Thursday, 19 September 2013

Motion builder works!

This site was pretty interesting saying how over sexualized images of women is a less important area of 'women objectification'

http://cratesandribbons.com/2013/06/08/the-objectification-of-women-it-goes-much-further-than-sexy-pictures/

''Because it is all too obvious and difficult to ignore, we tend to focus on sexual objectification. ''

''After all, being presented in a sexual way doesn't always mean objectification. Sexy pictures of men, in contrast to sexy pictures of women, frequently portray them as sexual subjects, actors exercising their sexuality, instead of objects meant to gratify someone else’s sexuality.''

''Now in an ideal world, we would find ourselves randomly cast as either subject or object at different times, depending on the situation, with no problems. However, in society’s dominant narrative, subject and object status is heavily gendered''


So maybe games should be less stressed out about how there female character looks or how sexualized she is and more bothered about creating a more even gender ratio of this subject and object situation. Sometimes a woman and come to a mans aid and vice versa.



The article later refers to the new tomb raider game and another article about players not feeling they they are playing AS lara croft but there to help her and protect her.

http://kotaku.com/5917400/youll-want-to-protect-the-new-less-curvy-lara-croft

"When people play Lara, they don't really project themselves into the character,"

"She's definitely the hero but— you're kind of like her helper," he said. "When you see her have to face these challenges, you start to root for her in a way that you might not root for a male character."

Now I personally have never really felt like i was helping a main protagonist, i have always just seem a game as me playing AS the character. So i am not quite sure how that mind set is done, nor how it is created. Is it just for female characters? Do those feelings jump into action as soon as you see a female in a situation where she is portrayed as weak? Even if they have clearly shown there ability to look after themselves.

Or is it something coded into peoples genes? Man looks after women and children while women look after children and themselves.


I'd say this goes hand in hand with the 'subject and object' thing. Women aid men, men aid women. No gender in particular needing assistance and the player can be told through the story and actions of the characters which one's need to be helped.

More work


I fixed The motion capture issues.

They seemed to be all in the wrists, as whenever i linked the wrist skeleton to the rig inside motion builder it was the wrist that turns parts of it orange. And MB seems to use green > orange > red colours to show errors. Highlighting the dot in the upper right corner will tell you what is wrong with your rig.

My issue was ''left arm does not seem parallel to the x'' Meaning the wrist or elbow was a little skewed.

I wasn't sure exactly what did this but i just re-did the whole arm area. making sure to hole shift when making the arm so it was flat, even the fingers.
Like this image: http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/motionbuilder2014/en-us/images/GUID-0C39FAFA-474D-4F57-A794-8C765BDF0A86-low.png

And now look at her! She can slip up and use the motion capture data!

Free motion capture animation here:
http://www.motioncapturedata.com/

So i moved onto getting another ready as i do want multiple characters to be able to animate like this!

The same issue pop'ed up with Tetra but was easily fixed now that i know the issue is due to the arm.
Re-doing the arm skeleton seems to be the best way to make sure it works.


I'm unsure how much rotations in the arm MB can handle. But to be on the safe side i make the arm perfectly straight. the fingers don't have to be it seems. 
You also CANNOT have other joints, i had some in her tail and tie, did not go well. 
So those sections of Tetra will have to be animated pose-mo-cap.



Some MB tips: http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-69562.html