12-12-12 - Principles of animation don't apply to games

https://pure.ltu.se/ws/files/31041116/LTU-CUPP-07172-SE.pdf

This has a nice in depth description of why the principles are animation don't work for games. Sorry this post is so ridiculously short.

09/12/12 - A.I, Role of Emotion, Links and Lynn

A.I
"Each computer character in the game has a set of associated personality attributes. We have chosen to use the
“Big-Five Factor Structure” based on work in the field of psychology [5]. The major factors are: introversion extroversion,
pleasantness or agreeableness, conscientiousness or dependability, emotional stability, and intellect
or sophistication. Each of these major factors consists of 7 different sub-parts, which are given a value on a 9
point scale: the entries for the introversion-extroversion scale are shown in Table . Similarly, there are a set of
physical skills which are particularly important in this game, since the characters have to perform in the circus.
The personality aspects which determine moods and change of mood are given in the next section."


http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.55.1447

Role of Emotion
"The  idea  of  believably  has  long been  studied  and  explored  in  literature,  theater,  film,  radio  drama,
and  other  media.  Traditional  character  animators  are  among  those artists  who  have  sought  to  create believable  characters,  and  the Disney  animators  of  the  1930's made  great  strides  toward  this  goal. The  first  page  of  the  enormous classic  reference  work  on  Disney animation  [12]  begins  with  these words:
         "Disney animation makes audiences really believe in ...characters, whose adventures and misfortunes make people laugh - and even cry. There is a special ingredient in our type of animation that produces drawings that appear to think and make decisions and act of their own volition; it is what creates the illusion of life""

Bit of quote-ception there...

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/180000/176803/p122-bates.pdf?ip=193.60.167.114&acc=ACTIVE%20SERVICE&CFID=153602807&CFTOKEN=63560333&__acm__=1354814983_b62530e9fb9263cee0e99794381ab4c5

Immersion in games
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SebastianAlvarado/20121008/178967/Immersion_Getting_into_the_game.php


context body language
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01324126?LI=true#page-2


LOOK THIS UP.
courtesy of Michael "it has a section on Memorable Characters, Believability and Credibility"
http://uad-live.lib.ed.ac.uk/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=104173



Uncanny Valley note:
interesting point brought up by my brother... if making something too realistic causes people to become unnerved then could you use that information to make more unsettling bad guys?


Cinema and Game crossover thesis
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.gamecareerguide.com/education/theses/20040515/Thesis_Watching_Games.doc


creating virtaul characters: some assembly required
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.19.6030


Looks at Facade and Oz project.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1024751


Appraisal for a Character-based Story-World
http://emotion-research.net/projects/humaine/ws/plenary2005/modeling/RankPetta-AfaCbSw-submtoIVA2005draft.pdf




On a bit of a side note:
I had a meeting with Lynn because I was struggling quite a lot with my project structure. Unfortunately I was pretty brain dead by the time the meeting came round so coming to any conclusions was probably like getting water from a stone. Eventually I had a structure which made sense of everything and I'm incredibly grateful for Lynn's help even more so the next day when I'd gotten a good night's sleep and could think straight. Things are looking a little better. Still difficult to write but at least it's going in the right direction.

06/12/12 - Uncanny Valley, minor on body language

This is another one of those days where I find something which could have been so useful to my research if i'd have found it earlier.

"Believable Characters"
Magy Seif El-Nasr, Leslie Bishko, Veronica Zammitto, Michael Nixon,
Athanasios V. Vasiliakos, and Huaxin Wei

Link:
http://www.sfu.ca/~magy/conference/believablecharacters.pdf

Useful things found (so far.. it's a pretty huge journal)

• Look more at Uncanny Valley (Adds extra argument to believable over realistic and the difference between the two.)
  http://www.movingimages.info/digitalmedia/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/MorUnc.pdf

• Assassins creed and prince of persia series demonstrating the progression of games towards more story driven gameplay.

"In order for a character to adapt, it needs to not only be able to automatically select its motions

and execute its actions, but to also select nonverbal behaviors that convey and maintain its attributes."

"This character should be able to select its actions based on the current context and its own goals"

Another piece of literature which i clearly didn't include in my blog and now regret as it's needed in my proposal is about body language. I need to reference the impact of context on animated performance and one of the places that verify this is in the world of body language. Everything i read basically mentioned that all meanings of body language changes depending on the situation the person is in.

http://abertay.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?s.cmd=setTextQuery(context+animated+performance)&s.q=context+animated+perfomance

01/12/12 - Character Diamond

Still attempting to get my proposal done. I've come across this description of a book on amazon.

"...ways to give emotional depth to an NPC (non-player character), even if the NPC has just one line of dialogue; techniques to bond a player to a game's NPCs" -Creating Emotion in Games: The Craft and Art of Emotioneering, David E. Freeman

GAAAAHHH, WHY HAVE I NOT READ THIS BOOK YET.

Feel like an idiot. So clearly this is being added to my reading list... if i can find it =/


YOU CAN PREVIEW IT ON GOOGLE BOOKS! YAY!
Theres some interesting stuff concerning a character diamond to help make the major NPCs have a more interesting personality which is useful research for when i'm in the personality section of animating. I can definitely and will definitely use this as a base for experimental testing. Adding a trait then animating then adding a trait then animating then i can put the four different animations in front of someone.. see which they prefer. Page 56 gives a good list of ways to create a good character diamond.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gC7oAV_ZTSkC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=NPC&f=false


Extra notes to help with proposal writing:
The character diamond is used in conjunction with the context of the situation the encounter is happening in. Useful because it shows the method used in Games as opposed to those found in Robert McKee's book about film methods.
Differences



Update: This proposal has been switched round more times than i care to remember. Kill me.

30/11/12- Painting skills

Writing my proposal was killing me a little so an evening a couple of days ago I decided to have a break and practise my painting skills. I decided I was going to brush up on my ability to caricature and chose this wonderful picture here as it had a lot of personality already. 

Started by creating a rough sketch taking into account key parts of the animal. He looks a bit crazy but I kinda liked that.

Then i went on to add colour, I've made some similar style cartoons previously but this one seems to be of a higher quality due to the practise I've done in the last couple of years. Practise is certainly paying off. I added a Christmas hat because "holidays are coming" and it added to his crazy a little.

Never really managed to render a picture properly before. I've always been a little afraid to or lost confidence halfway through and ended up abandoning it but I pushed through with this one. I'm pleased with the result even if he seems to have lost some of his crazy expression.

Because this was practise though I'm going to critique it.
Things that could be better:

• The material on the hat doesn't have much form to it, some studies on painting material would come in handy to help fix that.
• Similarly the fluffy section on the hat doesn't look how I'd have liked and finding a method of producing a fluffy texture would be nice to find
• The left side of his face needs to have some higher contrast shadows as I think it loses some of its 3Dness
• The eyes probably would have benefited by being done individually and put more work into creating eyes that feel like lenses more than stickers stuck on a cue ball.
• The feathers I didn't make into actual feathers again due to lack of knowing how to go about creating them, same with the body,

To summarise main points to improve on in the future and ways to go about doing it.

• Texture : Tutorials
• Lighting : Value painting

It's not all bad though. I've definitely improved which is encouraging.

28/11/12 - Old Literature returns!

INTERESTING POINTS!

Parts of my proposal talk about the similaritied of creating films and creating story based games and applying theories used by the older medium film to help create better games and i just remembered the book i got last year for Brians module! At least i think it was last year...that doesn't matter.

Anyway.

The book is called story by Robert McKee and i remember at the time finding some of the theories in it pretty fascinating but due to time contraints and me being a little bit rubbish i never got the the parts concerning character.

So back to the proposal i was hunting around trying to make my proposal feel a little bit more in tune with itself and maintain the themes of comparing the two industries methods when i get to my example of personalities of NPCs reflecting the personality of the protagonist (using the example of ICO mentioned in a previous post) and i realise i dont have anything which shows how this has possibly evolved from films so i spend a little time searching journal archives and google scholar to find a decent reference for this or find how they actually approach creating characters at all when i remember the book and bring it out.

IT A GOLD MINE OF QUOTES AND INFORMATION

Seriously want to finish reading this book at some point but for now i've skimmed the parts concerning character and here are some of the interesting points as advertised in the first two words of this post...

Firstly there is a part which says exactly the same thing the ICO article described which was perfect beginning with this quote which i thought summed it up quite nicely.

“In essence the protagonist creates the rest of the cast.”

It also had some pretty interesting stuff about how to create a three dimensional character and what one actually was, it spoke about two sides to a character. The Characterization which is all the characters visable traits plus their basic personality, their values and opinions on things and then what he refurs to as the characters true character which are all the traits and choices made by the character when they are under pressure or are put in a difficult position. 

“True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure – the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation the truer the choice to the characters essential nature”

It also spoke about the difference between characters and real life. Giving an interesting point to consider when finding the balance between truly realistic character personality and those that are suitable for a game.

“their aspects are designed to be clear and knowable; whereas our fellow humans are difficult to understand, if not enigmatic."

Finally if this wasn't enough information he produces a diagram which displays how each supporting character is designed to help bring out certain aspects of the character.

28/11/12 - Still proposaling

Sorry i havent been all that "daily" recently. Been trying very hard to stay motivated and get this proposal written which is pretty difficult when you're me and easily confused by writing. Found this lovely animation though which has nothing to do with my project but i wanted to put it somewhere so i can stumble upon it again at a later date =]

See you when proposal is done for a much more regular update of mainly my practical work.