Extended Practice: Creating Textures

For the particles to emit from the girl character I had to create a texture that has a white beam running across the UVs. I'll also need to create two more textures, one that will make the girl character disappear, and the other is to make the robot character appear. These two textures are basically white and black blocks covering the UV maps of the characters.

 For the emittion beam texture I had to create multiple beams that ran across the UV map of the girl character. I created this in After Effects using the beam effect and I used levels to sharpen the the beam. I also added in a noise effect called 'fractal noise', this made the edges of the the beam look rough just so that when the particles are emitted from this beam they don't emit in unison.

Moving on to the disappearing effect of the girl character, I did this by covering up the UV map using black boxes because black will translate as being transparent and so will make the girl character disappear. To do this I used the masking tool in After Effects and went over the UVs with the masks to reveal the black box hiding the UVs.

Finally for the appearing effect of the robot character I did that same thing as above, however I changed the colours round so instead of the black boxed appearing over the UV map it was the white boxes appearing. This way the robot could appear as the girl character disappeared. 

 

Extended Practice: Cleaning Up The Animation

At first I thought that cleaning up the animation would by a simple task to do but a long one, it turned out that with all the information that was in the scene and the 2880 amount of frames in the animation it was too much for my computer to handle and it kept crashing when the ram hit full capacity. This meant that I had to do the cleaning up in stages so that my computer could handle the workload.

Cleaning up the animation was still simple to do because all I had to do was move keyframes around so that some arms and legs weren't merging in with the body. And like I said before in a previous post the hardest bit was when the characters went into the floor and I had to lift the characters up frame by frame, so that was a bit tedious to work with.

Before I could start cleaning the movements up though I had to made sure that the characters where in the same position throughout the animation because if not than you'll be able to tell that there is another character underneath the girl character. Due to this that meant that I had to scrub through the timeline and find any parts that the two characters were not together and place them together and keyframe that so that they'd stay together.

There is one thing though that I need to clean up every time I open up the project and that is the wall in the background with the windows on it. This is because the texture on that wall, the bricks, for some reason won't map correctly, so whenever I open the scene the texture remaps itself and I keep having to correct this all the time. I don't know what's going on with it so I'm going to have to speak to one of my tutors so that they could help me with this situation and fix the problem.

Extended Practice: Mocap Data on Characters

Now that I had all the data sorted out and I had placed everything together, it was now time to start placing the data onto the characters. This was simple enough to do, I did this by using human Ik in Maya and then creating character definitions, meaning that I went through the skeletons in of the character and assigning the right joint to the matching joint in the human IK window. This allows Maya to know how the characters will mirror the motion capture data onto the skeleton. 

As you can see by the characters in the video below some of the arms and legs go into one another, which isn't good. This'll mean that I'll have to manually go into the graph editor and move some keyframes around so that this doesn't happen. Doing this shouldn't take too long, but that part where the characters go through the floor might take some time cleaning up because I'll have to reposition the characters so that they're not going through the floor. 

Overall I think the motion capture data has transferred well across to the characters and most of the movements are smooth. There obviously are some amendments that I'll have to deal with like placing head and hands movements into the animation because if I don't it will make the whole thing off putting to watch and just distract views from what is really meant to be happening in the animation. The hands will be simple enough to animate, all I'll have to do is place a controller on the hands, which manipulates the fingers to bend, and for the head I'll just have to keyframe some movements so that the head isn't focused in one position.             

Extended Practice: Bringing Things Together

At this point I wanted to see what everything would look like together so I opened up the background scene and placed the characters in the studio. This was to show me how the characters would look in the studio and how the lighting would look with the characters. As you can see by the pictures below the character looks quite dark in the studio but that is the idea, I wanted the environment to be dark so that it would look more eerie when she starts to transform into the other robot character. 

I've done some render test timing and at the minute on my machine at home it takes just under two minutes to render out the images you see here. However, this will change when particles start to enter the scene, so I estimate another one to three minutes added on to the two minutes it already takes to render. Seen as though I'm using a render farm instead of rendering the whole thing off myself this will cost quite a bit of money, like I'm talking two to five hundred pounds to get this rendered off in time for submission.    

Extended Practice: Final Mocap Recording

After my attempt at recording the performance in a studio I decided that I'll just have to record the performance at Uni. This is because the room at Uni was so much better at picking up the background and the dancer, plus it gave the dancer a better understanding of where she could dance so that the cameras will catch the performance.

I started off by recording Katy, who wasn't the main dancer I had because the main dancer was busy that day. She tried her best to learn and perform the dance that the other dancer and I had put together, however she was stressing out about her not getting the dance right and how she didn't want to ruin me project. It was getting to much for Katy to do so I called up the main dancer and she agreed to come down and perform one last time for me because she wan't going out that day until the afternoon and it was still the morning.

The main dancer finally arrived and so we were able to begin recording the performance. She only had to perform the dance twice, once to go over the choreography and get warmed up and the other time she performed the dance so well we didn't need to capture another after that. So all in all the main dancer was only present for like half an hour and then we were finished. We were both happy with the final performance and so all that was left to do was bake the data from the motion capture onto a character to see how it turned out.

Overall the final result of the capture is good, but there will be some amending and changes to the performance so that the character doesn't have any limbs intruding the body. Also at the end the character walks around and heads towards the back, at this point the cameras didn't capture the dancers legs so she looks like she is floating so I'll have to fix that is Maya using the keyframes and graph editor.

Extended Practice: The Transformation

The transformation is an experiment to show me, and others, how the change between characters will go about and look. This will also give me a good idea how I'm going to make the particles fall off the character, this will be done in order where the arms will change first and then the legs following on with the body and head. 

Below you will see my experiment in motion, showing how the particle fall off and in what order. I did this using textures and image sequences on the textures, where I used two colours white and black. White was used to show the robot character appearing and black was used as the transparency so that the girl character could disappear. I also used another texture where a white beam is moving across the black uv map of the character, this is so the particles can emit from the moving white beam which will give off the effect that the character is dissolving. 

This experiment has shown me that I need to work out the layout of the uv mapping of the characters because as you can see the transitioning between the to characters isn't as smooth as I'd like. it has also shown me that the look of the particles flying off of the character looks convincing, however a lot more tweaking will need doing to the attributes of the particles to make the transition more effective.