As teased back in August, here's S.Y.N.C., a short feature movie shot entirely in VRChat. Written, directed, edited, and performed by "Legend50210" (let's call him Legend for short), it's a fun sci-fi actioner with slick production values and impressive fight choreography -- even more impressive, when you realize Legend plays all the characters.
"The loops are recorded animations of myself," as he explained over the Summer. "The FreezeFrame mod had a 'Sync' button at the time and it allowed me to line up all animations from the start when I started a new clone."
In other words, he recorded the fight moves wearing different avatars in a full-body VR rig, then synced them together in post-production. What's really amazing to me is that the fight choreography is so fluid and seemingly full contact. That wasn't easy, says Legend:
"It becomes a challenge in VR simply because there are no physical references to work from. Either trying to read cues for somebody that’s supposed to be behind or hitting a certain body part that is scripted for a certain reaction.
"Grapples are the hardest since it’s very easy to accidentally morph inside another model. Some moves can be done faster, but due to the method of tracking, it comes at a risk as it may cause some 'jumpiness' of the tracker."
This is probably why some of the moves seem a bit on the slow side. (But then again, how fast can a furry with big thighs in a power suit plausibly kick?)
"The trackers used for the multi-point body tracking are not 100% secured to the body and are prone to wiggle, especially for my predicament since I’m using 11 things on my body to track. A lot of the power is controlled to keep the models steady, especially since I’m working on a larger scale instead of a teaser trailer.
"There are some instances where if a move is too fast, the tracking can be lost. In the first scene at the final spin kick from the protagonist, I actually had trouble landing the spin simply because my headset would lose tracking. The speed I went was 'just enough' for it to be full speed without losing tracking."
The hardest shot to create? The one where a bad guys flips over the hero. Because that one might have wrecked his real life home:
"Performing it actually caused me to break one of my ceiling suspensions that I route my VR headset through," says Legend. "My foot got caught on it because I forgot to take my cable down. The shot was absolutely worth it though!"
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