Motion Capture Week 10 - Shots Shots Shots

This week was probably the best in terms of Mocap work this semester as we got to create the shot files for the pre vis! It was finally time to set up the scene with the characters, the camera, and the props. Before I started the shot files, I found out that my city scene did not come with textures so I decided to add some splashes of colour to make it look a little more exciting.

City Edited (as seen in Shot 1):

Another thing I did to zhuzh up the scene was changing the Mecha Man's appearance. He was given to me as part of the Mecha Attack scene file and had a black metallic texture - making him look super SCARY. (photo credit: Jasmine James)

Along the way he'd somehow lost his textures (probably floating somewhere in the fileverse) and so it was only right I gave him a new look.

Presenting *drum roll please*

OPTIMUS CRIME

Then the shot process began. For each shot, I would create a duplicate of the city scene and add the required characters based on the mocap data baked onto their control rig.

When imported, the characters would be HUGE so I scaled them down by 0.11 so they were proportioned correctly within the diner.

Once in the scene, I positioned the character using the storyboard as a guide.

Then it was time to adjust the movement of the character. The raw recording included the 'T' pose at the beginning and end of the shot, as well as movement around the space when Jasmine was getting into position. I edited the movement using the Time Editor. I selected the character and added it into the Time Editor on an animation track which then created an editable clip that I could adjust to my liking. This tool was especially useful for timing the movement of multiple characters within one scene.

With the characters in position (or sometimes beforehand), I would setup the camera's position, angle and focal length. A regular focal length for a film camera is 50-70mm - with 70mm being closest to that of a human eye, so I aimed to keep my focal length between these values for a more realistic approach.

Even though I animated the finger movement in Motion Builder, there were more adjustments to make in Maya to account for props and impenetrable surfaces.

Take, for instance, this hand going through the plate and the other into the counter.

After animating on animation layers, the hands have better positions.

Another fun adjustment for this one particular shot was adding a glass to her hand as she makes a sipping motion. For this, I used a parent constraint to attach the glass to the hand joint.

(in the above image, the joint is huge because I scaled it up in order to parent it to the cup)

After successfully parenting the cup to the joint, I used keyframes on the cup to animate the contact between the glass and her hand as she lets it go on the counter and picks it up again.

Parented:

Unparented:

The other props and objects in the scene would be animated next. This included things like the cups and dishes, cars and Optimus Crime.

When animating Optimus Crime, I used Maya's Graph Editor to adjust his exaggerated stomping motions.

Here I was animating the police car so that it squashed under his massive foot.

The final thing I would add to the scene was the character's facial expressions. To animate their facial features, I used the Shape Editor. The characters came with premade blend shapes so this was a pretty easy and enjoyable process.

Before Blend Shape editing:

After Blend Shape editing:

Then when I was happy with the setup of the scene, I would save it as a new file and move onto the next. In total I planned out 17 shots so there were 17 scenes.

Since this was the most creative part of the whole assignment, I definitely enjoyed it the most even though it was quite taxing on my sleep schedule. All that is left is playblasting and editing!! Getting so close now :)