ITS ONLY BEEN A DAY. man I say that again… BUT NOW ITS EVEN CRAZYER yeah I worked for like 3 hours today not fun I don’t recommend my butt hurts from sitting. BUT I GOT DONE WHAT I WANTTED TO WHICH IS: We made another unity project (Yes another one) and I recorded 1 hour and 10 minutes of how to use the system.. yeah its not really a how it its a how to not do because OOOF I really don’t know how my own code works somedays and I had to pause recording for awhile to debug some stuff WHICH GOT IMPROVED UPON which is good. I just have to edit that video now (which wont be included in the project time sadly) I exported the motion matcher as a package got that into github and yeah… that’s about it… I have 1 readme to write and a video to edit and then SHIP its been fun hack clubbers (though sometimes it was very much not fun and I was ready to kick my laptop across the room light it on fire and run it over with my car.

WOW ITS ONLY BEEN A DAY! LOTS HAS BEEN ACOMPLISHED! I hope. I have created a middle-man script that takes in data then gives it to the motion matcher trajectory thing. tomorrow I am going to make a tutorial of how to make it work. WOWOWOOWOWOWOWOWOW! we are getting close to being done and we only got 7 days to getter done. so lets GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!
btw if you are wondering how I made the middle man I learned a lot about C# inheritance. I have a custom class script that has all the variables that the motion matcher trajectory maker that script basically only holds the variables and does nothing else other then inherit from the normal unity thing MonoBehavior. then we have a script that inherits from that script that holds the variables. then the new script does all the math and grabbing of the data takes it and then since it inherits from the script it inherits the variables then we set the variables and then don’t have to hard code anything in the motion matching stuff. I hope I explained it right. I’m really eepy seepy and done for the day so I guess who cares.

I finished all the code comments. I know. WOW 4 HOURS OF CODE COMMENTS yeah but I was also cleaning some other parts of it up and fixing some of the indentations. anyways that’s done now only a few more things till we get to ship! but also a note to other devs like me… please comment your code while writing it because I have gotten in the habit of not doing that and as seeing here by 4 hours logged of code comments PLEASE JUST DO IT WHILE WRITING IT BECUASE THIS SUCKS

Not much changed I made an Itch.io for the demo. I also started adding comments to all of my code yeah its hard to remember what does what but I also got the dataset editor done or almost done. then its onto the matcher and then the trajectory maker then we are done there and then onto a tutorial of how to use it then we are done

OK its fixed now but first test build didn’t go so well (see video) the problem was unity wasn’t saving any of my data running in the background because it wasn’t serialized. I also organized project files plus removing unneeded scripts (I reuse code a lot and sometimes things get replaced and just left there) I also if you can’t tell from the video a dropped frame counter to show matches that where canceled because the current frame was good enough to meet the cost threshold. anyways I think now most of what I have to do it package everything up into… well a package then send it off into the world for you the hack clubbers to mess around with.

EDIT: I added a demo for Windows to the github if you want to try it early

The demo UI has been finished and it works quite well! I have a few more things to add like a looping map so that the Character doesn’t just walk off the end of the world and die plus some more main menu stuff I think too. anyways progress has been fast so far so expect more soon!

LOTS OF DEBUG UI COMEING YOUR WAY!

I have added lots of UI stuff to display internal values such as costs as stuff. I have also added the ability to adjust motion matching settings from in the demo so when I upload it to itch.io all of you can play with the system as much as you want and tell me how bad you broke it. to do wise its a bit more UI (some of it doesn’t work or I want it to look better) and then the data points kinda like the unity gizmo stuff I have been showing you here on star dance. anyways its like 1 AM I should have gone to bed HOURS AGO so I’mma go brush my teeth and work some more tomorrow…. my keyboard is starting to fail :-< Goodnight y’all. or good morning to the folk around the world like in Norway or something

I finally made a git hub repository. I also made a new unity project and moved everything into it to clean everything up for the demo I am starting to work on. I also made Bone Rotation matching but it doesn’t contribute all that match. I should be ready to ship/ Have a demo ready soon

OK OK IT WORKS ENOUGH OK DONT TOUCH IT

I’m a fraud you guys. I couldn’t figure out the velocity thing so I…. I USED AI! I SWARE I HAVENT BEEN THIS ENTIRE TIME…. ok heres what happened I couldn’t figure it out so I had some AI going through some Motion Matching related thesis stuff and explaining it to me and then I ended up giving it a small chunk of my matcher code use to generate the cost and it pointed out my problems….. so 1. The way I was calculating local position was wrong which is funny because when I do it the other way it also breaks but then that leads into the second part. 2. I was inverting data and that was what was keeping the system working for some reason awhile back and even when I tried removing it a bit ago it broke which was really weird. anyways if you change both of them they fix each other so YAY I guess… sorry for the AI usage. it didn’t re write my code for me though I hand fixed my problem which I can proudly say all of the code is all hand typed…. (other then stuff I copy and pasted and or reused from other code I wrote… TRUST ME I NEVER WANT TO REWRITE UI SYSTEMS please unity fix the uitoolkit its bad)

Working on velocity matching. its kinda working now better then it was but its really weird that it slows the character down so much but its better then random snapping poses

HOLY CRAP IT WALKS!!!

I can’t believe it. I am so FLIIPING happy ITS MOTION MATCHING! THAT IS ACTAUL REAL MOVEMENT AND NOT JUST WIGGLES!!!!! AAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!! HECK YEAH!!!!!!! ok so in reality its still not fully working. I had to disable bone velocity matching completely to get it to work but I think I figured out why it doesn’t work. for trajectory matching I realized that the character is scaled to 1.83 instead of just 1 so that will affect the matching and I have to implement an offset (and I did it for the bone positions too but I never did it to the velocities) anyways I think I will fiddle with it till that work epeshly since STARDANCE WAS EXETENDED UNTILL OCTOBER 30TH THANK YOU HACK CLUB!!!!

Video is of it working, not working and me playing with settings.

WE HAVE HIT 100 HOURS LOGGED!!!!

wow the amount of time I spent on this is CRAZY! anyways we have had little improvements on the matcher I have been trying to get it to give me a full animation but it refuses instead kinda just wiggling its arms up and down pretending to be a bird OR snapping between poses that have NOTHING to do with walking.
I have spent the last few hours attempting to calibrate it to work as well as writing a better dataset debug script so then it will be easier to visualize what every frame of animation contains Data-wise so then I can attempt to manually match frames and see what the matcher ranks them vs what it normally matches so the I can maybe weight it or bias it a bit. we only have a week and bit left LET LOCK IN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

we have done it!

MOTION MATCHING FROM SCRATCH!

the last week has been crazy. I have found more data from a unity demo of a long discontinued motion matching asset and I have retargeted the animation in blender and brought it into unity with proper root motion. since this was my first time using more then one animation clip with EVERYTHING I expected bugs and errors AND THAT I GOT. I had to go in and rewrite a really small chunk of how the dataset maker compiles the trajectory data. I had to make the matcher actually handle more then one clip as well as dig into a null reference error it was giving me so I had to dig into it more and learn that the dataset was still flawed and go back and do more to the editor AND THEN ONCE the data was good now the matcher scales the character to like 300% or something and I never even told it to touch scale so now I have to properly set up multi-animation unity playables since before I didn’t know that you couldn’t just set all the blend weights to one and hope for the best. now finally after all of that. it appears to match and hold onto a frame. I have a few last features to implement into it that being velocity matching so then it wont just hold a frame but understand that arms move and swing. as well as debug info for both me while testing as well as for you my dear hackclubbers so when I ship you all can see a bit into the inner workings of it.

thank you for coming with me on this journey I never expected it to go this long but it feels good to have at least one person interested in what I’m working on for once and not just get shrugged off. - Ash ❤️

Video is of the matcher working
photos are of the scaling issue

sheesh I’ve done a bit in the last week.

So we have

• added the ability to match bones in the matcher
• got the matcher to handle multiple animation clips

and I guess that’s it… I honestly thought I did more… on paper it doesn’t actually seem like that much.. huh. OH WELL! I also found a MASIVE collection of animation from a unreal engine demo project so I’m probably going to extract that and retarget TONS of that over the next few days because imma say it the problem with the matcher is the lack of good data at this point.

Pink/Purple - Animation frame data position
Red/green - predicted trajectory

OK OK OK

IT WORKS!!!!!

so we got bone positions to work. I’m done for the day. anyways I literally just had to flip my subtraction around… yes… its stupid…. anyways went from this: RootPositions[i][j] - BoneTransform.position to this: BoneTransform.position - RootPositions[i][j]. ok mic drop… I did say I would ship by the end of the month of august and clearly that didn’t happen but it will (hopefully) be this week

Pink sphere is the foot pos from data set
Blue is the other models foot pos not from dataset
then red is root position

(Also 2 devlogs in one day! I’m on fire!)

IM SO CLOSE!!!!!!!!!

LIKE LATER TODAY (maybe can’t promise anything or the programing gods will kill me) I WILL HAVE MOTION MATCHING IN A GOOD DEMOABLE STATE FOR ME TO SHIP! I have got the bone data to work and actually spit out something useful by changing my whole approach and instead of sampling curves (which could work I just gotta deal with all the weird problems) I have created a unity scene in memory it spawns in the rig samples all the bone transform.positrons making unity do all the math and hard work before it returns me world positions of all of the bones I told it to track. the only problem I am having now is that I got to convert those world positions back into local position so that they can work anywhere (and yes I just converted them from local position to world position and this might sound counter intuitive but I need to change the parent of the local position) I remember this being easy for trajectory matching but maybe since this is WAYY more sensitive to rotation I need to try a different approach. the final stretch is approaching us dear hack clubbers. I got the rest of today then school starts tomorrow.

LETS! LOCK! IN! YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

btw the pink sphere is the foot potion… or what should be the foot position. Blue is the actual foot position. Red is root Position

Note to self… don’t freehand code… plan everything out on paper because I’m just experiencing Murphey’s law at this point :-<

so…. the data that I didn’t know if it was right or not was incorrect… VERY incorrect (kinda) so that data was in local space I need it in world space but to convert it you either need to do the conversion through a transform (which requires a transform to reference) or do what I am doing (since I don’t have a easily accessible transform (unless I’m stupid and don’t know of one)) so I am going up the paths and for each object extracting their position and transforms (in local position) then adding it up until I eventually hit the root which would be in world space so now its converted (I’m doing the same for rotation too with more math) anyways my code for this entire project was never pre planned and I never normally pre plan but this is one of the times where once it works I’m going to figure out how it works (because who am I kidding I don’t really know) then I’m writing all of it down on paper and optimizing the loops and everything before jumping back into the editor to re-write the bake() function from scratch leading to MUCH BETTER READABILTY and hopefully speed because it takes a good 5 seconds from my for loops and brute force. anyways if you cant tell this is VERY BORING WORK and I really just want it to work SO BADLY because once I get everything in world position the next steps should be really easy but I shouldn’t say that because at this point if I do I might jinx myself

WOW JUST WOW!!! So I toured the Vicon Set-up at my local univercity and it was amazing. I loved every moment of it. they even put markers on me and captured some data (not any I can use for motion matching but still WOW THAT TECH IS COOL)

In more on topic news I got the dataset maker to output bone data into the database. is it the correct data… idk but I will figure that out!

(Photo of me standing forward is just a general photo with the markers. photo of me looking away from camera with hand in air is me showing off all the retroreflective markers (and EMGs) then there is a photo of the compiled dataset)

THERE WE GO! finally we can select what bones we want to track from a nested dropdown. now I just need to implement it into the baking logic so I can get a finished dataset out of dataset maker. perfect timing too. I have gotten a few emails back from the university and they are willing to give me a tour of the Vicon system and there may be a chance one day to capture data on it so hopefully everything works out and I can capture on the same tech that AAA game studios use which would be a dream come true and would blow my mind.

There we go. I think I finally got it working. JEEZ UNITY NEEDS BETTER DOCUMENTATION ON THE UI TOOLKIT LIKE WOW ITS THAT BAD…. anyway I got the custom lists working now I just gotta add the actual bone selections then write in the logic to add everything to the datasets. if you look at the photo that’s roughly how it will look to use the dataset maker. not sure if I mentioned this in the last devlog but I finally messaged my local university to see if they will let me either tour or use their vicon system so I’m hoping something comes of that because that would be really cool. anyways its really late I pulled another programmer and stayed up till midnight working. see yall later.