ANIMATION

Animation was far and away the most difficult and tedious aspect of this project, and it cannot be summed up in a simple step by step process. I had hoped that each of the controllers could be constrained to the surface of the environments so that I would not have to adjust every control point on my rig when I wanted to move the player through changing environments. I looked into many options, but was unable to find anything that worked. This added a great deal of complexity to nearly every aspect of the process.

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For example, every time I would rotate the player, the laser's end would need to be projecting on to a new surface. Relative to the player, the environment surface was changing in distance at varying speeds.  So even basic movement like rotating the player had to be animated in many different parts.

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First I would have to rotate the player and keyframe, so that they were turning at a natural rate. Then the laser controller would need to be keyframed to align with whatever wall it was projecting onto. To do this, the laser controller's distance from the player would have to be moved on an axis aligned to the player's X and Y location (so that it didn't create hiccups in the speed of the rotation). This was especially troublesome when walls contained organic, curving surfaces, because many more keyframes were needed in order to make it appear that the laser was actually drawing was actually drawing on the wall...

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I was most excited about the idea of having players preform geometric proofs as a way of accessing power ups (like button pressing sequences in fighting games). However, this also ended up being much more complex than I thought it would be. It would require that the particle emitters be stopped (intermittently) while the player is moving through different parts of the proof (to keep it from "interrupting" the proof). Unfortunately, I found no obvious way to do this. The only way I could manage to create the effect was by using multiple emitters.

 

Since the emitters only draw when they are being animated, the drawing path could be made to look like is jumping from one surface to another by using a different emitter every time the laser moved from one surface to another. The problem with this technique is that then emitters can't be linked to the controller as a means of animating both.

 

If the emitter being animated as part of the rig (linked to the controller), it cannot be unlinked without losing the animation. Wherever the controller goes, the emitter will go. If it is not linked to the controller (if it unlinked), then both the controller and the emitter both have to be individually keyframed. This requires aligning the emitter to the controller for every unique keyframe (essentially doubling the amount of work).