November ‘25

I've been spending more time lately working on new scenes and environments. Focusing on this has slowed down overall progress a little bit, but it’s been absolutely great for my motion capture process.

If I plan it all out ahead of time, I'm able to record a scene for an area that doesn't fully exist in the game yet, put the animations together, and THEN structure the environment around the characters as they move. I'm still working on fleshing out these spaces with more furniture and decor, but I think they're gradually coming along.

I've mainly been focusing on two areas lately. The first one is a large parlor. What used to be a normal and unassuming corner of the third floor now opens up directly into this room:

Like I said, it still needs more decorating, and maybe I’ll mess around with the colors a little bit more in the future. But right now I'm focusing less on the room holistically and more on the smaller details that directly concern the characters/scene taking place within the room. For example, the wine glasses you see in their hands!

Since everything has to work both forwards and backwards in time, I didn't bother trying to figure out any sort of real-time fluid simulation for this. Instead, I animated the wine separately in Blender. For a first attempt, I'm rather pleased with how it turned out, especially because it looks like this when I animate it in the first place:

I also spent a little bit of time making a fireplace with logs and a fire for this scene, but to be honest, I'm less happy with how they turned out.

I wanted to try animating this without any actual animations, so it's being controlled entirely through its shader code—which I didn't write myself, I combined this fire shader with some vertex displacement logic from this shader—and I don't hate it, but at the same time, it's a long shot from the behavior I’d like it to have.

It was a similar thought process as the one I had with animating the wine: I figured I could try to employ some sort of simulation or post-processing effect to animate the fire, but I'd potentially run into issues when it comes to the player reversing time. Plus, something like that would probably eat up more resources than what I've got figured out right now, and it's always nice to keep things that way if possible—those decisions add up!

Odds are I'm going to make an armature for the fire in Blender and animate it manually like the wine, then combine it with the shader I'm already using. What I have right now, though, is much better than what I had before, so I'm happy with it for the time being.

I also animated some window curtains going crazy in the parlor. I'm not in love with how the mesh deforms in certain parts, so I'm eager to return to this later on and make some improvements.

But even if the curtains aren't perfect right now, I'm really glad I have that experience under my belt. I'm planning on making a large act curtain for a theater scene pretty soon, and it will no doubt be much easier because of this.

Moving on to a completely different part of the building, I spent some more time on the kitchen, and added some kitcheny things! The sink, oven, cabinets, and drawers are all animated—and are all controlled by the same singular armature instead of all having individual ones. It'd be nice to keep it that way, because then I wouldn't necessarily need to have a separate armature for every single thing that moves in the game, which would simplify things for me significantly as I continue to scale up the amount of animated objects. But as of writing this post, I'm still working on getting those animations ready to test in-game. So, look forward to another kitchen update soon!

Just outside the kitchen is the hall that I'm building this "home" area around. In that main hall, you'll find this happy little guy! He's got a cage with a perch, and I'll also be adding a food bowl and a couple other things--after all, I'm a responsible pet owner, and I would never let aaaanything bad happen to him.

I treated the bird, cage, and chain as one object for animating purposes. The perch also has a tiny rope for its own swinging. I had a lot of fun animating the bird, and it reminded me of a story about Walt Disney, whom I just finished reading a biography about earlier this year.

One day, Disney brought a small mechanical bird into the studio and tasked his technicians with figuring out how it works. They succeeded, and incorporated its mechanics into the development of an advanced form of physical animation synchronized with audio, which they aptly named Audio-Animatronics!

Disney's technicians used a joystick apparatus to control the bird animatronics and record tracks for The Enchanted Tiki Room, but the more complex human models used for attractions like the Carousel of Progress required a much more complex and rigorous approach. The process required somebody to wear an extremely uncomfortable harness—which you can see for yourself about 90 seconds into this video—that would record the motion of their limbs in order to create movement tracks for the animatronics.

As somebody whose current project revolves around motion capture animation, I was understandably intrigued when I learned that fact myself. One thing led to another, and I ended up reading the guy's whole life story.

While I was working on the bird, its anatomy and animation, I caught myself a few times thinking about those early Disney engineers and imagining what sort of process they had to go through to achieve their artistic vision with animatronics. I have the futuristic luxury of working entirely within a virtual space, where simple mistakes can be nullified with a keystroke. What those guys, though, did is leagues beyond what I could ever hope to accomplish, and it’s incredibly inspiring to learn about.

I spent a lot of time reading that biography. I think it had quite an impact on me and my approach to creative work, so it’s neat to have something that’s come full circle like this.

***

Sorry if you read through that nerdism about dead dudes making robots and expected more fun game stuff to come after, but I think I’m just about done writing this update. Not many more new and exciting things I’d like to share at this point. If you REALLY want something else to look at, check out how supremely fucked up the hair is on this character since I made some changes to the model without updating all the in-game animations.

Yep, that’s some quality content. Thanks for reading!

-Tim