A Better Actor

An Easily Directable AI Actor for Unreal & Unity Sequences

While real-time engines offer a modern UX and convenient iteration times, directing actors (as in acting actors, not UE4 actors) in a cinematic context is still incredibly tedious, and modern real-time footage or games that offer "unparalleled cinematic experiences" often keep out-of-frame the clunky, barebones production experience that is matching animation clip offsets, tweaking sequencer timings and other fun bits of the virtual production process. If only there was a more streamlined, 1:1 way to do things?

With this engine agnostic package, you can now simply drop your actor (again, acting actor, not UE4 actor) into your game engine scene, pipe in some audio & animations from your production database and in a fashion similar to how you would input commands in a game like NetHack (or more relevantly, like you would shout on-set directions to an actor), distill the actor directing process to its real-world essence: walk here, shout that, bow.

General Use

If you want a demo, simply navigate to the Package/Plugin root then open the sample scene inside of the Sample Scene folder (total braintwister, I know).

Upon plugin install, three new prefabs/blueprints are available to you:

• A Better Actor Character
• Actor Position Marker Location Marker to direct where you actors will walk to.
• Actor Point of Interest Point of interest your actor can look at or point at - By default actors are points of interest also.

After dropping the A Better Actor prefab/blueprint into the scene, you will need to fill in the following variables for it to work properly:

Stage Directions

• Lines: Audio clips of your lines that the actor will speak on cue.

• Subtitles: Subtitles for the above lines, sent out to the optional Subtitle Manager (see below).

• Locations: Places (in order) where your actor will walk to throughout the sequence. While this can be any actor/gameobject, the Actor Position Marker prefab/blueprint is included for your convenience.

• Look At: Things the actor will look at (in order) throughout the sequence. You can leave this empty, and the actor will look at the nearest actor or point of interest nearby.

• Point At: Things the actor will point at (in order) throughout the sequence. You can leave this empty, and the actor will point at the nearest actor or point of interest nearby.

• Wave At: Things the actor will wave at (in order) throughout the sequence. You can leave this empty, and the actor will wave at the nearest actor or point of interest nearby.

Actor Settings

• Look At Duration: How long will the actor look at a given item after being driven by the POINT, WAVE or LOOK events.
• Subtitle Manager: If your actor's lines have subtitles, the text will be piped into this manager via SendMessage (Unity) or Event Dispatcher (Unreal).

Facial Animation Drivers

• Volume: Volume of the current sentence being spoken; You can instrument this procedurally animated value to drive facial blendshapes.
• Pitch: Pitch of the current sentence being spoken; You can instrument this procedurally animated value to drive facial blendshapes.

If you're using (and realistically you're most probably doing that) a different Skeleton, you can simply duplicate and retarget the included A Better Actor Unity Animator or Unreal Animation Blueprint and associated animations to your new rig - Note that if you're missing some animations you can always use the royalty-free ones in the package! Message me if you need more help setting things up.

Your character set up, it's now only a question of adding them to your Timeline/Sequence, matching them to a Signal (Unity) or Event (Unreal) track and calling the events/signals below. While the plugin is easily extensible, these are the built-in ones included for your convenience:

Character Locomotion

• SNEAK: The character will sneak to the next location listed in the Locations array.
• WALK: The character will walk to the next location listed in the Locations array.
• RUN: The character will run to the next location listed in the Locations array.

Dialogue

• TALK: The character will say the next line in the Lines array. This will also adjust the volume and pitch values at runtime so that you can instrument your own facial animation system.

Body Language

• POINT: The character will point to the next item in the Point At array, or the nearest point of interest if the array is empty.
• WAVE: The character will wave to the next item in the Wave At array, or the nearest point of interest if the array is empty.
• LOOK: The character will look at the next item in the Look At array, or the nearest point of interest if the array is empty.
• BOW: The character will bow at their current location.

Gait Modifiers

• SADDEN: The character will slouch a little and will act a little less lively.
• BRIGHTEN: The character will have a little more pep in their step.
• SCARE: The character will shrink a little.
• NORMALIZE: The actor will return to a neutral state.

Point of Interest Modifiers

• MAKE BORING: The actor will stop being a point of interest. A good usecase for this is if you want an actor to point out a specific thing in a crowd.
• MAKE INTERESTING: The actor will start being a point of interest.

Installation - Unity 2019.2.0b1

This is a plugin that makes use of Unity's Package Manager feature. Just drop the com.alexismorin.abetteractor folder (found in the packages folder of the Unity Source) into your own project's packages folder (found at the same level as your Assets folder) and it should work out-of-the-box. If you're using a pre-packman version of Unity (phew!), navigate inside the com.alexismorin.abetteractor folder and then just drag the Editor folder you find there anywhere in your project hierarchy.

Make sure you then also register pointOfInterest as a new tag in your tag manager.

Installation - Unreal 4.22

The unreal version is not yet ready and visible here in the docs only because its easier to format down the road.

Just drag the ABetterActor folder from the UnrealSource folder's Plugins folder into your own project's Plugins folder (create it if you don't have one already) and open your project - things should work out by themselves.

Make sure to assing the skeletal mesh for your actor - as you would for any other actor deriving from the character class.

Acknowledgements & Thanks

• e→d films' Daniel Gies for having a chat with me and plugging this plugin (haha) idea inside my head.
• This always excellent piece of Unity navmesh documentation.

TODO

• Unity gait modifiers still need a little love
• Unity menu option to apply all of the required components automatically to a skinnedmeshrenderer
• Unreal has no inbuilt functional pitch recognition capabilities that survive packaging - I'll have to look into it some more but for now I added a dummy pitch and volume system that should be fine for cartoonish stuff.
• Unreal feature parity and MVP

Per usual for me this was puked out in a matter of hours (with a trip to LA in between them so I can forget all my code) so beware of bugs (and scream at me if you find them).