Week 6 // July 7 - July 13
This morning, Monday, July 7th, I had to use a different PC since Ishita was using my station (we don't have enough computers for everyone). Unfortunately, that machine didn't have Vicon plug-ins and shelf scripts installed. While I was trying to figure our how to install a new shelf, Ben came. He usually works at a computer that was now occupied by me. I decided to let him use his workstation and went back to the Graphics Lab to see if I can make the plug-ins work on a machine in there. My gut feeling tells me that this "musical computers" will not last long and we will either get more machines or more copies of the program... let's see which one it will be.
Finally, after lunch, I got everything I needed to function properly and continued my work on a motion capture animation of my pencil model. I created lattices with 8 subdivisions to see if more divisions would make a positive difference. I didn't see too much improvement. In the process, however, I found out that if I just skin the lattices to the skeleton, without binding the mesh, then I get a disaster. Because the lattices are driving the mesh, the resulting deformations do not look pleasing.
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| A pencil with three lattices |
I decided to stick to my usual routine of skinning the mesh to the skeleton and then binding the lattices to the specific joints. I created extra faces on a pencil mesh. Hypothetically, if I position them really close to each other, then the lattices can smooth out the bends without actually interfering with each other. This didn't work out quite like I expected, because you could still notice a narrow strip, which wasn't under any lattice's influence. I also noticed that the main areas of the major bends of the mesh occur where the faces meet. Perhaps, if I take some of them out... or add more in... it might improve the look of the resulting animation. The Polygons menu has an option to Edit Mesh -> Cut Faces Tool, which allows one to add more faces/vertices. Later, I discovered that if I select the model in the object mode, then I can also smooth the mesh using the Polygons menu.
I created a bowing pencil using one, two and three lattices. I experimented with their placement on the mesh and the subdivisions. In the end, I was not quite sure if the result was really much better than without applying the lattices or I thought this way because I worked with them for a while. I decided to create comparison videos of my animation of a pencil with a mesh skinned using lattices versus the same mesh skinned directly to the joints.
We had a meeting on Friday. I presented the work I have done so far. A full body lattice over the pencil mesh was combined with the smoothing of the areas around the joints to create an elastic-looking bowing motion. Everybody thought it looked really good. We decided that I will try a range of different motions and will also explore how texture interacts with our current approach. After the meeting I went down to the mocap where I quickly learned how to apply texture to the mesh. My pencil ended up checkered and in order to display its texture in the preview I needed to turn on Hardware Texturing in the Shading menu. I am looking forward to researching these topics in depth next week.
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