9. Motion capture part 1

Motion Capture

In this part of the module we had to record motion capture data that we could use to animate a character. I had to find a short clip of actors performing so that we can use it as reference while we wore the motion capture suits. 

For my shot i decided to go for a scene from the film El Dorado, in which the characters talk about how they could scape the ship were they're being held.

Using Motive to record was very straight forwards and easy to do, we mainly had to make sure the person wearing the suit had the right amount of motion tracking markers and that the cameras could see them all. 

Adding recorded motion capture data to a character, at first was very stressful, until i started understanding it a little more, then i was amazed at the characters moving like how we moved in the studio. 

To start, i imported the data i recorded, it was 2 of us so 2 skeletons appeared. After this i opened the Human IK tab, and created a character definition in which i used the feature of using the prefixes to match the joints automatically. 

It was important to make sure that the skelleton's joints in the definition panel became green or very close to, as too many yellow joints would affect the way the character would move later on.

Once i had the skeleton's definition sorted, i imported a character that i downloaded from Maya's character generator.

From here i had to tell maya that i wanted the character to follow the mocap data that imported.

In order to do this, i created another character definition for my character. In the HIK i changed the source to be the mocap data, this way my character will follow it.

I encountered several problems but the first one was that although the character was using the data as the animation source, it wasnt following it, not only that but doing a completely different animation. 

To fix this i deleted the skeleton the character came with, and then was left with an empty regular mesh.

To create another skeleton, all i had to do was, go on the quick rick tab and create one manually instead of automatically. Step by step, starting from the guides, i placed the joint guides where the joints of the character would be, for example on the elbows, knees, hips.

Once this was done i created the skeleton with a control rig, this will be the controllers to move the character's parts. 

When i created the skeleton, unfortunately, every time it looked very thin and the controls appeared very small, so i just scaled them all a little more in order to select them and see them easier.