Animating characters for VR is cumbersome, difficult, and slow. It's also, in my opinion, the most interesting frontier in animation right now. In 2015 I worked on a virtual reality cinematic experience called "Rexodus VR". It was made by Steelehouse Productions in Tulsa Oklahoma, and was created as an intro to VR experience as well as an experimental promotional piece for Steelehouse's graphic novel "Rexodus". The target platform was the Oculus Rift DK2 which allows the user to turn their head and even shift there perspective by take a few steps in any direction as they explore a virtual world. As an animator this presents a bit of a challenge. In school we were always taught to "animate to the camera". In other words, you were only concerned with how a pose looked from the perspective of your render camera. It could look awful from any other angle as long as it looked right from that single camera. There's always been something comforting about that to me. I'm a control freak and this feeds into my nature nicely. I like having the ability to guide my viewer with meticulous care. VR takes that concept and pretty much throws it out the window. Games deal with this issue to a certain degree. If you're animating a run cycle for a game character, you have to assume that it's likely going to be viewed from any number of angles. But even in games, when it comes to your cutscenes, the game tends to take control of the camera away from the user and tell it's story from specific angles. A hundred years of cinematography and story telling viewed through rectangles has honed this process to a fine art. So what happens when the frame gets taken away? Or worse still, when you no longer are allowed to use a camera. Once you get over the initial horror of having your beloved and trusted tools taken away and the screaming subsides, you begin to realize the wealth of exciting opportunities that have just presented themselves. One scene from Rexodus VR has the user standing with a human girl to their left and 2 massive, anthropomorphic dinosaurs in front of them. All three of the characters are talking an interacting with each other and the user. We animated this scene in maya and were pretty happy with it. Then we brought it into VR and suddenly could see all these little flaws and things that just didn't work. But we'll get back to the crappy parts in a minute. Let me gush for a moment. VR does a fantastic job of letting you feel the scale of a thing. It lets you feel like you're really in the presence of another person, or in this case, a dinosaur. VR is the most fantastic multiplier when it comes to the ways we can make users connect with our characters. It's incredibly satisfying to animate something and see someone reacting to it and interacting with a character even when there's not a specific "gameplay reason" to do so. It's such a powerful thing feeling like someone is standing right there in front of you talking. I can't begin to describe how excited I am to have the ability to actually make people relate to a character in ways that we never could before. Simple things like feeling rude because you're standing too close to a character are powerful tools that we can learn to use in story telling. VR will let us tell stories that people are more deeply connected to than ever before. But right now, it kinda sucks. Let me explain. Remember those flaws that VR suddenly revealed? Well, it does that a lot, and not just with animation. As much as it's an awesomeness multiplier, it's also crappiness multiplier. Almost every single model, animation, or texture that I would make and be happy with on my flat, boring monitor, would need at least some degree of changing once I'd taken a look at it in VR. The problem is, right now there's no quick workflow for that. I have to wait and go throw the process of implementing the asset before I can see it "in person". If you're scale is a little off, you're really going to feel it in a big way. You start losing all these normal map tricks you used to use for adding detail that just aren't working anymore. That character you animated just doesn't feel like he's talking to you, or he's getting to close, or is just plain scary. Even something as basic as the arcs my dinosaur swings his arm in are suddenly, painfully broken. VR isn't breaking it, it's just giving me a clearer lens to see through and exposing things that were there all along. After finishing the project and going through this process, one thing became very clear to me. I need to be able to work in VR. And I'm not just talking about having a few gimmicky art tools. I'm talking about having a fully or nearly fully VR workflow. Now I'm not the sort of person that jumps on the bandwagon every time some new form of human computer interaction comes along. I don't wanted to paint textures with my fingers just because your tablet has touch. I don't want to sculpt something with my Kinect scanned hands. Those things aren't going to make me work faster or better. I've become convinced however, that to make the best VR experiences possible we're going to need to work within the world we're creating just as we've been working on rectangles to make content for rectangles. I don't expect this to happen quickly, but as an animator I can definitely picture a day when my workflow looks a lot more like that of a stop-motion animator. Can you imagine being able to work in room scale with something like the HTC Vive and reach out with a precisely tracked control and move your character from pose to pose? To have the advantage of being the presence of your characters through the whole process? So basically you'd be a stop-motion animator except you'd have the one tool that a real stop-motion animator could only dream of. An undo button. As I said, this will take time, but the potential impact of story telling in VR is far to significant to ignore and not make it the absolute best it can be. I look forward to sitting back 50 years from now and telling stories about how much harder it was "in my day". And I couldn't be more excited about the new ways we'll tell and experience stories in the years to come.
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