Motion Capture Madness

(This is a very rough test of using modified motion capture for the male figure and preset poses for the cat figure. Sadly I didn’t pay attention to the ground levels and both characters pull underground a bit, still I was happy with the results otherwise. It’s kind of scary posting my imperfect animation attempts, however I figure I’m going to improve and it will be fun to see later where I started from.)

I’ve been working through the “Poser 7 Essential Training” tutorials by Larry Mitchell on Lynda.com and I’ve been so impressed with all the features of this program I didn’t know about. It’s a great tutorial to check out if you subscribe to Lynda.com.

I jumped ahead to the motion capture part (once I dutifully went through half of it sequentially) cause that’s something I’ve always wanted to know more about. I figured it would be fun to see how it’s done, but how could it be relevant – I mean, I don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on getting someone in a motion capture suit to catalogue movements for me. Much to my surprise, there are actually resources available for free to everyone who’s interested in seeing how motion capture works. Obviously, like clip art, they are just generic samples that may or may not work for your project, however I found that by downloading a few, I could use parts of it and modify it for my use as opposed to starting from absolute scratch.

I found 2 very good websites in addition to the mocapdata website Mitchell mentioned in the tutorial. One is BVH Files created by Aminazoo, a professional motion capture studio in the UK. What a cool thing for them to do to entice people to start using motion capture and then get potential future clients once they want custom motion capture. The other resource is Carnegie Mellon University’s CMU Graphics Lab Motion Capture Library. To use the data in Poser, you need to download BVH files and then import them. Also, some of the files will create a flaw where your figure will pull up 2 feet from the ground. To correct that, use the Drop To Floor script since this need to be done for each frame and to do so manually would be a hair pulling nightmare.

There was also a great section on how to use a reference video in Poser as a poor man’s/woman’s motion capture substitute. Lots more work, however the results of using real human references add a degree of natural movement when spending thousands to rent a motion capture studio is not an option.

Going 3D

(A very rough test of using the sword prop and figure interactions. Very brief music segment by Kevin MacLeod.)

After a long hiatus, I am back. I’ve been buring my head in books and video tutorials learning as much as I can about 3D animation. Here’s some screenshots of a test film I was working on…
I’m woefully ignorant on this subject, however it’s so fun to learn about something new.

Here I’m trying different test shots with different lighting treatments. It’s so exciting learning about what’s possible. I guess it’s time to get some more RAM for my computer soon.