Day 13

I spent the whole morning in the motion capture studio. The school brought in a new software, Vicon Blade , since it will apparently make our work faster, and we could probably skip Motionbuilder. Well since it's a new software, even the lecturers were using it for the first time. We had problems using the software at first, since the interface is different (but the data management looks the same as Vicon IQ), and the steps we used to use in IQ can't all be used in Blade. Due to the difference in steps, the previous method of running the pipeline of processes after we've captured the raw motion capture data cannot be done in the new software. They had a fixed pipeline that could not be changed, to my knowledge so far. Due tot his we had to follow another marker placement type instead of the usual 46 markers we use on our actors when we were using Vicon IQ. We now have to use a 53 marker system, which had some differences in placement of the markers on the body. We faced a problem where we could not see the markers in real time in the 3D view, but we could see in the individual camera views. We did a test capture and ran the pipeline but the last process, calibrating the actor, took super long.


Played around with my setup. I copied on the reference model Mr Douglas gave us onto the particles, which made the playback real slow. So i added a poly reduce node after the geometry and it played a little faster. I noticed that the geometry intersects with each other when the particles are too close. I reduced the number of birthed particles, but then the distribution of the particles were kind of off. Instead of removing particles from the whole grid, the particles started disappearing from the left, so the right side had more. If I made the birth rate any lower, particles will only appear at one side, and not on the other.

                                                     Reference geometry on the particles

I wanted to put in a walking or running animation onto my particles to see how it'd look like. I tried searching for pre-animated walk cycles, but didn't find any. I remembered I had a running animation for a robot character that I created last term. I tried to render the sequence as a bgeo but the render came out wrong, it wasn't the animation. I guess it's due to the fact that I did not rig the geometry properly. I'm not good at rigging and when I rigged it (in Maya), I just parented the geometry onto the joints and animated the joints. I kind of spent some time figuring the bgeo thing out, but in the end i gave up, I'd rather get a better working animation then the mess I made.

                                                           My very simple robot model

                                                       The network that makes up the robot

                                                                          Lots of nulls

                                                       Notice the geometry under the joints