Studio I Updates

http://www.kat-walker.com/

Up to this point I seem to have mastered the art of capturing the five fingers and have moved on to the post processing. I was able to capture the sound and have it synced to the animation on Monday and have been attempting to animate the keys. This will definitely take a lot more time than originally planned.

Mary Had A Little Lamb.mp3 / Mary Had A Little Lamb.wav

The weekend went well. I talked to my sound designer, Clayton De Wet about recording a performance. He said films usually record the audio first and sync it up during the performance. When I get to the point of having a performer come to play the piano, I will have him or her go to Clayton’s studio first to record and then we will sync it as it is played in the motion capture studio.

As for the skeleton my modeler told me he would be finished this coming week. He’s a bit late on the deadline as I was expecting it this weekend.

Also last Friday I met with Matt Ward from Image Movers Digital. I spoke with him a lot about motion capture and what they’re looking for on a demo reel. He told me the default characters or a basic character in MotionBuilder would work fine. When I told him I was bringing things into Maya he asked why I even took that step. What they look for in demo reels are the moves not the rendering and painted weights. He told me not to waste my time. With that advice I’ve decided to bring the piano and possibly the character into MotionBuilder so that I can render there instead of in Maya.

He also told me that the hand capture was a great idea. It is one of the few things not perfected in the industry and if I could do it with a 12 camera setup that it would look very good for getting a job. He also said that facial or animal motion capture would be a good thing to try.

As for my work I managed to get a working piano playing actor. The movements do not translate very well to the Mia character and I may go ahead and just render with the actor. I’ll be working on animating the keys on the piano with the actor and then possibly moving on to the character. The problem is I need the character from my modeler before I can begin fixing the hands in Maya. The animation comes from an FBX and is merged into the scene with a character already in a TPose. I need the character’s exact finger length to animate the piano in Maya. For now I will animate it in MotionBuilder and get everything working there.

I’ve managed to bring in the piano to MotionBuilder from Maya. I also have playblasts of my coneman with the applied animation from the Mia skeleton.

I have continued to work with the Motion Capture Data from Sunday and have come across a significant improvement to the thumb. The wrist still pops but the thumb pops very few times.

I’m currently looking into getting a trial of the PeelSolver Plug-in for Maya. PeelSolver allows the user to by-pass motion builder and attach the data to a skeleton right in Maya. The issues I am having in MotionBuilder are with attaching the fingers to the actor. I’m hoping that this plug-in would allow the data to be better read by the final skeleton.

Today’s capture session went well. Being at the computer was much easier than directing someone at the computer and being in the suit. I was able to get several decent captures and I have been working with them since we finished up earlier today.

John helping out

After a long weekend of trying to get my piano captures to work, I finally decided to work on a different capture I had done for fun.  I decided to do this capture so that I could see if I could even get a sucessful five finger capture seeing as the piano captures aren’t going well.  I had made a cone man character for my Motion Capture Technology class during Spring of 2008 and I applied to him a five finger capture of me miming.

I’m starting to come to the conclusion that SCAD’s studio is just not set up well enough for such a central thing as a piano performance.

I spoke to a modeler, Kyle Blair, who is going to be modeling a mime for me and also a “Mickey” type skeleton to use for other captures.  I will continue to see if the piano data will work but am thinking that at this point I’m better off getting multiple five finger captures so that I have more for my demo reel than one piano playing performance that took two quarters to do.

Mickey Skeleton