Chadam
Summary of tasks:
- Retargeted and cleaned up motion capture data primarily in 3dsMax.
- Cleaned out data pops, jittering, intersecting mesh animations, characters passing through enivironment objects.
- Kept feet grounded and removed sliding feet and/or feet going below the ground plane.
- Retargeted animation to better fit unusual character designs such aslarge heads or claw hands.
- Refined, removed, or altered parts of motion capture performances.
- Blended multiple motino capture performances into a single animation for each character in a scene, if the scene needed a long near continuous performance.
- Created loops to be reused later. i.e. Walk, run, and idle loops.
- Scaled motion capture animation as needed by adjusting CS Biped Footsteps and/or performances using layers to solve issues such as, characters not lining up due to CSB rig size differences. Some performances were repositioned characters instead of scaled, or a combination of both repositioned and adjusted footsteps were used. Adjusting CSB Footsteps involved lengthening/shortening distances, or reorienting the steps to extend or shorten walk distances which could bring character performances closer together, and also to keep characters from going through a wall.
- Rigged props (More than the single bone props).
- Adjusted character rigs, created constraints and controls to cut down time spent on cloth/hair/eye animation.
- Made quick fixes to existing rigs for unique scenes, i.e. separating body parts. These rigs were brought in as new skeletal meshes.
- Created key framed animations to fill in gaps between motion capture performances, replace motion capture, fill in for performances that could not be captured.
- Animated props, cloth, hair, eyes, and hands.
- Edited and/or finished off other keyframe animation.
Working on Chadam
The bulk of the work focused around cleaning motion captured performances, and creating a scene from multiple clips of those performances and key-framed animation. The initial plan was to only animate hands, cloth, and facial expressions. The rigs had already been set up and brought into the engine, performances had already been motion captured, and a small portion of that motion capture data had been cleaned in Motion Builder over at House of Moves. Only hand, hair, and cloth animation were needed on House of Moves' delivery. Another smaller batch of the motion capture data had been cleaned elsewhere using 3dsMax. That batch came back with several issues one of which were altered rigs. Every file received were in the Character Studio Biped (.bip) format.
- Unusual character designs and proportions.
- Only .bip files available to work with.
- Received some cleanups with altered rigs.
- Received some cleanups half completed.
- Fitting multiple motion capture performances into a small room.
- Creating a single performance out of multiple performances.
Challenges:
Having only .bip files to work with, there were extreme limitations to deal when working to extend performances beyond what they were. Often, character performances would not line up if they were largely different in size. It became a serious issue when those characters were to interact with one another, or even walk alongside each other as they each would cover different distances. Some solutions to dealing with this issue were to adjust the CS Biped Footsteps, blend a walk/run loop to fill in the gap using the Motion Mixer, or go right in and add key-frame animation.
The rigs were set in stone, although there were a few things I saw that could be added to help give a little more control over animating cloth, eyes, and hair. Controls were added hair, eyes, and Viceroy's scarf, Chadam's head drips, while constraints were added to Chadam's tie to help keep it pinned on him. The idea to pin Chadam's tie came from the batch of cleaned up motion capture data we received with altered rigs (though that was not supposed to happen). We found Chadam's tie directly skinned to his main rig and the original bones for the tie deleted.
At first, we liked the idea because it would cut down time on having to animate cloth, however, we could not bring in the animations done on the altered rig into the engine without bringing in a second skeletal mesh. For a couple of reasons, we wanted to keep to the rig we already had, so as a quick fix to get a similar effect, I constrained the bones of Chadam's tie to his body using Helper objects. This way the trajectories of the tie bones could be baked down and the helpers deleted before exporting to Unreal.