Texturing

This week I’ve been re-rigging the Alien. She has a modified Mia skeleton out of MotionBuilder. I worked with finishing off the dance motion capture and am close to a final product. Below is the image of the skinned alien.

Rigged Alien

This is the dancing alien. She is rigged with the modified Mia skeleton and had a 3 fingered capture attached to her that was captured in ViconiQ.

This week I finished texturing the rest of the piano.  I decided to keep the lid closed and added the brass accents.  I also modified the floor plane so that it is no longer wood but a wood colored surface.  Also I’ve been working on developing a technique for animating the piano keys.  All the rotation points are in place and I have a short video with the intro part of the song with the keys animated.  I have a decent and efficient technique down now and the animating should not take quite as long as it did this weekend.

Piano - Final Texturing

I’ve also ordered motion capture markers so that I can create my own gloves.  The ones that came this past week will not work as they are too small.

7/16 inch Hard Marker

Base

This weekend I worked on a variety of things for the project.

To start, I set up a lighting scheme for the piano. Then I worked on texturing the piano and setting it up so the keys would be easily animated. The piano has a basic black phong texture on it and white keys have a blinn. The pivot points of each key has been moved to the top so that they can tilt as they are played realistically.

Piano Key

Piano Key

As you can see above, the key is easily tilted to look like it is being played. The key is middle C. Below is a test render of the piano with basic textures, the floor has a standard wood texture that I will be doing myself when I continue texturing.

Piano

This weekend I spent 5 hours on Saturday and 4 hours Sunday in the motion capture studio at Montgomery Hall. Chad and I attempted to do a hand capture by taping me up in a variety of ways. We tried two different types of markers on my hands while I played a small keyboard.

We had a variety of difficulties with the Day 2 setup.  First, there is not a 5 fingered skeleton in Vicon and it will require me building it.  Second, the cameras are not set up to capture in a small space.  The cameras were having trouble reading the small markers.  I plan on creating my own gloves for the project that may allow me to have a quick setup and have large enough markers that the studio cameras will have no problems picking them up.

Me in my Motion Capture Suit - Day 1

Left Hand - Day 1

Left Hand - Day 1

Right Hand - Day 1

Right Hand - Day 1

Left Hand - Day 2

Right Hand - Day 2

Right Hand - Day 2

This week I will be working on getting the motion capture data into Motionbuilder. I may also have to build a skeleton in Vicon for the 5 finger tests. On Day 1 we used a 3 finger skeleton in Vicon and it was successfully brought into Motionbuilder. However we did not get a chance to build the 5 fingered skeleton in Vicon to bring into Maya. I’m also going to look into the Peelsolver plugin for Maya which allows you to bring in motion capture data straight in and therefor skipping the Motionbuilder step.

For the space scenes several planet textures will be needed. Over the weekend I was designing and painting several planet textures. Here is one of them that has been added to the previous lighting test.

Note: The gases in the background will be tuned more towards the color of the planets for the final.

Blue-Green Planet Test Render 001

Blue-Green Planet Test Render 002

Blue-Green Planet Texture

Lighting Test

I spent the weekend organizing my plan for the project. Now that I have the majority of the modeling covered I’m going to be working on the space scenes until I get those models.  At that point I will texture the models and continue on with the space scenes.  I will be working on making planet textures for the next few days.

In my other class we are learning Maya particles.  I am working on a particle star field rather than using a matte painting as I did in a test in my lighting class.  A galaxy made of particles is also in progress.

Galaxy of particles