Dynamic Digital Humans
Life-like virtual humans that were created using a revolutionary low cost production workflow.
Note: Since this is a research project, most technical details are under NDA and cannot be posted here.
Contributions
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Created a demo that was shown at Siggraph 2019
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Collaborated with multiple designers and the Creative Director of Cream Digital to produce VR content
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Produced an efficient material creation workflow for the character in Unreal Engine
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Assisted research teams with the optimizing the efficiency of their production pipeline
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Ported Jasmine avatar to AR and mobile VR platforms
Challenges
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Creating a highly realistic player controlled VR IK arm system
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Communicating with various parties, both internal and external
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Optimizing project for multiple platforms
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Creating materials for skin and hair with an emphasis on realism
Research
The stakeholders wanted a very realistic interaction system, so my first step was to find out what's out there. A lot of VR games use floating hands which would not have been useful in our experience. I analyzed VR interaction systems in games such as Boneworks and Spider-Man: Far From Home VR experience and the animations/rigs implemented in UFC 2 and For Honor.
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Image obtained from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onuEJPDUdJs
Image obtained from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8a1BAolFIk
Implementation
Implementing the interaction system involved experimenting with various IK nodes in Unreal Engine and improving it by adding various joint deformation nodes. It took me 1 month to create and iterate on the system. Iteration was based on feedback from design leads and the Creative Director of Cream Digital.
The last part of this process was adding multiple corrective blendshapes to the arms so that they do not deform in a strange way. I created 4 types of blendshapes that were activated when certain joints rotated past a threshold. This is what it looks like when it is slowed down.
What did I learn from this?
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Research is pivotal when experimenting with new interaction systems
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Optimizing content for VR platforms is very difficult and requires meticulous attention to what's happening in the level
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Working with blueprints!
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Compressing media to take up less memory space
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Meeting hard deadlines
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Working with stakeholders and constantly re-prioritizing tasks
Want to know more?
Click on the image below to visit the Dynamic Digital Humans website
