Capstone Animation

Here's the high-quality layer of my animation, for your viewing pleasure. Sorry it took this long to upload the animation... I never bothered to make a YouTube account until tonight.

Capstone Testing Results

Earlier today, we had nine people test our project and fill out the questionnaire I handed them. The physical touch-screen part was not quite working as it should be, but we had a mock-up that had mostly the same effect. Instead of "touching" the screen, the user would shine infrared LEDs onto the screen. The first three questions ask for a rating between one and ten (one being the worst, and ten the best), and the averages of all those are below. The fourth question is in regards to "unusual objects" that I hid in the animation and did not tell the testers about beforehand. The last question asked for additional comments. The other questions had a comments section as well, and I selected a few from each question to post below.

1.) How was your overall experience with the project? 8.7

"The longer I used it the more details I observed. I love that I did not get bored or figure it out right away." Jolene B., New Media

"I've never seen anything like it I believe, it's a very interesting concept." Cameron M., Biology

"There needs to be more physical relationship to the work, this will obviously be remedied when they implement the touch screen part to the project." Brian M., New Media

2.) How would you rate the touch-screen interface? 8.3

"The way it worked was neat, it might have been more fun to actually touch it. The LEDs were slow to go through layers, but the effects of different light sources were fun to see." Alexandra S., Biology

"The touch-screen portion still in developmental stage, yet so far, wand-type interface is very effective." Brandon H., Chemistry

3.) How would you rate the animation? 8.1

"It was really neat and it looked great." Lily O., New Media

"The animation seems really well done, and the fact that there are multiple levels of the animation that are burned through makes the piece that much better." Brian M., New Media

4.) Did you find any unusual objects? If so, how many?

*This question had some mixed results. Some people did not notice any of the objects I hid (or they did, and didn't think of them as "unusual"), while others saw a varying amount of objects. On the questionnaire, I had a range of 1-10 items, even though I only hid five objects. Two people found all five objects. One person circled "seven", which makes me wonder if she either miscounted (which would make sense, as I gave no one any warning about the hidden objects), or saw objects that she deemed "unusual" that were supposed to be there.

"...I did not realize finding the objects was the goal right away, but I think that's because I was excited about the wand and burning things." Jolene B., New Media

"[I did not find any objects because] I spent my time writing neat things on the screen instead." Thomas W., Molecular Biology

5.) Additional comments?

"Wireframe on bottom looks more interesting and dramatic." Thomas W., Molecular Biology

"Perhaps make it more sensitive so that the last layer can be found easier and doesn't take as much time waiting, it'd be a little more interactive that way. Also perhaps start with the actual animation not the wireframe as that's more like uncovering and 'discovering' things and fits with the theme better." Mary G., Biology

"Interesting concept. Great animations and sound effects." Kevin M., New Media

Milestone #3, and Capstone Testing Plan

Here's my updated Gantt chart. I have finished rendering for my animation (sound the trumpets!), and all that's really left that needs doing is for me to finish the audio for it. I have the voice acting done for it, performed by my friend, but it lacks any sound effects. It shouldn't be too hard to finish at this point, though. I'll have all four of my layers ready to present tomorrow in class.

And now for the more important part of this post: capstone testing plan. By March 31st, I will have completed all my testing required for capstone. So without further adieu:

My Capstone Testing Plan

• Audience: I will target new media and studio art students and faculty. I will also ask Jason Walker if he would like us to target other groups, such as computer science students/faculty. I will ask Owen Smith if he has any recommendations for people to contact.
  
• Deployment: Since our project is an installation that can only be experienced to its full potential in person, we will plan on setting up a time and place for people to come and test it out. We will be contacting other capstoners who are doing installations (Kristina Younan and Dan Sprogis, maybe Dana Ransdell if he's setting up his project as an installation, and whoever else might be doing installations. I'll have to research), and we will try to coordinate having the same time/place. I know it is possible for us to use the Collaborative Media Lab as a place to test, but I'm not sure if it is the most ideal spot for the other capstoners yet.
  
• Promotion: I think the most effective way to get the word out is to send out posters for the event. The printed posters would be placed in key locations, such as the 4th floor of Chadbourne Hall, the Collaborative Media Lab, Lord Hall, and the Memorial Union. Other locations may become important depending on the opinions of the other capstoners with installations. In addition, the posters would be sent via FirstClass email to the "NM Major", "Art", and "Announcements & Alerts" folders, would be posted on the New Media Website, and might be announced in the Maine Campus. I think if we offered FREE snacks as well, more people might be keen on showing up (although such a thing would be difficult to pull off at the Collaborative Media Lab, if that's where we end up having it, given the library's ban on food... but there's always the possibility of being extremely sneaky about it).
  
• Feedback Mechanism: Probably the easiest way to do this would be to give out a hard-copy survey for the user to fill out upon testing our project. As the installation really needs to be experienced in person, it would only make sense to have a physical survey, as opposed to an online one. Questions would include "How was your overall experience?" and "What did you like/dislike about the touch interface/animation?", among other questions that we'll need to think up, and would also include an "Other comments" section for anything else the user feels like adding.
  
• Feedback Summary Format: We would have to custom collate our results, since the mechanism used to collect the results is very much not digital. The results would consist of written testimonials (most likely whatever is written down in "Other comments", but it may come from other questions asked) and charts (such as to show everyone's rating of their overall experience, from "Excellent" to "Terrible").

Poster, First Draft

Here's my first draft of my poster. I did not have all the information I needed in order to fill in the details, but the layout of it should be enough for the critique tomorrow, I hope. I'll need to edit this and have it printed by class on Monday.

Milestone #2

This is my Gantt chart as of Tuesday night. I forgot to post it to my blog, though, but as it turned out that my milestone was postponed due to a snow day, I will be presenting tomorrow (Monday) anyways. I have more done than my chart states, though--more specifically, the voice acting is over and my animation is 99.9% done (just need to finish up a tiny bit of lip synching and fix the gravity field for the dirt so that it doesn't "float" down like it currently does). I might have it finished by tonight, except that I also need to work on a promotional poster.

My project has been tweaked again for a number of reasons (one being that it will take me less time and fewer headaches the new way...), and now instead of it switching from one style to another, it has become switching between different levels of "detail" within the 3D animation (wireframe mode on top, followed by a low-quality default light render, and then a hardware rendered low-quality version with scene lighting, and then finally the high-quality rendered version). In order for the viewer to see the higher quality versions, they will need to "dig" away at the lower quality versions. I'm still working out the details, but this would give me a lot more time to focus on the project, since I'm not spending all my time simply animating.

So anyways, this is what I've gotten completed since my last milestone:

• Storyboards have been scanned to .pdf format, and can be found here.
• Voice acting *finally* recorded.
• Animation is nearly complete.
• Sound effects search has begun.

What I still need to do:

• Finish animation.
• Render (yikes!).
• Sound effects/foley work.
• Editing.
• Acquire an ambient music score.
  

Milestone #1

My first milestone review is tomorrow morning, so I'll post here what progress I've made and what I still have left to do. But first, an updated Gantt Chart again:


So my 3D animation is nearly complete and ready for rendering. That's the good news. The bad news: it's going to end up being about a minute long, instead of the projected 20-30 seconds. Whoops. That's around 1500 frames. Each frame seems to take a solid 20-40 minutes to render (it depends on what computer I'm rendering from, among some other factors), so it doesn't take a math genius to figure out that it would take an entire month's worth of rendering if done from one computer. Yikes! Thankfully, I'm not doing it from only one computer--I plan on hijacking a bunch of computers from the Collaborative Media Lab for this sole purpose (a feat I can probably only get away with solely because I work there). However,the big consequence of all this: a longer animation means less time to make more styles to switch back and forth from. I am still doing the 1920s style one next, but chances are very slim that I'll have any others done before spring break. I only really need two different styles for this project to work anyways, but having more would still be nice. Perhaps if we're to continue working on it after break, I'll get more completed.

So anyways, enough ranting. Here's what I hope to have ready to show tomorrow:

• Storyboards
• Hardware rendering of my 3D animation (or at least parts of it)
• Production-quality rendered still images
  

Gantt Chart Revision

Here is my Gantt chart revision, as requested for Wednesday. It will be re-updated before my milestone review on the 31st, where it will hopefully look like I'm not as far behind as it seems (isn't it sad that I spent almost 120 hours working only on the 3D animation, and I'm still not done with it? This project is going to destroy me).

Winter "Break"...

First semester of capstone is finished, and the next one will unfold in a month. It has been a rough semester for me, but I managed to develop a capstone idea that I am excited about (and probably more importantly, one that won't fail me at the end of the year).

The lack of time that I have remaining before capstone presentations has me worried, though. I would feel so much better about my project if I knew I had more time to work on it, but I feel that too much time was spent in areas that I feel are not very important to the overall piece. This is not to say that I've been slacking--I must've spent over 100 hours working on the 3D model of my character--but simply that animation is a slow process that requires a lot of patience and time. On the plus side, I have all of winter break to work on this, and I am hoping to get a lot of it completed by the end of it, but at the same time I know that the chances of me getting "enough" completed by then are pretty slim. But that's my plan for this so-called "vacation".

Fun.

Multi-Technique Animation Media Proposal

I forgot to post this a few days ago to the blog (I think I posted it everywhere else that I needed to), but anyways, you can find my media proposal for my project here. It also has my prototype on it, made in Flash. The ActionScript behind it was quite annoying to work out, but after a few hours of kicking and cursing I managed to make it work.

Computer-Free Capstone (again)

Now to do the computer-free capstone assignment again, except this time for my current idea.

This exact project would very likely be impossible to mimic without a computer. However, with some modifications to my current idea, it could be done. Instead of having all the animation clips played simultaneously on top of each other, and switching the clips back and forth so that you can only see one clip at any given time, they could all be played on separate TVs, all next to each other (so that one TV is playing one style of animation, and the next TV is playing another, etc.). They could play from VHS tapes that basically consist of nothing but that one animation clip being looped over and over on it. Of course, the animation techniques would be limited to those that don't rely on computers to do in the first place (3D computer animation is obviously out, but claymation, which is also 3D, will still work). Each of the TVs would begin to play at the same time, so that all the VHS tapes are synchronized. To simplify my idea even further to the bare essentials of it, I could forget about using animations at all, and simply use paintings in a gallery--each painting is of the same object or scene, but created using a different style (realism, abstract, impressionist, cubist, etc.). This would be the simplest idea of the two.

I think out of the two ideas above, the animation one, although more difficult, would be the more effective one. However, I feel neither of those ideas are as effective as the one that still needs a computer. First of all, removing the computer would remove a couple of possible animation techniques that require it. Secondly, I feel it is more effective when only one technique is playing at any given time, and that having all the clips lined up next to each other detracts from the overall effect of the project.

New Proposal Paper

I've been doing a lot of catch-up work recently, ever since I changed my idea over to the animation. I already have a prototype set up for the project, but I will be posting that later, once I get the media proposal up and running (which won't take too long, I hope, except for some issues I'm currently having with Cordova). The new text proposal can be viewed here.

Multi-Technique Animation: the Variant

So after doing some brainstorming, and after having a talk with one of my capstone classmates, I have a variation to my capstone idea. This is how I described it in my intent in the Pool:

I will still be using many different animation techniques. But instead of it being a linear narrative incorporating all the techniques into one piece, I was thinking about using a very short narrative (maybe 30 seconds long), and animating it using each of the techniques (so that there would be a 30-second long 3D computer animation, a 30-second long 1920s-era cartoon, etc.). The narratives would be synchronized with each other, so that the action was happening at the same time in each animation.

After all the animation is over, I would assemble them all together (in Flash, MaxMSP, or something) so that only one of the techniques will be playing at a time. The viewer can then push a button and effectively switch the style of the animation from one technique into another instantly, during playback of the piece (and since the action is synchronized, the switch wouldn't disrupt the narrative much). This gives the viewer near complete control over the visual style of the animation.

The narrative itself is something I am yet to work out, though. It would be very short, though, so that I would still have time to animate all the different techniques. I also haven't decided if I was going to use a normal narrative, or one that loops. Either one would work for this variant.

This might be more work for me in the long run, but it would prove to be a more interesting (and more interactive) piece.

Gazira Babeli: Second Life Hacker

The other link Jon sent me was about Italian "Second Life" coder Gazira Babeli. Her avatar for "Second Life" has been hacked so that she is able to summon swarms of Super Mario armies, punctuation marks, tornadoes, and "grey goo". It seems she would attack rude users who engage in improper netiquette with these maneuvers, forcing the users to think twice before speaking rudely again.

I've never played "Second Life" myself, but from what I've heard it is essentially a virtual world for players to create an avatar and enjoy a life outside their own. There doesn't seem to be any real objectives beyond just socializing and enjoying oneself. Very much like Anarchy MUD, actually. This gets me thinking about how flexible I should allow Anarchy MUD to be; the more flexibility I allow, the better chance another Gazira Babeli joins the game and hacks it to her favor. But at the same time, if the game is easily hackable, it might be very possible that the hackers would disallow any other players from ever joining the game. How flexible is "too flexible"?

BumpList

During our discussion last week (I was presenting my media proposal and simulation for Anarchy MUD), Jon sent me two links to websites that might help me flesh out that idea more. If I end up switching over to the animation, these links wouldn't matter too much, but I'll post about them anyways. The first one is for BumpList.

BumpList is, as the website describes it, "an email community for the determined". It is essentially an open forum that anyone can join and post to, as long as they have a valid email address, but there's a catch: BumpList can only hold six subscriptions (Or is it five? The website gave both numbers. Perhaps it changed to allow one or two more after a while). What this means is that when a new person subscribes to the forum, the oldest subscription is removed so that the list only has six people. If that person who was bumped wants to post again, he/she would need to resubscribe.

Unfortunately, the forum seems to be down until they find a new server, and the last date mentioned on the website was in 2004, so I don't think it will come back, but the idea behind the website fits one of the principles behind Anarchy MUD, and so is something to take note of.

Multi-Technique Animation

So I came up with a new capstone idea. It's currently up for reviews and suggestions in the Pool. Hopefully it's not torn apart too much, because I really want to get working on it soon (capstone presentations are at the end of February, which is not even four months away! Why are the presentations so much earlier this year than in previous years?!). This is how I described my intent in the Pool:

I intend on creating a short animated story that incorporates many different types of animation techniques and styles into one piece. Some of these include, but are not limited to: 3D computer animation, 1920s-era black-and-white silent cartoons, Golden Age cartoons (eg. Looney Tunes), claymation, Japanese-style, vector, etc.

The story goes roughly as follows: the main character, originally 3D-computer animated, soon finds himself lost in a 1920s-style cartoon, and it becomes his objective to try to get back home to the medium which he belongs.

This piece will allow me to experiment with a vast number of styles, and play around with interesting transitions between two different styles. It also gives me the opportunity to be creative and try to devise new and innovative styles.

Computer-Free is the Way to Be

This week, Jon gave the class the challenge to reimagine our current capstone ideas so that they do not use any "typical" new media (ie., no computers, Internet, videos, etc.).


Envisioning "Anarchy MUD" without typical new media would probably result in a complex, Nomic-style board game. In fact, the game itself would not be too far off from Nomic; basically, instead of focusing on changing the rules of the game itself, it focuses on changing the game itself: adding , editing, and removing rooms, items, monsters, and other players. And unlike Nomic, voting won't occur--during each person's turn, he/she would either add something to the board, or edit/delete something already on the board (or another player). At the end of each person's turn, everyone else would either approve or disapprove of that player's action (or do neither, if he/she chooses). For each approved vote, that player gains one point, and for each disapprove, that players loses a point. Some actions would require the player to have a certain number of points before he/she is able to perform it, such as possibly needing ten points before removing another person from the game, or perhaps needing a certain amount of points before being able to add/modify/remove more than one thing per turn. Some actions would have penalties, such as losing many points after removing a player. Players who have been removed from the game may come back as a new player, with no points; likewise, anyone else can join the game at any time with no points as well. As my current plans with "Anarchy MUD" don't actually have a way for a player to win, the same would apply for this game. The players can devise their own way to "win", if they so choose, or they can just play until everyone is bored (or angry with each other).

I think the computer-free version of Anarchy MUD would be almost as effective as the normal version, and perhaps even more so for some aspects of the game. Some issues would need to be addressed in regards to items/rooms/monsters that players create, and what kind of game impact each would have, but not being confined by computer code opens up the possibilities for what these things can do. For example, someone might decide to make a Wand of Player Deletion, which would allow him to remove other players on his turn at will if he uses it--everyone might disapprove of it, causing the player a lot of point loss, but likewise the next player might consider destroying the new item to prevent it from being used in play, so there's a self-balancing aspect to some things. Rooms and monsters would be harder to implement, but with a little thought they might play a role in this game. But come to think about it, they play a miniscule role in the online version as well. Huh. Looks like I would have a bit more to conceptualize.

Anarchy MUD Simulation

Last night, I created a rough simulation demonstrating basic game play and interaction for Anarchy MUD. The simulation (made in Flash) can be found here. Likewise, in theory it really should also be found in the media proposal site I posted earlier, but it seems the First Class web publishing server has problems with me updating my site. In other words, the "Simulation" link still points to a blank page, and not to my updated page featuring the simulation.

Meh. I can't complain, as it's free.

Media Proposal

My media proposal for Anarchy MUD can be found here. I was up late last night working on it, and I had it posted to the pool, but I forgot to post it to my blog until about three minutes ago. The simulation will arrive in the next few days, and will also be found in the media proposal.

Only around seventeen years too late?

I was researching late last night for some possible source codes that I could work off from for Anarchy MUD, and I stumbled into something that could either make or break my project: TinyMUD. Apparently, about seventeen years ago, James Aspnes developed a MUD that allows all players, and not just administrators, to create items and rooms. Later derivatives improved on this, allowing more control over the world (such as being able to destroy items and rooms as well, adding recovery methods for deleted work, creating a system to limit power to certain players, and even allowing universal game rules to be changed (like Nomic)). The more I researched it, the more I've discovered games that had the same exact characteristics of Anarchy MUD. Every characteristic was present in another game somewhere.

Except for one.

As flexible as all of these games seem to be, I am yet to find one that incorporates the modification and deletion of player characters as a feature. This might be my only saving grace. It is also, in my opinion, the most interesting characteristic, so I'm not completely dismayed that everything else has been done before. If anything, it might make programming that much easier, if I am able to use the source code from a TinyMUD or TinyMUD-derivative game. I will be doing some more research, however, to make sure that I am indeed doing something at least partially original.

Ingenuity is hard work.

Feeling like a stick in the MUD

It has been very busy for me recently, so I haven't had much of a chance to update my blog beyond adding my proposal paper. I have been doing a lot of reviewing of other people's capstone ideas, giving suggestions, writing and editing my proposal paper and Gantt chart, and other random school work that I haven't had much time to work on my actual project.

I am also daunted by the task of working on a project that I've had little experience with, outside of actually playing a few MUDs a few years ago. I will either need to learn a programming language (not exactly sure what that language will be yet, at least not until after I research what is available), or make friends with someone willing to code for me. Thankfully, I do not believe I am forced to start from scratch; there are many source codes available for MUDs that are very basic, and allow designers to work off of and improve to fit their game better. I believe one of my first steps I will need to take is to research what is available for me to work from, and go with the one that fits my idea the best. This saves me about three heart attacks and an aneurysm, because I will not be forced to develop the entire system from the ground up and instead will have more time to create a solid and hopefully functional game.

If anyone knows of anyone who has actually had experience building MUDs before, I would love to receive a little bit of help.