Miri Mocap Project

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...

Fixing the eyes: Continue fixing the eyes with even more keyframes... Retargeting the mouth: I was really surprised about how well the mouth retargeting went. It's night and day compared to the eyes retargeting. of course, it's not perfect, but I would say it's 80 percent there, for the FIRST PASS!! Can't express how happy I was when looking at it. Some problems still need to be fixed like: Pose holding around frame 214-227 Pose refine for frame 264 & 430 Regarding last week's progress, Dr. Kennedy said it was kinda weird for the eyes to retarget this bad as he thought the tracking in Analyzer was not perfect of course yet still acceptable. He recommends ensuring consistency between poses to minimize random behaviors. But if that doesn't work, it would be smart to move on and clean up the eyes later on. As for this week's feedback, he was pretty satisfied with what I've got for now. However, he did mention to be careful with some of the mouth shapes....