VR Animation – Page 3 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

February 8, 2018

‘Quill’ Gets Animation Tools to Bring Your VR Paintings to Life

Quill, Facebook’s VR painting tool, has been a great way to sketch in VR since its launch back at the end of 2016, but today a new update transforms it into something entirely new. Now, with tools for animating Quill artwork directly in the app, users have a new dimension for artistic expression: time.

If you’ve ever made a stick figure flip book using the corner of a notebook or a stack of sticky notes, you already understand the fundamentals of key frame animation: arrange a sequence of slightly changing pictures back to back and watch them come to life as you quickly flip through.

That’s the foundation of today’s Quill update, which Facebook says is the biggest to date. The program now includes a set of animation tools which will let you draw and arrange discrete frames into animation sequences. With helpful tools to visualize previous frames and quickly create new ones, artists will be able to express not just a moment in time, but an entire scene. This video gives a glimpse of the new tools in action:

Facebook says that the in-VR animation tools bring major time savings compared to using a combination of VR and traditional animation software. With direct access to animation tools in the app, the update should make VR-drawn animations—like this impressive piece from artist Nick Ladd that we saw last year—easier and faster to produce. Facebook claims that the company’s VR resident artist, Goro Fujita, was “able to complete his animated short film Beyond the Fence in just three weeks, an undertaking that could have lasted over a year with traditional 3D animation software.”

The company also says they’re working to integrate Quill content with Facebook Spaces, so that artists can share their work, and friends can watch stories together; a sensible move considering Quill is being developed under the umbrella of the Facebook Social VR team after the shuttering of Oculus Story Studio, where it was originally conceived. There’s no mention of when Facebook Spaces viewing will be deployed, but the company says they’re in development of that and “many more Quill updates and features” for the future.

Update (2/8/16): An earlier version of this article stated that Quill is being developed by Oculus. While the tool was originally built by the team at Oculus Story Studio, its ongoing development was formally moved to Facebook’s Social VR team after the Story Studio group was closed down in 2017.

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January 13, 2018

Waffle is the New Home for VR Animation on Gear VR

Virtual reality (VR) is the ideal home for 3D animation. It doesn’t take animators many tweaks for their 3D animations to be viewable in VR, giving head-mounted display (HMD) owners a whole new way to experience 3D animation. Now, Waffle is launching on Gear VR, and it promises to be the new hub for original VR animations, and even boasts the first animated VR series. We’ve got a bunch of trailers for you to have a look at the new animations in action.

Waffle is available now on Gear VR for free, and you can view new animations and new series on it. They boast voice actors from reputable shows like Bob’s Burgers, Veep, The Mick and more.

Water Bear is what Waffle claims to be the first animated VR series about a bear that fell off a party boat and decided to live underwater. He has a variety of funky underwater friends, and is sure to have some comedic hijinks.

Dessert Island on the other hand follows Conan the ice cream and his pal Fred the chocolate bar. Get it? It’s not a desert island. It’s Dessert Island.

Yes.

Fred honestly looks like he’s having some kind of existential crisis throughout most of it, though that could be us projecting.

And finally there’s All-Star Party, a series about a party. Everyone there is a star. By which I mean literally. It’s the #1 party in the Universe, and everyone loves it – well, we think they do at least.

Waffle basically offers free VR animations and will likely have many more shows and episodes in the future. The trailers don’t exactly give us much indication of whether or not any of them are actually funny, but if you have a Gear VR you can download it right now to find out for yourself.

Waffle offers animations with attitude and we’re eager, if hesitant, to take a look for ourselves. Whatever is happening things are about to get pretty weird on Gear VR.

Make sure to stay on VRFocus for all of the latest news on cartoons in crisis and the latest in VR animation technology.

December 14, 2017

VR Short Film ‘Asteroids!’ from Baobab Studios Now Available

Interactive VR short film Asteroids!, the follow-up to Emmy award-winning VR short Invasion! (2016) is now available for Gear VR, Daydream, and Windows MR headsets. From the director of the Madagascar franchise, the full 11-minute cut continues the journey of aliens Mac and Cheez (and robot sidekick Peas) on their deep space mission.

Baobab Studios announced Asteroids! at Oculus Connect 3 in 2016, and has since made an interactive preview of the animation available on Gear VR and Daydream platforms. A 360 video ‘sneak peek’ has also been available in various forms, including the iOS and Android Baobab app.

Today, the full version of Asteroids! is available for free across several platforms. The best experience can be found on Gear VR, Daydream, and Windows Mixed Reality devices, where the animation is rendered in real-time 3D. Sadly, unlike their first short, Asteroids! is not currently available on PSVR, HTC Vive, or Oculus Rift, despite its considerably more interactive design.

Invasion! was the team’s first foray into VR animation, and was a polished experience, but ended all too quickly. It was later slightly extended with an intro narrated by Ethan Hawke, but this felt like an afterthought, and didn’t offer the viewer what was really needed—more time with the characters. Asteroids! is a major improvement, being longer, with more complex animation and now interactivity.

“Different storytelling mediums all have a common goal—to tell great stories through characters that audiences connect with, care about, and maybe even come to love,” Baobab writes on their official site. “The great challenge and great potential for VR storytelling is not simply to achieve this goal, but also, to do it in a way that actually lets the viewer become a part of the story. With Asteroids!, this is a step towards achieving this goal.”

Follow these links to download the Gear VR, Daydream, and Windows Mixed Reality real-time versions. The non-interactive 360 video version of the full short can be viewed via YouTube 360 and Facebook 360, or via the Baobab app for iOS and Android (which also supports the Cardboard VR viewer), but for the reasons above, it is strongly recommended to experience one of the real-time versions first.

Baobab Studios is one of the largest independent VR film studios, having raised a total of $31 million in funding to date, most notably a $25 million Series B funding round in 2016 which also welcomed Larry Cutler (ex Dreamworks and Pixar) as CTO. Their current project, Rainbow Crow, an adaptation of a Lenape Native American tale, is their most ambitious, presented in several chapters, and features musician John Legend.

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November 20, 2017

Free UE4 Template Makes Creating More Realistic VR Hands a Snap

Czech developer iNFINITE Production has released UVRF – a free, cross-platform template for hand presence in VR. The open-source demo offers a framework for use in any Unreal Engine project, as well as a ‘Playground’ scene containing an underground bunker and shooting range to showcase hand interactivity.

Detailed in a post on the Unreal Engine VR developer forum, UVRF’s framework aims to be a useful starting point for implementing hand presence in an Unreal-based VR experience, offering 17 grab animations to cover most objects, per-platform input mapping and logic, basic haptics, teleport locomotion using NavMesh (with rotation support on Rift), touch UI elements, and several other useful features. The framework is released under the CC0 license, meaning it can be used by anyone without restriction.

In a message to Road to VR, Jan Horský at iNFINITE Production explained how this template could be particularly useful to new developers. “While Unreal does very good job at making development accessible, building hands that properly animate, are properly positioned, with grabs and throws that feel natural and so on, is still not a trivial task,” he writes. “While it’s not a problem for experienced dev teams, it is a problem for newcomers. And they’re the ones that are likely to have ideas that will surprise us all. This little demo is an attempt to make VR development easier for them.”

The included ‘Playground’ demo shown in the video features a functional shooting range in an underground bunker, littered with magazines to show the multi-object interaction of reloading a gun, along with many other features to highlight the hand animations.

Originally developed as an internal tool for prototyping at iNFINITE Production, the team decided to kindly share it with the world. “I expected such a project would come from companies that are more interested in VR growth like Oculus, Valve, or HTC,” says Horský. “It’s nearly a year since Touch was released and there is still no such thing publicly available, so we decided to take it into our own hands.”

You can download to the template here.

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August 30, 2017

Hands-on: Infectiously Weird Movie Creator App ‘Mindshow’ is Now Free on Steam

Mindshow, the app that lets you create animated movies with the use of a VR headset, is now available for general release on Steam following its invite-only alpha. Letting you essentially jump into an avatar, record physical movements, simulate facial expressions, and record audio, the imagination is truly the limit on what stories you can tell.

Revealed by Mindshow Inc (ex-Visionary VR) at last year’s VRLA Summer Expo, the company has since added several tools, settings, and flushed out its crazy cast of characters ranging from a talking Twinkie to a body building piece of lettuce. Some characters even have the ability to record audio with voice modifications, giving anyone the chance to inject a little weirdness into their creations without being expert impressionists—well, a little more weirdness anyway.

One of the cool aspects about Mindshow is that it’s not only for making 2D movies, but functionally acts as a platform that lets you watch others’ performances from within VR. With the ability to share your own VR shows and view others’, you can remix anything shared publicly through Mindshow and create something new. To boot, the app will soon be featuring shows from people like Reggie Watts and YouTube viral star Tay Zonday every day of September.

While specifically stating support for HTC Vive, the app uses SteamVR, so it works nearly as well with Oculus Rift given the three-sensor, room-scale setup. Admittedly, Mindshow is optimized for the Vive, so some buttons aren’t mapped currently to Oculus Touch including the ‘mirror’ option that lets you see a ghostly apparition of your avatar while recording a scene so you can get posturing and facial expressions correct.

‘Mindshow’ on Steam

The user interface is pretty simple, letting you select your action with one controller; teleport, record video, hop-in to avatars, rotate and move props and characters. The other controller is dedicated to spawning menu items like characters and props, and also a progress bar and play button so you can rewatch performances.

There’s a few hard caps on avatar numbers (max 3 in each scene) and props, and each discrete recording cuts off within 30 seconds. The recording cap is true for strictly ‘VR shows’, but longer 2D shows can be created by recording the action with the camera tool and generating multiple cuts, then stringing them together with a film editing software. The show below, which takes the fake documentary-style popularized by the The Office and throws it into space, was built using basic tools and stock backgrounds.

It took me about 45 minutes to create a 2-minute show (it’s so bad I’ll only link it in the confines of parenthesis: here). That may seem like a long time, but quick cuts and short dialogue mean you have to teleport around and delete the recorded actions of avatars and record new ones. Then you need to import, cut and string all of the clips together before you can export to a video file. Shorter clips that are under the 30-second recording cap can however be shared directly to YouTube from within the app by linking your account.

One problem I ran into while making my half-brained movie was audio. The integrated mic on the Vive is just plain bad, and a clip-on external mic would go a long way in terms of audio quality. Rift is slightly better in that aspect, but I don’t have a three sensor setup, so I couldn’t get the perfect shot I was looking for due to inconsistent controller tracking. Otherwise, there were only a few hiccups when trying to interact with props, as they sometime didn’t like to stay put.

For the pros: if you’re good at video editing, you can even take advantage of the green screen background that lets you chroma key your creations into anywhere imaginable. Check out the movie below made by Mindshow to see just how crazy things can get.

Creating with Mindshow was an awesome and eye-opening experience. It’s hard to imagine that I can now direct and record any idea or skit floating through my head, however bad and half-brained they may be. There are some definite limits to what you can produce, but those sorts of bottlenecks are sure to create their own brand of viral gags that would otherwise be impossible (or expensive) outside of a VR headset.

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August 18, 2017

This Impressive Short Film Was Drawn and Animated Entirely Inside of VR

As VR continues to grow, the tools of the medium continue to mature as well. In an impressive demonstration of what you can now create entirely from within VR, artist Nick Ladd has produced an impressive short film using Quill and ANIMVR.

Made by Ladd alone in just four days, the short film Escape was made in virtual reality by painting the environments and objects using Quill, while the animation and some effects were produced with Animvr. The end result is a short but impressive look at how VR content creation tools are becoming increasingly mature and enabling creators to achieve a unique look and feel in their work.

Quill, it seems, matches nicely with Ladd’s broadly stroked painterly style that’s evident in some of the non-VR works on his art blog. The environments he created for Escape use extreme color contrast as a sort of lighting for the film, instantly setting a strong mood.

And although you’re watching the film here as a ‘flat’ video, the assets and environments are made entirely in 3D; it wouldn’t be a stretch to adapt them to be viewed within VR itself.

The film’s animation appears a bit less developed than the environments (to be expected from an artist primarily focused on still works), but is used effectively nonetheless to bring action to the piece. That’s not a knock to Ladd’s talent, as animation is hugely challenging and in Animvr is done largely frame-by-frame. Artist Joe Daniels has a great overview of what it’s like to animate inside of VR using Animvr:

Especially as a one man production, Escape is a promising look at how VR tools are changing workflows, and allowing creators to make beautiful and entertaining works of art in entirely new ways.

Thanks to Dario Seyb for the tip!

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August 9, 2017

Google is Exploring Ways to Let You Animate Your ‘Blocks’ Creations

Google’s team at Daydream Labs have been prototyping ways of animating objects and characters in Blocks, the company’s recently released VR modelling tool. In a recent entry on the Google Blog, senior UX engineer Logan Olson describes how it could give users the power to “create expressive animations without needing to learn complex animation software.”

With its low-poly aesthetic and simple menu systems, Blocks is perhaps the least intimidating 3D modelling tool currently available for VR, and the Daydream Labs team looked to retain that approachability as they prototyped animation systems during their ‘one-week hackathon’. Olson explains that this boils down to three steps: preparing the model, controlling it, and finally recording sequences for playback.

Firstly, the static models created in Blocks require some ‘prep’, adding appropriate control points and joints for inverse kinematic techniques (for models with a rigid skeleton), or for a ‘shape matching’ technique that works better for ‘sentient blobs’ or anything with a less defined shape, good for ‘wiggling’. Olson explains that there is a short setup process for shape matching but it “could eventually be automated”.

Once prepared, controlling the movement is where VR is at its most intuitive, as the motion-tracked hardware means that a simple form of motion capture is readily available, although it’s not always appropriate, depending upon what’s being animated. Olson references the creative app Mindshow that embraces this ‘puppeteering’ technique, due to launch into open beta soon. “People loved ‘becoming’ the object when in direct control,” writes Olson. “Many would role-play as the character when using this interface.”

Alternatively, you can simply grab specific control points of objects and manipulate them, which also works well with multiple users, or you can directly pose the skeleton for keyframes, which Olson notes is ‘much more intuitive’ than traditional apps due to the spatial awareness and control afforded in VR.

Finally, recording and playing back movements could be done with ‘pose-to-pose’ or ‘live-looping’, the former operating with a sequence of keyframe poses for complex animations, the latter being suitable for simpler animations, allowing the recording of movement in real-time to be played back in a repeating loop. “Press the record button, move, press the button again, and you’re done—the animation starts looping,” writes Olson. “We got these two characters dancing in under a minute.”

As a proof of concept, the experimentation appears to be a success, although it will likely require further refinement before the team considers rolling out these features into a future Blocks update.

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April 22, 2017

Oculus Teases Unreleased ‘Quill’ Animation Tools

Oculus has provided an unreleased build of the Quill VR paint app to an artist to experiment with animation features. Released earlier this year, Quill allows users to create still 3D drawings in VR. Using the new animation tools artist Goro Fujita shows what the app’s animation tools can do.

Oculus Story Studio, the company’s VR film division, built Quill initially as an internal tool for creating the VR film Dear Angelica. The film surrounds viewers in a hand-painted world which indeed includes animated elements. Quill launched to the public in beta when the company’s Touch VR controllers released earlier this year, and while we found the VR paint tool very impressive, it didn’t include animation capabilities.

Dreamworks Animation artist Goro Fujita had his hands on Oculus’ art tools (both Quill and Medium) ahead of their public launch and has created a number of impressive works in both apps since.

In new videos published recently, Fujita shows a new piece of artwork he’s calling ‘A Moment in Time’ which features an animated Quill scene which was painted and animated with an unreleased version of the app which Fujita says was provided to him by Oculus. You can see a tour of the work in the video heading this article; in a followup video, the artist walks through the scene pointing out various elements and commentating on its creation:

At present it isn’t clear if Oculus intends to roll out the animation tools into the public release of Quill in a coming update, or if it will keep that version internal, though the release to Fuijta (who doesn’t work for Oculus, and apparently was not asked to keep this information secret) does make us think it could be foreshadowing an eventual public release. We’ve reached out to Oculus for comment.

Hat tip to Reddit user N1Cola who spotted Fujita’s videos.

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October 18, 2016

Baobab Studios Raises $25 Million in New Funding Round

There isn’t a studio that can claim to be ‘The Pixar of VR’ just yet, but many heavy hitters in traditional media and tech are taking notice of the growth potential of animated films in VR, and specifically in Baobab Studios, the VR film studio known for animated shorts INVASION! and sequel ASTEROIDS!. Baobab today announced the close of $25 Million in Series B funding, bringing total funding to date to $31 Million.

Original investors included Comcast Ventures, HTC and Samsung, but now join Horizons Ventures, Twentieth Century Fox, Evolution Media Partners (backed by TPG and CAA), China’s Shanghai Media Group, Youku Global Media Fund and LDV Partners.

The series B funding brings along with it Larry Cutler, Pixar’s technical director for Toy Story 2 (1999) and Monsters Inc. (2001). Cutler will be joining Baobab as chief technology officer (CTO).

Chris Milk, founder and CEO of VR film distribution platform Within, will also be joining Baobab’s advisory board.

“We are on the cusp of a storytelling revolution with this medium, and VR gives filmmakers the opportunity to develop immersive experiences and take audiences into the story like never before,” says Mike Dunn, President, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment and Fox Innovation Lab. “Baobab Studios is an innovator in this space, and we look forward to working with them.”

ASTEROIDS!, the second installment in the INVASION! series, was first revealed at the Oculus Connect 3 developer conference earlier this month. The full release of ASTEROIDS! is slated for 2017.

Baobab Studios was founded by Eric Darnell and Maureen Fan in 2015. Darnell is best known for his director and screenwriter credits on all four films in the DreamWorks Madagascar franchise, and also known for his work on The Penguins of Madagascar (2014) and Antz (1998). Fan comes to Baobab from mobile game developer Zynga where she oversaw three studios, including the FarmVille sequels. Fan previously worked on Pixar’s Toy Story 3 (2010).

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October 13, 2016

Animated VR Tale ‘Allumette’ Launches Today, Aims For Your Heart Strings

Penrose Studios’ Allumette launches on Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR today. This real-time animated VR tale is beautifully crafted and aims for your heart strings, but does it hit its mark?

Alumette tells the tale of an orphaned girl who lives in a fantastical floating village. The aesthetic straddles the line between claymation and cardboard handicraft and is expertly used to set a well composed stage consisting of a little village that’s set floating in fluffy clouds. A stage indeed; while a picturesque slice of the tiny village surrounds you, directly in front there is a large flat area that Allumette makes ample use of for character performance and key moments. The scene around you functions as your viewpoint for the majority of the experience, and it’s well composed such that there’s a pretty world in your periphery, but it doesn’t distract you from the main action.

The claymation-like animation approach might look great in a still, but I don’t think the choice of ‘low-framerate’ animation (where character animations are jumpy, characteristic of claymation) was a good fit for VR; we’re now so used to smooth 90 FPS motion in these modern VR headsets that seeing the characters animate at what looks like the equivalent of 10 or 15 FPS made me feel like my computer was stuttering or even that the characters were running in slow motion.

Animation aside, the characters themselves—a mother and her daughter are the main focus—are well designed, staying clearly on the cartoon side of the style spectrum. Unfortunately that style comes accompanied with mumbles as the only form of communication among characters in the world of Allumette. Instead of saying real words, characters make expressive mumbles, hums, and groans to one another, so you are left with only the tone of what’s being said while needing to infer the substance. This felt a little tired, and made it more difficult for me to connect with and care about the characters, relegating them solely in the realm of little critters (reinforced by their cartoonish designs) rather than complex entities with which I could readily connect my human thoughts and emotions.

Alumette spins up a quick connection between Mother and Daughter (I’m using those as proper nouns because names are never given) whose craft is creating glowing baton-like wands that are sold to the townspeople. Mother teaches Daughter how to sell the goods, and, in a single moment, apparently teaches Daughter the meaning of kindness by giving one of the wands to a blind man to use as a cane. It all happens fast. Too fast.

allumette-vr — In VR your perspective is actually much further out; you tower over the little characters and their world like a giant. At this scale (closer to human-sized), Allumette might have been more effective.

I have been searching for a VR experience with characters I can really connect to and care about. I had high hopes for Allumette in that regard, but I’m still left searching. That’s not a major knock against Allumette, it’s something the entire VR industry is still learning how to do effectively.

Character development is hard, but in many ways it seems that time spent observing the characters is a minimum requirement. With Allumette spanning only 20 minutes or so, it’s hard to develop the characters and still have any time left for conflict and action. But this is in opposition to the VR medium which so far has favored shorter ‘experiences’ than epic stories.

Still, you can’t expect to just shove the conflict in the viewer’s face after a few minutes of exposition; if the viewer doesn’t connect to the characters then the conflict hardly matters because there’s no reason to care about the outcome.

Allumette is at its best when the viewer realizes at the same time as Mother that she needs to make a tough choice because it’s the right thing to do. It makes effective use of the stage around the viewer to hint at what’s coming. This moment is not sophisticated though, and while I could feel a little tug on my heart strings from what I knew had to be done, it was only a general feeling of sympathy, not a specific connection to the situation of the characters (because I was not very attached to them or their world). The ending in particular felt oddly jarring, like the dénouement had been hacked off.

If it sounds like I’m being a little hard on Allumette, it’s because it’s really good, but I want it to be great. At the excellent price of free, it’s definitely worth a watch, but I don’t think it’ll have you coming back for a second viewing any time soon.

I want a story in VR that immerses me and makes me care about the characters and makes a world so enveloping that I don’t want to leave. We aren’t there yet, but Allumette undoubtedly points us in the right direction.

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