aleon-virtualavatars

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Out my train car

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Toad Run

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For my final, I planned to have myself and toad racing, similar to Super Mario Run - Brooklyn edition. I found the assets for Toad and the 3d scene, including the buildings, heart, diamond, and coins. I textured them all in Maya before adding animations to the scene.

I created my character in DAZ, but after finding assets and bringing them into Daz, shaping my face, bringing her into Maya multiple times and finally posing her, my character wouldn’t keyframe. I tried to fix this by changing the control channel settings, but unfortunately this didn’t work either. Without having my own device to use Maya on troubleshooting is much harder. Since I could no longer make my character race toad, I had to make a quick last minute decision of what my project would end up as. I created a character in Autodesk Character generator and brought her into Mixamo to add animations. I had to stich multiple animations together in Mixamo which required creating a new maya scene and importing the second animation as an .mb file instead of the .fbx I downloaded from Mixamo.

Once my scene was rendered, I imported a screen recording to Premiere pro, where I added a background image - a photo I took on the roof of my old apartment. Finally, I added in a beat to the background - “We will fly” by Zander Zel. My image sequence had errors importing to Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects, but the last image2 in this photoset are frames from my animation.

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My face blend

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These are my faceblender front and all view textures along side the original images used for my second go at making a face mesh in blender. 

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11.16

“Hollywood’s Post-Biological Future, Where Actors Can Perform After Death” // "Athletes In Video Games: Balancing Publicity Rights" // “Rogue One: A Star Wars - A New Hope (For Deceased Actors)"

One power, and unfortunate downfalls of a media is the ability to archive. Some archives are living, while others are created as an afterlife to whatever the media object is. The debate for publicity rights has been an on-going issue for film and television actors, but the debate continues to grow as technology becomes more and more intelligent. Publicity rights can be understood as The right of publicity, often called personality rights, is the right of an individual to control the commercial use of his or her name, image, likeness, or other unequivocal aspects of one's identity, according to Joseph Rothberg in Forbes.  GIan Volpicelli's vice article, he explores the ways in which 3D digital models can perform posthumously. Technology is used to use actors bodies, voices, and characters if they pass while a film is in production. Some actors, like Robin Williams took measures to ensure their image isn't used until well after their death. In around 2008, the debate expanded beyond television and film to video games, and from afterlives to living people. Oliver Hertzfeld shares with us the stories of Ed O’Bannon, a former All-American basketball player at UCLA, and Samuel Keller, a former starting quarterback for the Arizona State University and University of Nebraska football teams. Around 2008, both players learned that their images were being depicted in video games produced by Electronic Arts (EA). When the fight for publicity rights reached the Supreme Court, they found that the First Amendment does not fully protect images being used for publicity if they pass the Rogers test. "The Rogers test requires a trademark used in an expressive work to have “no artistic relevance to the underlying work” or “explicitly mislead as to the source” of the work before it is deemed to be an infringing use." Since video games have artistic relevance in their creation and there are no claims of false endorsement, players rights in video games pass the Rogers test. In Davis v. Electronic Arts Inc. (9th Cir. 2015), "a video game developer was found not to be entitled to the transformative use defense for use of former professional football players' likenesses in its video games where the game replicated players' physical characteristics and allowed users to manipulate them in performing the same activity" California, the home to many of the country's and world's most famous celebrities has more law established to protect the rights of these citizens. In 1985, they passed the Celebrity Rights Act in California Civil Code §3344. This section of the Civil Code gives an individual a right to sue another for knowingly using a famous person’s name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness, in any unauthorized commercial manner for 70 years after an actor's death.

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Facebuilder mesh try 1. 

I had a lot of issues getting the pins to align correctly to my face with these images. Pins would align to my facial expression, but then lose the shape of my face. Other times, the program would move the pins after creating a texture. 

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Excited fairy2. This video has butterflies throughout, but I did not have time to fix the bounding box of the 2nd butterfly. Other than this visual slip, I faced issues accessing 3D softwares, which made it difficult to get into a workflow. I also learnt that I cannot fully animate a character in Daz 3D then bring it into Maya. If I did not need to reanimate my avatar in Maya, I would have had my avatar be a little more animated in her arm and body movements.

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My avatar getting excited after seeing a butterfly!

My word for this assignment was “excited”. Since fairies make me happy and excited I decided to make my avatar a fairy. I animated the face to appear intrigued and then smiling and excited. When I rendered my animation though, the eyelashes were not transparent so I did not want to bring too much attention to the face

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10.28

“Modders Keep Finding Ways to Make GTA V’s Violence More Intense” // “The Truth About Video Games and Gun Violence”

Debates about whether or not violent video games influence irl actions are not new to the conversation. Death Race, a video game from 1976, requested players mow down pedestrians to earn points.  Today, these debates are centered around games like Grand Theft Auto (Kain). Grand Theft Auto is one of the more popular violent video games of our time. Playing Grand Theft Auto V with the least amount of violence still asks players to "run over human beings and animals, shoot people with powerful rifles, burn police officers alive or even beat someone to death with a baseball bat" (Zwiezen). Players have created mods to alter the way GTA V is played, including changing the way blood looks, how bullets hit and how avatars react to violence. Many of these mods make the violence in GTA V more realistic, and sometimes more violent (Zwiezen).

“Guns don’t kill people. Video games, the media, and Obama’s budget kill people” - NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre at a press conference one week after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary.

Various bills have been attempted to moderate violent video games. There have also been many studies done to explore the effects of video games, but many studies came back with opposing results. It is believed that conversations in media are influencing the results/objectives of these studies. It has been found that , "the number of violent youth offenders in the United States fell by more than half between 1994 and 2010—while video game sales more than doubled since 1996" (Kain).

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9.28

"Why Do We Care About Fictional Characters?" // “Online Funerals for Gamers & Their Avatars”

As humans we are predetermined to care. Mark Coulsin, leader in psychology university of Middlsex, argues that we assign meaning and emotion in inanimate objects when they move with purpose. Agency is key to characterization of importance and life. Coulsin's conclusions make me wonder if video games and virtual worlds can be used to increase empathy in the real world.

Avatars with realistic appearances cause of us to assign more value to them when their character also has human attendances with flaws as well. For gamers, virtual funerals and memorials for online companions are just as important for healing as they are for those close to us in the physical world. Virtual funerals have existed in one way or another since 1995, with the advent of the World Wide Cemetery memorial website. For years, gamers have been organizing in-game memorial services to commemorate the lives of often young players who have passed away in real life. Mourning online though has its own language. In the space-based game Eve, players use the code “o7” as a virtual salute in a sign of respect of the last time the person logged off for good. Saved games also offer comfort for the mourning. By re-watching the last save in Skyrim, an elaborate role-play universe, one Redditor was able to relive the final in-game moments of his brother.

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9.23

Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto remains increasingly relevant today as we observe the ways in which female identifying people engage with digital media and technology. “Welcome Our New Fembot Overlords," argues that the Cyborg Manifesto actually caused women to fall deeper into gender roles than allowing women to escape them. Insta-baddies and influencers, like Kylie Jenner are becoming more and more like cyborgs in the way they look and perform. For example, Kylie Jenner is constantly connected to her social platforms, switching up her hair and body in real life as if it were photoshop, and taking selfies where her phone can be seen physically attached to her. Jenner and others of her type are the new fembot. 'Fembots' were originally created to serve their owner, who was usually a man looking for control. The non-female identifying owners of these fembots did not see women as autonomous beings. Hess argues that the idea of the fembot can be seen daily through cyborg influencers and feminized tech. Feminized tech, such as Siri, Miquela, and Poppy, are still extremely popular within our digital and physical worlds. The digital world, and values of capitalism, have caused women, real and fake, to perform to intangible standards set by women living within a digital world.

The study, “Inside Out: Avatars as an Indirect Measure of Ideal Body Self-Presentation” explores motivations behind avatar creations. Users tend to alter traits in virtual chats rooms to perform in a more desirable way. This can include age, physical appearance, social status, intelligence, income and marital status. However, sometimes online spaces allow some users to be more open and honest about things that they would usually need to keep closed off in real life.

The study focused on exploring how users decided to create their virtual self perceptions. Participants were asked to make 2 avatars, one representing themselves and one with any characteristics. They found that participants who were comfortable with their weight or wished to become larger in real life created avatars with little change in weight in their to their any characteristic avatar compared to their self-perceived avatar. On the other hand, participants who wished to be thinner in real life created avatars that were significantly smaller compared to their self avatar.

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9.14

virtual worlds are real? // psychology of video game avatars

"How is using an avatar different from typed chat alone? Do people maintain a sense of personal space when using digital avatars, or do they create new social norms? When everyone can choose an attractive avatar, what makes an avatar more engaging (and potentially persuasive)"? (Yee)

As humans we're persuaded by things that look like us and tend to think that avatars are things we create and control, but the opposite is also true. Online worlds and avatars change how we think and behave. Avatars are usually, at least partly, versions of who people would like to be. This can be how someone would like to think and behave or in appearance. How this avatars performs in the virtual world then circles back to how the user behaves in real life.

The self-perception theory was brought about by physicist and phycologist Daryl Bem in the 60's. Bem's theory revolves around the idea that, "we observe ourselves and use that information to make inferences about our attitudes or moods, as opposed to assuming our attitudes affect our behaviors". Often people conclude that our behaviors are based on the mood we are in, but self-perception theory states the opposite— after first perceiving ourselves, we make assumptions about our identity and attitude, then continue to perform to meet those assumptions.

This theory can help us understand how virtual avatars impact players in real life. Observations on virtual avatars turn into conclusions and inferences that then come into play again when acting according to our expectations.

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Sage spreading love with abstract heart hands pose.

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9.9: Uncanny Valley

Technological advancement has begun to subside the uncanny valley, the exception here is when it comes to landscapes. Because of the repetitive, but abstract and irregular textures and patterns in nature, scenescapes are harder to make realistic.

Hyperrealism in media is always amazing to look at from an artists perspective and being able to appreciate the work put into making the scenes hyperreal. I don't think that the presence of hyperreal media though, takes away from more cartoon like characters. These characters actually probably sit better with a wider audience. Along with the fact that there is less of a fine line between really dope and the uncanny valley, cartoon like characters have the greater chance of resonating with a wider range of people. Their character is based way more in the idea of the character than its physical appearance.

In both cartoon worlds and hyperreal ones, artists are able to create their own realities. When it comes to hyperrealism, it is much easier for the created reality to blend with actual reality. Repercussions from this come as people use the created worlds as a reference to real world issues. For example, creating a deep fake of the president speaking. While I guess there is a responsibility for artists to not try and manipulate society with their CGI creations, I think it is also increasingly important that the internet and general public be aware of the growing presence of CGI and how to spot it, similarly to how we are able to recognize phishing scams.

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Hi everyone