Week 9 // July 28 - August 03
I spent the Monday finishing up animations for our meeting tomorrow. However, the next day, since Jessica was out of town and the meeting was canceled, I got a bit more time to run my experiments. Laurel also sent me three new relevant motion files that she found from last year.
I ran a few tests to figure out the best placement of the lattices and the cases where I could avoid their application and directly skin the mesh to the skeleton. I also figured out how to delete an annoying green handle for the skeleton: I had to group the joints and then ungroup the handle from the structure to delete it.
Also on Tuesday Jim was presenting the dry run of his SIGGRAPH talk on gradient domains.
By Wednesday (July 30) I finished almost all of the animations. The walking flower still doesn't look right, because of the pot deformations, which I am going to try to minimize. During our previous meeting with Jessica we discussed the necessity for Laurel and I to synchronize our work for the ease of comparison of the results. I took some time to figure out the most efficient settings of playblasting* to minimize the size of the videos. However, I had a small problem, which prevented me from creating final movies. For some reason, the flower model that I worked with appeared in plain grey even though when I render a scene it appears in color. It is not a major obstacle but it is annoying because nobody knows how to fix this anomaly and Laurel doesn't remember how she got her videos to appear in color. But the next day Laurel emailed me with an interesting tip: all I had to do to preview the scene in color back was to switch to the 'side' view and turn on 'hardware shading' (the scene is still in grey in the 'perspective' view).
The rest of the week I spent exploring various retargeting options for the walking motion and experimented with the lattice placement for the pot. I also documented most of the issues I've encountered in Maya while working on this project. I also made a final comparison page with all the videos embedded.
 |
| Mocap Crew Summer 2008 |
On Friday we had a Last-full-day-everyone-is-together partEy. We ordered food from Mad Mexx and guys set up a projector and a screen on which we watched The Incredibles. The image on the right shows everyone who was there (with the exception of Liza, she was in the lab just at the beginning of June): the crew as seen from left to right, top to bottom: Laurel Bancroft, me, Moshe Mahler, Ishita Kapur, Liza John, Elise Walton, Shira Mahler, Justin Macey and Ben R.
The idea of the picture as well as the title, which is made from retro-reflective markers, belong to Shira. The original picture was made using mostly our FB profile photos.
This is my version of the picture with pretty much all of the photos taken with my camera (I just replaced the pictures that were too small or too stretched out). Also, the digits are positioned strategically, so that each person's shot is touched by at least one of the digits :-)
* Playblast: an option that allows to capture exactly what happens in a Maya scene in a video format.
| <<== Previous Week |