I’m pretty proud of myself.
I’m using some motion capture in my animation. I had wanted to completely avoid programming. I’m not sure why. I guess because I wanted to be done with it. But I busted out some coding because I was kind of tired/lazy. I have like a 2 second clip of someone and I didn’t want to have to motion capture for that stupid 2 seconds.
But faces are incredibly hard to model. It’s easy to drag around an arm. Hi-five. Seig Heil. Salute. Simple. But making a face look annoyed->perplexed is an enormous set of muscles moved in really subtle ways. And it takes ages.
I had to code in C# on Unity. Which is a language I’ve never coded in on a platform I’ve never coded in. In a few hours, I got a pretty elegant solution. Well, maybe not elegant, but damn efficient. On the Unity forums, people have been trying to do this since early 2000.
Basically, I can wireless motion capture directly into the editor as I’m editing the scenes. It saves a ton of steps and time. And while it was only for a 2 second clip, I’m going to be able to do it for anything.
Some of it was grunt work. Some of it was basic logic. But most was just programming concepts. I’ve said many times that coding is coding. Doesn’t really matter the language, they’re all based on the same concepts. Just like human languages.
As an aside, it’s a common trope to have sci-fi/fantasy languages not have words or meanings. Like Klingon or Dothraki or Dwarvish doesn’t have any word for “thanks.” Which is stupid. The race in question is always human + or – a tiny bit, yet they never came across some unbelievably simple concept. “What is a toilet?” the last living Klingon asked as he died from sepsis.
Anyway, programming is programming. Only the ;{>:) changes. Stuff way down low or up high changes, but usually it doesn’t matter if you’re coding it.
In other news, Kevin Clay said he posted the completed audiobook of SpellTalker. I need to proof it, get any corrections, and then it will be on Audible.
