Are sympathetic characters the same or different to engaging characters? This was a topic on an old Writing Excuses podcast (episode 9.10). The answer is they are different. Here is what resonated with me from the episode in terms of how can I think about my characters to make them more engaging. To help characters … More Sympathetic vs Engaging Characters
In my last blog I introduced this new series on applying machine learning to screenplays with the goal of automating some of the tedious steps of creating an animated cartoon using 3D character models and animation. Even if you are not in the animation space, you might find it interesting in an introduction to the … More Applying Machine Learning Classifiers to Screenplays for Animation Automation
This is a first post in a new thread looking at using machine learning to speed up my process of assembling camera shots in an animated cartoon series (the series I would be working on if I did not get distracted all the time by shiny new technology to learn… ahem!). Can I speed up … More Machine Learning for Assembling Animation Scenes
For my hobbyist animation efforts I started with friends as voice actors. However, not having many friends… I mean, it is hard for my numerous friends to commit to being a voice actor over a long period (and it’s unfortunate if voices of characters change mid series). The obvious answer is to write the script … More Emotional speech synthesis for animation is here!
Back in 2021 there was a forum thread on video quality for the MP4 recorder. A few people reported getting poor quality MP4 files recorded, myself included. I have since upgraded from 2021.2 to 2022.2 (with a newer version of the Recorder) so was curious to see how much better the results were. First, a … More Unity Recorder Output Format Wars
Ambient occlusion is a lighting effect that increases shadows where two surfaces meet. In real life, there is less light bouncing around surfaces in corners or where two walls meet – this is called ambient occlusion. As I am aiming for semi-realistic images in my videos (not 2D cel shading as in most comics and … More Selecting Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) HDRP volume settings in Unity
When you use a walk animation in a Unity Timeline using an Animation Track with Scene Offsets applied, you may come across a problem where you want to have the character end up at a precise location at a specific time. The problem is if you are in Preview mode (the default), moving the character … More Precise positioning with walk animations in Unity
To make stories more interesting, do you need conflict or do you need tension? Can you create tension without conflict? I was just listening to the Writing Excuses podcast (episode 18.5, An Interview with Mary Robinette Kowal) and she raised a current thought she was working through on whether it was conflict that made stories … More Conflict vs Tension in Storytelling
Here is my current implementation of captions in Unity, the writing you see at the bottom of the screen that shows what the character is saying. You might do this when the original movie is in a different language, or in my case, I am using captions to avoid having to worry about voice actors … More Implementing Captions in Unity using UI Document
Motion capture from video files has improved with time with some recent new entrants on the field, so I thought I would give a quick try again to see whether they were good enough quality for my goals. I am creating an online animated cartoon as a hobby project, although I admit I spend much … More Video Motion Capture EOY 2022
Extra Ordinary, the Series 