Backplate Tests

Testing how we are going to approach the moving camera & backplate with the current animation and without textures or lighting. 

The following shot was done by creating a half cylinder that ran behind and under the characters which could then be textured with the matte painting. The matte had to be slightly altered to help counter any pin cushion distortion. The shadows can then be rendered on a separate layer without the background to help ground the characters.

Street Scene Animation

Here the street sequence has the mostly finished mocap animation of James (need to animate his hands) with the added animation of the characters, Joe & Bully 2. The secondary characters were blocked in by Isaac & Nur and then I was able to do the other passes to finalise the animation.

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Matte Paintings - Room and Street

Below is the matte paintings of room sequence and some of the street shots. At the moment we're using ambient occlusion, shadow and a master beauty pass to aid the painting process which is being done in photoshop. The passes are blended with the paintings to bring out forms and set up the direction of light. 

Facial Rig & James Pool Version, Rig

The modelling was done by Juan and Isaac for the pool version of James. The body rig was created the same way as the Joe and bully rigs, using abAutoRig by Supercrumbly. The facial rig is one that will be applied to all the motion captured animation because our captures were only for the body actions. The facial rig makes use of blendshapes and set driven keys. With this particular rig the face includes goggles and a swimming cap. The cap is effected by the eyebrow movements, the other versions of James (8 year old & 16 year old) include hair, which does not have a rig and at this point in time it may not be necessary. A few problems that arose when developing a facial rig were mainly to do with transferring it to the motion capture version. The Transfer script was what we saw as our best option but it caused some issues with constraints, particularly by breaking the connection with the neck controller. After several failed attempts with trying to prevent the neck control from breaking when transferring the facial rig, we decided to not include it and that any head movements would have to be made in the MotionBuilder clean up stage. 

Prop Constraints

Above I have constrained the props (pencil & backpack) to the control effectors in MotionBuilder. Each prop required a joint for the parent/child constaint to function as well as an effector. 

Mocap Clean Up

Below is the street sequence with the mocap set in with the previs and layout of the cameras. The mocap did speed up a larger portion of the process but it does have other requirements to get everything working as desired.

This includes applying the captured data and clean up to another rig which has the facial rig and corrective blend shapes. At this stage it is without that rig but the process to transfer the keyed motion captured data to the other rig will be done using a python script and a mel script. It will work by selecting the root of the mocap rig and then running the python script which will selected the rest of the joints with keyed animation and record that data into an .xad file. Following, the mel command will store the joint selection sequence which can then be transferred to another rig along with the saved xml data.