Yet another week have gone by, and so I welcome you all back to read my rambles. This week have been a short one for me, since I missed both Monday, Thursday and Friday. This, because I went home for a wedding last week and then the Easter holiday occurred. Even though I were not there, I still worked on my own and when I got back we got a lot of work done.
Last time, I completed the Base mesh for our character Sofia and so I could begin my work of Rigging her (creating a sort of skeleton) and later Skinning (telling the skeleton which parts of the models will move for each bone). This work was spread out a bit over the whole working period of the week, since the whole day of Tuesday was reserved for a Motion Caption Shoot. For the shoot, I received the job of motion capture controller, which entailed calibrating the cameras and recording the actor in the Studio. The process of calibrating the cameras was a lengthy but fun task to carry out. It starts with booting up the cameras and then the capturing program Motive. Of course, this is the easy part, but you cannot start recording right away. First the performance of so called Masking needs to be done, removing in the program reflective objects from the cameras’ view like other cameras or chairs. This tells the program not to include this information in the recording. After this a technique called Wanding is used, where you spin a wand with reflective marker, to show the cameras the area of recording. Later a Ground Plane is placed out to create the virtual studio in the right angle in the program. When this is done, you can start recording! Well, you’ll need an actor first, and they need to be in a skintight suit covered in small markers, which is not fun to apply and is a very tedious process.
Of course this recording was not done alone, but together with my colleague Kevin Alonso, who had the role of director, the job to explain each movement the actor had to perform and give orders to start or stop recording. Also, our wonderful actor Victoria, who did a great job on set! Here is a video a classmate took of Kevin instructing the actor
and some data from the motion capture recordings supplied by Kevin! Enjoy
Re:liv(e) Art 