Random Point Generation (Patreon)

One of the really undeveloped areas of E-Motion is the random point generation.  It is used by the system to give the character somewhere else to look or glance that is not restricted by the target's location relative to the character.  Up until now these have been randomly generated somewhere infront of the character.

There are sliders to adjust how they were generated, but because of the randomness it was very hard to actually dial in these settings.  It also just didn't work as well as I had hoped, leading to weird angles.

A hidden feature of E-Motion that I added for ReignMoCap was that you could override these positions by creating objects called 'EMObjectLeft' 'EMObjectRight' etc. which allowed you to define the positions that the character will use.  Still this has the problem of what does the character look at if there is no usable point.

So, what I have done today is overhaul the system in several ways :

Random Point generation is no longer random.  First up was making the sliders more intuitive. They now adjust the distance the points are created directly. If you put 4 units in distance, they will be created 4 world units infront of the character.  Even though you can't actually see them, this makes it quite easy to set them in a good spot.
These points are based on the abdomen location and regenerated if the abdomen changes its angle by 15 degrees or more, or at random intervals.  This will only occur if the character is not actively looking at the point so their eyes don't jerk about.

Next was to allow the system to choose either the randomly generated point, or one of the manually placed one (if you have added them to a scene).  This selects the one that is closes to the center of the characters vision each time the character goes to look at a random point.

Finally I added a third option for left and right. It also checks the characters hands, and if they are closer to the center of vision that either the random point or the set object, the hand will be selected instead.

This has a suprising affect on E-Motion. With more stable random points, the ability to have objects as points of interest and the ability to look at their own hand the character now has lots more places to glance or look at when avoiding your gaze.  This reduces the feeling of repetition and looking at nothing, but also makes it much more contextual!

It also greatly enhances how the character reacts to playing animations, especially dance animations as she can now look at and glance at her hands when they come into view!

I still need to tweak it somewhat and update the UI to better reflect what the sliders do now and then I'll release a test version on here