Since I have NO idea about any of this, Graham was very very helpful, and I think I was quite quick to pick up what was going on and why etc.
In terms of the dance itself, Cristina took elements from the choreography I was about to use from the dancer, and added a few of her own freestyle moves and I think they all came out really really well! (from what I could see).
A few photos from the day
This definitely made me more intrigued to learn a lot more about MoCap, and I was really keen to start collating my data and get it added to my model so I can do lot of clean up and extremes
It's disappointing that there isn't more out there... (maybe I just wasn't looking properly) and that pretty much left me at a cross roads - I could either go back to my original plan of key-framing - which I know and am comfortable with. Or I could spend 2 weeks trying to figure out what i'm doing and be at risk of getting it all wrong...
There's definitely heaps more to it than I initially realised and it's more complex. But LUCKILY, Chris specialises in Motion Capture, so I asked if he could point me in the right direction, but he's gone one step further and offered to help me and give me a crash course in Motion Builder so I can get set up and learn how to transfer the motions over to my model.
We met up today and it was DEFINITELY really helpful, he showed me some great examples of what he's done with his own project which helped me really visualise the complexity of it all. I'm still really surprised that I couldn't find any introductory tutorials. He's lead me up to a point where I can turn the points to characters and get these mapped to an actor and my model. After i've done this with all my files we're gonna sit down again and he's gonna walk we through transferring this all back to Maya, and putting together movement sequences.
It's actually all really exciting (cause i'm a nerd like that), and I feel like this already has the same feeling as rigging does, and I think that my knowledge of rigging has helped my understanding of it all, especially in terms of terminologies etc.
Fun times to be had! Aiming to have this first part finished by Sunday!
In other project related news, I feel like everything is really beginning to take shape and come into place visually.
I did another quick playblast with my intial lighting attempt where the shadows betray me...
My scenes are all dressed now with a new terrain / cave tweaks, and the camera's are all set. So all that's left before rendering:
- Tweak Textures
- Set Lights (urggghh)
- Dance sequence!
12 days left to do these - let the no sleeping commence!
