Miri Mocap Project

Finished fixing the body: I'm fine with the body mocap data for now. So I will move on with cleaning the face this week. Cleaning the eyes: The eyes were the most problematic parts after retargeting, that's why they were my first priority to clean up, as I'm not certain how long it might take me to fix all those jittering and random movements. Before Cleanup Looking at the graph editor itself, I can see a lot of bumps and spikes in places where it should be smooth and flat. This explains all the jittery movements from the retargeted data.  Fortunately, it's actually really straightforward to fix. I could start by deleting all those unwanted frames and only leaving the keyframes that defined the pose.  I would say this got 80% of the way done. Of course, every subtle movement has been removed but this was a decent base to start adding them back using animation layer. Animbot here to save the day(my time): But before going all the way with this method, I wanted to try out...

Dr. Kennedy's feedback for the face performance: Dr. Kennedy’s feedback was pretty much in line with the self-critique I already had in mind. Still, it was reassuring to see the feedback, which definitely took some stress off my shoulders. The biggest issue is the jitteriness and random movements in the eyes, so that’s going to be my first priority during the cleanup process. But this week, I would like to focus on finishing the body performance cleanup first. Refining the feet: While further refining the feet, I do experience the feet ik exceeding the maximum distance from the hip, resulting in the foot ik being dragged upwards as the hips push upwards. Fixed the issue by using an animation layer to lower the hip position when it was dragging the feet ik upwards. Foot turning often requires manually adjusting frame by frame, not really a fast approach to this. Finger animations: Some of the finger movement was really unclear in the reference footage. Scaling up the footage in Prem...

Updating the frame rate: Dr. Kennedy updated the framerate for baking to 24 fps this week, which was 23.976 previously. I was quite confused about the change of framerate when watching the tutorial last week but IO thought it was just an update to the performance framerate. Well, turns out Dr. Kennedy also makes mistakes from time to time. Fortunately, Dr. Kenmedy was constantly reminding us to make copies of files for each progress. I simply opened up the file with the proxy skeleton setup before baking and baked the animation in 24fps this time. Fixing the knees facing: I'm lucky that the knees within my assigned framerate were only slightly off. I managed to get them all sorted using animation layer under 10 minutes.  Flattening the feet: For flattening the feet, I only used the animation layer to adjust the default rotation on the neutral frame. Which probably did 60% of the work for me. The refining was done in the base animation layer. Mostly deleting frames where the feet st...

Face Retarget Finished: The face retargeting was finished during the semester break, and we're waiting for Dr. Kennedy to mark the 1 on 1 feedback. So this week I finally started with the body mocap performance. Baking mocap data to proxy skeleton: The whole mapping of the mocap data to the actor in Motion Builder was exactly the same as in previous assignments. However, I did learn that you can simply drag the markers from the viewport and drop them into the actor setting from Dr. Kennedy's recording of the recap on the process. No more scrolling through the navigator to look for the desired markers!! So after double-checking that the actor was indeed driven by the mocap marker data, we bake the animation to the proxy skeleton. Mapping the proxy skeletons animation to the Human IK controllers in Maya worked flawlessly. I can already see a couple problems right on.  The hands were clipping into each other, both feet were not flattened on floor level, and knees weren't follo...