Full Body Avatar | Interaction Improvements
How we show your hands while grabbing items.
One of the big challenges for full body avatars was coming up with a way to show you grabbing objects. With the floating bean, we got away with this by hiding your hand whenever you were holding something. But since one of our major goals was to make it easier for others to understand what you were doing, we knew we needed to find a good solution for making sure holding items looked good.
The telekinesis effect
We tried a bunch of different approaches, including snapping your virtual hand to a spot on the grabbed item. But that felt like the game was physically pulling you around and rotating your hand. We decided that we should always honor where your hand is in real space and have the grabbed objects come to them, so your virtual hand feels as close as possible to your real one. You can especially feel how this improves the stabilizing handles for laser weapons while in VR.We did find one exception to the rule that felt nice. Instead of allowing your avatar arms to stretch as long as they need to match the location of your real hand, there’s a point where if you move a held item too far, your hand will look like it let go and the tool hovers where you’re holding it in real space…kind of like you’re still controlling it with magical powers. We call it the “Telekinesis effect.”
The telekinesis effect
Then there’s the visual gripping effect for (many) objects. We wanted the visual to look cohesive for Rec Room objects. In order to give our artists control over how hands are posed when grabbing the object, we created an internal tool called the Hand Grip Placer. Our Artists can then determine how objects should sit in the hand and what hand pose they should take. During the beta period of full body avatars, we are continuing to work through all of the 500+ items you can grab in Rec Room to make sure that you have great-looking grips.
This is an internal tool we wrote to give our Grip Artists a way to place and pose how the hand should grab each one of our 500+ items in the game.
Improved movement & animation
Thanks to the work of @joedanimation , we have enhanced and added more life to our avatar animations. This includes improvements in walking, running, jumping, climbing, clambering, wall running, and sliding. Our goal is that Rec Room feels immersive and expressive, and these improved animations do a lot to ground the avatars in the reality of the game space.We are still working on polishing all of the animations in the game as part of our beta work.
Bean slide compared to full body slide.