Blog

I have just begun working on my Master Thesis, which I will be making in collaboration with the company Unity Technologies that make the awesome Unity game engine.

The Master thesis will be about "Adaptive Animation for Character Locomotion", which basically means creating a system for adapting walking, running, and crawling keyframed animations to a dynamic environment. The system will take curved paths, uneven terrain, and variable speed into account all the while ensuring graceful footsteps without slipping feet and motions that stay as faithful as possible to the original keyframed animations under the given restraints. Inverse kinematics is one of many techniques that will be involved in this.

Goals and perspectives

The system is meant to be generic in nature, working not just for biped characters (with two legs) but also for example for dogs, bugs, and spiders and, say, robots and aliens, provided that they move around using a limited number of legs. This list of features is the ideal case - time will tell how far I get within the timeframe of my Master Thesis. Hopefully I can continue working on the project after my graduation, if necessary.

In the end, the result of my work will be made available to all users of Unity free of charge, for any use. I hope to get people from the Unity user community involved in testing the system as it is developed, since one important success criteria is the usefulness and usability as perceived by the developers using the system. It will take some time before the first prototype is ready though, as I've only just begun.

The project up until now

My original "pitch" of the project to Unity was a presentation based on this slideshow:

See PowerPoint slidehow

A few ideas have already changed since that. For one thing, the idea that animators must enrich the animation cycles with additional data has been abandoned. The data needed is for example information about when exactly each foot leaves the ground and land on the ground again. The new plan is that this will be automatically analyzed and calculated by the system. More on that in a later post.

In order to quickly get my feet wet, I've made this little demo, where I have modified the Goober guy that comes with one of the Unity tutorials, and made his legs use some very simple inverse kinematics:

Click the image to make the demo run in the browser. Just click yes to install the Unity browser plug-in. Note that in this simple demo I simply adjusted the altitudes of the feet, so feet slippage etc. are not prevented. The actual system will work in a completely different way.

I have already gotten some interest and positive feedback in the Unity forums. Stay tuned!

My website runevision.com has been online since 1998. Now, ten years later, runevision blog is started to make it simpler for me to communicate developments in ongoing projects and other things in my life.

For a start, the blog will mainly be centered around my master thesis project on Adaptive Animation for Character Locomotion, which I have just begun working on. For the next half a year, this blog will be a place for myself and others to track the progress of the project, see the ongoing results, read about the thoughts behind the technical details, and roll eyes at the occasional silly remarks.

The master thesis marks the end of my education in Multimedia with specialization in Games Programming at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. After my graduation, I am looking forward to a carreer in the game industry as a games programmer. Well, enough background - you can always go to runevision.com for more. The blog is now officially open.

(Note: Post appearing before this one have been migrated retroactively from my own news entry system.)

Website makeover! Finally, rune|vision has gotten a completely new design. The six years old dark and blue angled design has been replaced with a bright smooth lime and orange design, aimed to make it look more professional, and the content has been revised as well. Hope you like it! I've also uploaded my 3D image series Metal & Flowers, which is my most ambitious artwork yet, and an exercise in playful ironic contrasts, both visually and thematically.

Our Team 3 game production FLIPSIDE is a 2008 Independent Games Festival Student Showcase Winner! It's a huge honor, and I and two other guys from Team 3 are going to San Francisco by February to show off our game at the Game Developers Conference, attend the IGF Awards Ceremony, and talk with people in the business. :D

The platform game FLIPSIDE features the split-personality mental institution patient Hannibal on the run, as he imagines his own escape in a cardboard cut-out world with two sides. As his mood changes between extremes, the world reflects it and flips between a happy, fluffy world with bunnies and bumble bees, and a gloomy, hostile world with evil nurses and killer wasps.

ClashBall Championship is a frenzied rough-and-tumble ball game set in the future with two teams of robots battling each other to score the most goals. Tackle your opponents when they're close or throw heavy boxes at them to watch them fly though the air. Play with your AI-controlled team players against the computer or play against a friend in the split-screen mode.

Dragon Panic is an interactive OpenGL demo featuring a flock of small helpless people and a huge serpent-like dragon emerging out of a lava lake, which can spew fire breath and fireballs at the people. Be in control! Scorch those critters and make them run in panic! Try it out at the new Dragon Panic page in the Multimedia section. It's fun!

Okay, the last update was two years ago... I've been busy with Real Life, but here's a few updates now: I made a 40 second animation with a spider robot pet called ArachnoBot. See the cute fellow on the Animations page. I also made a simple abstract 3d image in the 3D Gallery. Oh, and for those using Game Maker, I released a version of Rune's Game Engine compatible with Game Maker 6 on the Game Maker page.

Linux Magazine France has a 7-page article about Rune's Particle System. The title is "POV-Ray's quest for fire and smoke". In other news, my Stereogram Gallery has for the first time for years been updated with one new image. It's an updated version of the dragon stereogram from 1999, with a better tiled image, made with POV-Ray.

Red and White is a new game I've made which is a computer version of the classic board game known as Reversi or Othello. Play it against a friend or one of three computer opponents!