soon after. Because of this, the expanded 7 point scale makes more sense.

As you can probably tell I've fallen behind my schedule quite rapidly due to needing to explain the new system and certain tasks such as editing and analysing game footage taking much longer than I anticipated.  Today I will be creating and uploading live motion footage for reference material and producing storyboards based on them and the body language explored. If there's time I'll start animating today as well.

Live motion reference
Short example as to why this sort of reference is hard to capture...

The main challenge encountered has been how to capture a natural reaction the amount of times, I needed to stress that I didn't want them to act like an NPC pretty often and many of the attempts they would react before being hit. We attempted a few strategies to help them react more realistically like closing their eyes or being bumped into from behind so they weren't expecting it and on a couple of occasions this paid off.
 I think there might be some footage I can use but i'd like to film more with new tactics to try and get some more reference.

I won't be uploading the reference footage to the blog as there's a ridiculous amount of it and editing the footage to upload wouldn't be the best use of my time.

Storyboards
First pass storyboards which may change with the new reference footage. Only one for now. More tomorrow

1. Fight

This demonstrates a possible fight animation. The most extreme fight reaction would cause the NPc to immediately lose their temper and behave aggressively, possibly violently push the player and then proceed to taunt them until they steady themselves with the gestures indicating "here i am, come get me."

Side note: Comparing this storyboard to the previous ones I've made is making it obvious that the life drawing classes are paying off. The poses I can now record are becoming more complicated and I'm finding I don't need anywhere near as much in the way of reference photos. Things I still need to work on however are hands, feet and faces.

I had some time before filming reference footage so I started to animate the base walk of the "player" towards the NPC. I don't need to time myself making this animation as it's the player's character not the NPC plus it means I have a base file to work with and practice at a walk cycle.

This is a work in progress play blast  I have yet to fix the left arm (it's twitching oddly), properly animate the right arm, both of the legs, feet and hands. I'm happy enough with the main body movement but I may fix the slight lean it has at a later stage.

Side note: Interesting dishonored point.. more dialogue than animation but it shows your actions are having an effect. After coming back from a mission where we decided to go for the violent approach as opposed to the stealthy one, Emily (the young girl) commented on how many people we'd killed and said "I'm tired of being afraid, when i'm empress i'll make everyone else afraid, just like you." And she's drawing a picture of herself, shadowed and holding a bloody knife. The actions we've chosen are directly reflected by her attitude and actions.