Animation Showcase Video: Needs and Emotions (Patreon)

Hello!

For today’s Patreon post, I wanted to showcase some animations that Alice has recently created for our Parafolks. She created a nice video to share these animations with you which you can watch at the top of this Patreon post. ⬆🎥 

The Animations in the Video

1. Need to pee
2. Need to eat (hungry)
3. Laugh - Chuckle
4. Laugh - Generic
5. Laugh - Uncomfortable
6. Laugh - Out loud
7. Flirty
8. Flattered
9. Touched

In our previous Patreon post about animations, Alice shared a look at sitting and exercising animations, locomotion and emotion animations and Anna also explained how she adapts animations to make them work for characters of different heights. The new animations in today’s post are about expressing needs and emotions. This is only a small part of what Parafolks will be able to express and we are looking forward to sharing more info about emotions and needs in Paralives when we make progress on these systems.

The Character Animations We Have So Far

Overall, Alice has already created 172 character animations for Paralives. This is without counting those for the babies and toddlers showcased in last week’s post.

The text is really tiny and we blurred it because there are some secrets in there but here’s what Alice’s list of created animation looks like at the moment:

That’s a lot of animations! Many many more are still to come.

What’s Next for Animations

Here’s what’s to come regarding our work on animations for Paralives. I’m looking forward to sharing our progress on these tasks!

1. Animations where the character is holding and using items. This can be eating with a fork, mixing ingredients in a bowl with a spoon or speaking on the phone. Alice already created various animations like these but right now, in the game, these animations play without the actual object being in the hands of the character. You can see that in a previous Patreon post where Sebastian is speaking on the phone while dancing but he isn’t actually holding a phone. Jérémie is about to work on the system to attach objects to the characters for specific animations so this should be working soon!
2. Animations where the character is physically interacting with someone else. This would be hugging, kissing, dancing together or holding a baby. In the past month, Alice created 4 animations where there is physical contact. Soon, we will be working on the systems to integrate these animations which require some thinking: Where do characters meet in the world before performing an animation together? What happens if one of the characters is busy doing something else while the other wants to initiate the animation? How do we make sure that people of different heights animate well together? Regarding that last question, we will surely be using Anna’s procedural animation adaptation tools that I mentioned earlier in this post.
3. Improve multitasking support for animations and interactions.
4. Mass production of animations. The previous bullet points are among the last big milestones for animation features we need for Paralives. Once our systems are all in place and working, Alice will be able to accelerate the production of animations for the game and we will be able to showcase more and more of them which will be pretty exciting!

I hope you enjoyed today’s post and don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you have any feedback or questions for Alice!

Cheers,

Alex

EDIT - January 12, 2023: This post is now public, feel free to share it!