motion capture and keyframed animation first attempt

I attempted to simply record and fix a peice of motion capture footage using the kinect system and animation layers in maya. For the sake of test i simply added some quick rigging to the kinect skeleton in maya and used the animation layers to blend the key-framed and motion captured footage together to remove some of the glitches that appearred in the footage.
It worked well and served its purpose however i now need to focus on attempting to attach the rig i'll be using to the skeleton so that i can quickly apply the animation to a custom rig.

Rotoscope and Keyframed animation first attempt

I have begun the combination tests of adding keyframed animation to both the rotoscope and motion capture footage. I am avoiding the combination of motion capture and rotoscoping given that they are both ways of achiving a similar outcome and with the exception of facial expressions there is no benefit to combining them.
My first attempt at combining techniques was the combination of rotoscope and keyframed animation using a the construct scene from The Matrix. I used rotoscoping to animate the scene then attempted to add to it using keyframed animation however even though the peice was animated and looked decent, through exagerating the movements of the characters I lost sight of the inital point of the scene and the movements werent approriate to the peice.
My next attempt i will be trying to focus more on the emotional performance in the scene rather than the movement within it.

Rotoscope and Roto-animation

It is best for me to me be clear about the differences between rotoscoping and roto-animation.

Rotoscoping is a technique that is majorly used in 2d animation where an animater essentially traces a peice of live action footage frame by frame to imitate the movement of the subject in a 2d animation.
Roto-animating is a 3d variation on that technique where a peice of live action footage is braught into a 3d program and the character is animated using close referencing on top of the footage. The first instance of this technique being used is (once again) with Gollum in The Two Towers and i believe it was the team at weta digital that gave it its name of Roto-animation.
Both of these techniques are incredibly useful to animators especially for studying the movement of  subjects that may be more difficult to animate such as animals.
I mention rotoscoping a lot on here however i do mean roto-animation when that is said, The reason being is that the term roto-animating does not seem to be as well established as the term rotoscope and it is in the end merely a variation on the rotoscope technique.

In conclusion when i mention rotoscope on this blog i am mostly refering to roto-animation.

Crit week

During crit week i gave a quick reminder of the stage i was at during pitch week and showed my progress since then. Overall i feel the presentation went well however i do need to work on being more confident when speaking and perhaps also more clear as to what im talking about.
   I recieved a lot of useful feedback during the session both on my persentation and my project, the first bit of feedback i recieved was that during future presentations i should focus more of what i discovered from doing certain media tests than the media tests themselves. I was also advised to use some of what i had learned in my rotoscoping test to observe and try to pick apart films which i plan on doing in the near future in the form of case studies and it was also mentioned that i should focus more on the combination of motion capture and keyframed animation than them both seperately and to that end firstly identify the pro's and con's of each.
   The most important piece of feedback i recieved however i feel was to turn my research question on its head and rather than looking at how motion capture can benefit key framed animation to look at how key framed animation can benefit motion capture.

Motion capture using kinect

During pitch week one of the peices of feedback i recieved was to download some motion capture data and attempt to do some clean up animation on it. However instead of downloading the data i decided to try and capture some myself using a Xbox Kinect system, motionbuilder and software from www.brekel.com . Rather than explain step by step i will instead link i followed to achieve this  http://www.reubenfleming.co.uk/tuts.html .

This is an example of the captured data imported into maya, i have not attempted to edit it yet however i will be attempting it in the next few weeks. The most interesting part of doing this however was being able to have a character mesh attached to the skeleton while capturing which was entertaining and gave me some ideas that may be used in a future project.

Character animation

Concidering my project is not only on motion capture and imitaion i created a short piece of performance animation while attempting to keep a couple of things in mind. These were attempting to have 2 characters interact in a scene, animating a exaggerated and a subtle character, attempting to lead the eye of the viewer and basically most of the 7 essential acting concepts outlined at the beginning of "Acting for Animators" by Ed Hooks.

This is the piece i ended up with, allthough there is no sound to go with the animation my thoughts at the time was the first character asking " Well? What do you think?" and the second character repling with "it's ok". The scene itself was originally going to be losely based on my own personal experience of the university interview however as the scene developed so did the concept so it has ended up being one freind asking another for their opinion on their written work.
From this creating this short animation i have personally discovered a couple more useful things in relation to animation, one rather obvious one is that attempting a short straight ahead animation without storyboarding beforehand takes much longer than it initally should and also that when animating two characters interacting a scene attempting to animate them both seperately then animating the interactions does work but not as well as it could.

Rotoscope animation

Continuing on from my mimics before i have been looking into rotoscope animating in 3d. My reasoning behind this was very similar to my reason for the still image mimics, to try and imitate the feel and performance of a live actor in a 3d character. Also when researching into gollum as mentioned previously, I discovered that in some cases this was a technique they used to imitate Andy Serkis's performance. Allthough its a rather old technique which has been used in many 2d animations and also used by walt disney to study movement instead of direct imitation and tracing it was interesting to see it being transfered into a 3d character.
   At any rate below is my attempt at rotoscope animation in 3d using a scene from the film "Taxi Driver".

 

 

Allthough its not a perfect representation it is fairly close and i do believe i could have gotten it a lot more accurate if i had given it another few passes. What i have discovered from this test is firstly and rather predicibly that it is possible to re-create live action scenes in 3d while still keeping the same impact and emotion that is in a scene and secondly that the technique is also useful for studying the more subtle movements in a human or any creature in 3d also.

 

While animating this peice one thing that i did notice was that as an animator i wanted to exaggerate the movements of the character beyond the limits of the actor and had to stop myself from adding extra animation where there was none. Also that the live actor rarely blinks which is something that i  feel in animation adds life to a character.