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Fuckin cuno

Whoops I was gone a year

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some buttons for the fellow voters out there

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reference images:

1 pic

2 pic

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The origins of Connor’s blinking

As a part of some face animations being stored and applied separately from body animation, each character also has a number of prerecorded, general-purpose face animations.  Having default expression states are extremely useful during the development process. If a scene isn’t performance captured or something has to be inserted after the fact, default reusable expressions make it very easy to create something from new or existing mocap data.

The hug ending for example was entirely handcrafted by the devs and not perfcapped since it was inserted late in the development process, well after filming was finished. The body animation for the hug was mocapped for the scene but not by Bryan or Clancy, which is also why there is no dialog.

This optional separation of face and body animation (unlike HR, which had to separate face and body animation as a rule) is very versatile and allows for a lot of design options. When Connor speaks perfcapped dialog but the player is still in mokit while he is speaking (any line Connor speaks aloud as you approach Daniel before the “get close enough” zone trigger for example) the separation of face and body animation is a necessity. It’s also necessary for any normal mokit idle animations or his animations in the gallery to flow as nicely and be as dynamic as they are, and absolutely essential for action sequences (which are always mocapped by stunt doubles). In working on a personal project I’ve made a list of all of these prerecorded states Connor’s face animation can be in. I also grabbed IDs and since IDs are generated chronologically during development, we can actually tell exactly when each animation was recorded.

You can see that there are 4 distinct recording sessions. The first one with IDs 2986-3032, the second with 12210-12267, the third with 29655-29700, and the last one with 34927-34940. There is an extremely noticeable jump from the first recording session to the second, and this was actually how dragonbane0 identified that a lot of the animations recorded by Connor’s old actor were simply retargeted to Bryan’s model. This includes both body idle animations and the above expression states. The first group with the old actor would have been recorded to my estimate in late 2014 or early 2015. Gameplay development for The Hostage began in mid-2014, before that actor was cast. The casting was a few months later in October, so these animations were likely filmed shortly after. The ID disparity between the start of The Hostage’s development to these face animations being recorded is 411 to 2757, so about 2,000 animations were filmed between the start of development for The Hostage and when that actor was on set recording. The group starting with ID 12210 would have been rerecorded with Bryan’s first filming session in March 2016. The original animations were of course kept and retargeted (this is why Connor looks so different for non-speaking animations in The Hostage, because it’s the structure of an entirely different actor’s face and expressions being retargeted to a new face), and the third group with ID 29655 in December 2016, when Bryan returned for the rest of filming. This was known before I went to make this list, and I expected the ID disparity. However I didn’t know exactly what states existed, and to my shock the very first face animation state ever recorded for Connor was “BUGS”, with ID 2986.

“BUGS”. Eye movement is stripped.

I was shocked to find out that this was the first animation recorded because it was an immediate contradiction to something I had believed previously: that Connor’s blinking and overall “bugginess” was a result of on-set discussion between Bryan and Cage, and was improvised by Bryan himself. 

From this video:

Jack: I’m talking to Amanda right now. Bryan: How does she- you gotta blink. That was the thing we did. ‘Blinkblinkblinkblink’. There you go. You’re computing. … Jack: Did you improv that wink? Bryan: Yeah. The wink was improv. ‘Cause we did- whenever we do the probe- you know, when their arms kind of peel back, and I can get the information about where’s Jericho, we check with the Tracis in the Eden Club like this, and the wake up bit, so we did this and I kind of liked the idea of it being kind of, uh- Jack: Twitchy? Bryan: Yeah. So it was kind of chaotic with the blinking. And so there are different pieces, like when we’re waiting in the elevator with Hank, and when we’re doing the conversation, we’re talking and all of a sudden the report comes in from Amanda, and so I thought it was fun, this kind of like, all of a sudden this computer starts being really like a computer. And since it came right after the line of like, “And adapting to human unpredictability is one of my features”.

Upon rereading the transcript, it’s actually not very clear at all what Bryan is trying to say other than that the wink was improv. His following dialog would imply that he improved the wink intentionally as a result of knowing Connor was going to blink due to receiving a report. I’ve looked into this before and couldn’t identify the blinking as a part of SINCERE (the “adapting to human unpredictability” line) or NEXTCASE (the “I just got a report” line), but as a part of the research I’m doing now about his reusable face animation states successfully found it in the “cycle” animation between the two dialogs, CONNOR_06NEXTCASECHOICECYC. 

CONNOR_06NEXTCASECHOICECYC. Eye movement is stripped.

Other than “BUGS”, Connor does not have any reusable blinking expression states. “BUGS” is used only in the following scenes: connecting to Rupert to download the encryption key, failing the QTEs during last part of the fight with Hank on the rooftop, when he gets called back to the garden during his sole leader speech, and during the cuts to his real body if he remained a machine, Markus had a successful demonstration, and he decides not to shoot. These all have rapid blinking as a part of their animation, which I’d assume is part of the eye data that got stripped in the above gallery swap. All other occasions of Connor blinking were intentionally recorded as a part of the on-set direction, and consequentially are contained to whatever animation they were specifically a part of. So Bryan definitely did improv the wink, and according to him thought it would be fun to have happen right before he would be rapidly blinking. However, as for the blinking itself—this is clear evidence that it was a design choice made in the very early stages of the game’s development, over a year before Bryan became involved with the project. I suppose that “Bryan improved the blinking” alongside “it wasn’t a wink, he was connecting” is now little more than a fandom myth that has been busted.

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same image

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i love rechecking my friends' pronouns five times just in case i accidentally called them deadname mcslurrington

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low effort Connor! hes sooooo ! omfg hes my favorite ever

reblogs are appreciated >_<

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So glad to see the porn bot girlies have hobbies now. Aerobics, Handball, sky diving. #Growth

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what do you call your cat. like your defacto petname for them

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A moment of light during the siege

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That’s it.

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How rigidly he sits at the beginning of the game VS how smoothly he sits towards the end of the game.

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How to assert your dominance as a short person

@aimseytv @ranboolivesaysstuff @guqqie

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The closest Sal had probably ever gotten to getting in trouble in school is when his EMF device started beeping in the middle of class and, without thinking about the words leaving his mouth, muttered: Oh no, it's going to go off.

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Will drawing Robin and Mike interacting together fix all my problems? No. But I sure as hell will do it anyway.

I like to pretend it does. It does

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Ranboo jumped.

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At long last, the beeduo zine is out!! Here's the link in case you wanna see the whole thing :)

I wanted to draw Tubbo patching up Ranboo. I think we generally talk about Ranboo patching up him or just helping him with his scars, but I wanted to explore a more somber look at the alternative. What I couldn't draw was the faint sound of the radio in the background, the host rambling about stars and our existence between them. What I couldn't draw was the warmth of the bathroom, so that none of them would be cold. What I couldn't draw were the apologies muttered into Tubbo's hair...