Motion Capture

  This group project, with Kathryn Rhine and Ryan B., is the Pied Piper project, this was the longest project I worked on, going on for 6 months in 2020. This project was a test of my abilities of motion capture, and my abilities to learn new software. The goal of this was to take a story, the story of the Pied Piper, and create an animation of the story, using Motion Capture to animate the characters. During this project, we all divvied up the roles so we were all doing something during each of the phases, we all planned the the shots, drew up, recorded together, and cleaned up the data by splitting up the different animations to each person equally The first part of this project was deciding what we wanted to do, by first each of us coming up with 2-3 ideas each, and deciding from there what we wanted to do. while there were some ideas, we ended up deciding to base our animation off of an old fairy tell, the Pied Piper, due to it's recognizability. The next part was coming up wit...

 As a part of the Creature Workshop class in 2019, I created, and animated using Motion Capture, a creature of my own design, a humanoid Lizard creature using a T-Rex as the inspiration The main hardware I used for this animation is the Xsens suit, in which I guided the wearer in the movements required for the animation. I then applied the data into the creature then rendered it. The part of this process that I had the most difficulty with was telling the wearer what movement I needed for the animation. In the past I usually wear the suit myself, or someone who knows the animations would wear the suit, so this time around I had to tell someone else what to do, in a way that they understood what to do. I was able to solve this by working with the performer before hand, and practicing the movements, and even demonstrating them myself. Ultimately, this was one of my favorite projects to work on due to the creativity of everything, and how fun it was, and I learned a lot about guiding ...

For this project, I was in a team of three people, myself included, in which we created a Pre-Visualization of a little story that I came up with known as "Fantasy Football" where a team of elves and a team of dwarves go against each other in a game of Football. All of the movements in the video was done through Motion Capture, either through the OptiTrack suit, or the Xsens suit. The clean up of the OptiTrack Suit data was done in Motive, and later exported into MotionBuilder as an FBX. They were then baked onto two different models, and cleaned up, then they were put together with a scene in Maya. My job out of the three of us was, essentially the Director, where I came up with the plan, created the Motion List, and the Shot list, while making sure my teammates were doing what they were supposed to be doing. My teamates, Arric and Steven were both the animators, so they did the clean up and the setting up of the scenes, in which they did a fantastic job on. Th...

For this project, what I did was try to do Motion Capture for a non-living object. I chose to create and animate a four wheel vehicle going through an obstacle course. What I did was I got this piece of plastic with three markers placed on it (the piece of plastic it used for motion capture, usually placed on the top of the hands) and I moved the piece around the floor in order to get the correct motions for it. After getting the motions in, I exported them as an FBX into Motion Builder to bake them on this little model I designed in Maya, obviously it's nothing special just something basic, and put it the obstacles in the scene. The Issue I had with the project is attempting to accurately recreate the movement of a land vehicle by hand. This became even more apparent after doing it when I realized that my hand was moving and shaking a bit more than I had anticipated. This had my vehicle move back and forth a lot, making look very shaky, and strange to look at.

This video is a project that I worked on where I took a game theme, and created a set of animations for a character. The theme I picked for the character was that of a fighting game character, so their actions and movement are more combat like. The actions I used was an idle, punch, kick, shove, turn around, and combo animations, all using the OptiTrack suit with Motive. I also created a walk and run animation with the Xsens suit.  During this project, I planned out my motions, then with my teammates, did the motions. I then proceeded to clean up the MoCap data, in Motive and exported the data as an FBX to move it to Motion Builder. There I baked the motions to a generic rig, and cleaned up the animation to the best of my abilities. Finally, I moved the animations to Unity and put them together to create the video above. The two biggest issues I had while doing this was the clean up for the animations, as I am not very good at animation, even basic stuff. I cou...