Miri Mocap Project

Quick fixes according to feedback: Dr. Kennedy was mostly pleased with the overall results I showed him last week. However, he did point out a couple places that could be refined: Eyes position: Around frame 120, the eyes would look better if they were moved slightly more toward the center. This would make it clearer that Miri is "looking straight forward" as she should be focused directly on Fred in this moment. Also, pushing the eyelids higher would help convey the surprised/shocked expression in the scene. When I was adjusting the eye placement, I focused too much on balancing the amount of eye white on each side, which led to the eyes being slightly off-center compared to the reference footage.  Before After Same around frame 136, the eye placement was too far up, but instead, it should be more towards the center. Before After Floaty feet: Between frames 22-26, where the center of gravity shifts from the left leg to the right, the feet seem to float a bit, especially duri...

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...