MOCAP Performance Capture - Creature
To create the most natural animation for our bear creature, we agreed that motion capture would be our best option. We managed to film in the MOCAP room on Monday and capture most of the actions the bear does in our scenes. This will help our bear have more human-like body movements and allow an easier viewing for our audience. The last thing we want is poor animation to distract the audience from the story or fully absorbing the character. However we each have a few scenes we will need to hand animate purely because it is faster or easier.
Maya Scene Layout
Originally I was planning on getting the pool scene completely finished by the end of semester to test for pipeline errors. However due to Emily and I having to rethink our model, its delayed quite a few things so I am not 100% confident I will be able to finish the pool scene by then. Therefore I have instead chosen to try get the 'sunset scene' fully done before semester ends as it does not have a simulation and is more achievable in the given timeframe. I will still work on both simultaneously in hopes that I can try get both done as soon as possible but the sunset scene will be easier/ faster to composite.
I started by setting up the scenes in Maya by mapping each out with rough geometry and used a cylinder as size reference for the bear.
Scene Prototypes
Another task we decided to do this week was creating mock up or prototypes of what our finally composited scenes may look like. This was extremely usefully not only because it gave us some insight into how our final outcome may look, but it will also be good to use as a guide when animating and compositing our scenes. It will allow us to have a sort of 'thumbnail' to refer to instead of working on it blindly. This will undoubtedly help us work more efficiently when we get to the later stages of our pipeline. I used an art software called procreate to edit these since I am familiar with it.
Creature Design Iterations
Last week we got some feed on our creature designs. Our lecturer pointed out that the legs still didn't quite look right. We discovered that it was likely because the feet/legs looks too skinny in proportion to our bears big, round arms. Therefore I edited some of my leg studies and applied it to the full body sketches that Emily did. We agreed that the subtle changes made the bear look a lot more balanced and added to its overall cuteness.
Scarf Reference
Since we want to have a realistic looking cloth head scarf (which we will try to simulate) I decided to take reference photos and videos of my teddy bear wearing one. I cut up an old scarf and tried my best to tie it onto my bear similarly to how our creature wears it. I think the most helpful source of information I learnt from this was that when the bear moved, the scarf didn't move a lot. However this wasn't the best reference footage/ photos because in context of our film, the bear is the same size as a human - therefore the head scarf would be a lot bigger and move differently due to the weight of the fabric.
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