motion builder

after working in motion builder and having it crash a number of times and undo able CTRL Z I have lost about 4 hours work. so I have learnt is to save after every change made.

setting up the cameras was very easy having them show you can test to see if you have them set up right by CTRL I.

Games and movies

It would be amazing to work on a project like this the way they go about doing the motion capture and getting all the face points working. Games are getting more and more in line with movies on how they are made.

The biggest down fall to our system is the recording size is not big enough. Also that we have to place out each camera every time if we want to shoot, having a studio that you would not have to do this would be better as we would get more time to record our shots.

motion builder

After Such a great shoot we now move on to the next step. This is where you clean up the animation, one big problem I have with my shots is that his feet are sliding around and are not making contact with the ground. this can be fixed using animation layers inside motion builder.

Motion builder is great for this clean up the rigs that it uses and the way you control the rigs make things very easy. The use of animation layers are a great help too they do a very good blend between animations and your fixed up animation.

wanding

We ended up re-shooting the shots of the short film in motion capture.  This was good this time in setting up the system when so smooth everyone knew what we were doing. When we did the wanding we got a very high quality reading. The previous time we did this took 3 times as long to get the same result and I feel that the capture data was smoother and of greater quality.

After going over the footage that we captured on Tuesday I think the results came out really well there were a few shots where the feet are going through the floor but this is a miner fix and happens even on the best recorded footage even out of studios. Motive seems like a easy program to learn and has very good control over what you need. Even tho we only captured really basic movements I think Motive has a lot of potential for larger and more complex scenes. It will be interesting to see how this system handles with more than one capture suit on. 

setting up the system

Setting up the system today went very smoothly I think. the only little problem that we ran in to was that some of the ground was reflecting in the cameras. Also a few of the cameras where pointing down a little low and did not catch much data, luckily we found this in the setting up stage and was fixed and not let go till shooting with the actor and having to re-wand the environment half way through shooting. Also having the cameras sitting higher in the room helped with getting a better capture quality.

One of the first things you want to do in motion builder is make sure you don’t have any breaks in the markers or any added markers that are not part of the character this is called the first pass of the clean up process.

 A lot of animators will place the actor inside the markers, add the markers to the marker set, and then leave it at that, you can also tweak how the actor sits between the markers, after the marker set has been activated.  The great thing with motion builder you can make animation layers easily and make tweaks after your character rig has been imported and driven by the actor.

This is great to help solve issues like your head/neck problems, or problems with arm twist that are difficult to judge clearly from the T-pose. Fixing these small problems is faster doing in motion builder than if you were to bake out the animation and try fix it up in Maya.