Animation Reel

Individual capture and process report

3466 Lyn

Virtual Bodies Assessment 1

Executive Summary

Before I have Virtual bodies, I have no idea about motion capture. And I don’t know it can relate to 3D and human movement. After the 3 seconds tutorial and this 11 seconds assessment, I have a better understanding how motion works, and how powerful that system own.

This report will show the detail of what I get from acting this 11seconds. I will explain in detail below about how I learn to control the system, the problem I faced.

The purpose is to analyses and improves the skill of using motion capture system, so that I can have higher quality work later on.

Sound track:

The sound I chose called Stalking You. Stalking You is soliloquy that comes from a mid-age man.

The following is what the man said in that 11 second:

Heh, it’s like a predator. It’s stalking you, Oh, you can try and outrun it with doctors, medicines, but in the end, time is going to hunt you down, and make the kill.

According to the tones of the voice, I have a picture of the man, and the emotion when he says this sentence.

In my opinion, I think the man should be a lonely man that live by his own for a long time, because of the negative massage he shows to us like”in the end, time is …kill.” Also, the words he says, make people feels scare and not feeling good, usually people doesn’t like those kinds of man. And these kind of man, should looks different from each others, for example the movement, the facial emotion.

So in my case, I suppose that this mid-age man is a lonely guy, he is very stress for everything, and he just live in his own life, but he can not get along well with each others, he is so sensitive, that even when he go out, he would bend his back a bit to protect himself and feel safe, while he is walking, he would look around and checking, find if anything could hurt him.

But as I said, he is lonely, but he got no friends to talk to. Therefore, I set my story like this:

Early in the morning, the man wakes up, he can not sleep because of the cars pass by, even the sound of breathing from his next door can makes him couldn't sleep. so he just go out and walk for a while, he think it can help him sleep again after taking a walk.

he just look around, and just talk about things that stalking to him...to the trash bin..

because he has no friends. and he has no one to talk to. So he just can talk to the bin about the stalker around him, to show his opinion.

Body Language, Open actions, Close actions:

Because my Character is talking to a trash bin alone, he should be so confident when he is talking, the bin would not against his speech. There would be very important that I use body language to explain Character’s emotion, and fit the tone of voice.

Open actions:

• Hand up to the air.

• Walk around

• Right hand point to the bin.

Close actions:

• Hands cross over in front of the body, then swing to side of the body.

• Right hand come across the neck from left to right.

Principles of animation shown:

• Anticipation:

Anticipation is used to prepare the audience for an action, and to make the action appear more realistic(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_basic_principles_of_animation). when the character says:” Oh, you can try and outrun it with doctors, medicines,”, he should looks like careless, his hands just swing up to the sky, but in his mind he doesn’t believe that at all. So that the next sentence:” but in the end, time is going to hunt you down, and make the kill.” The character suddenly turn back and point to his audience, that is Anticipation

• Staging:

I set a medium shot for my animation, so that people would focus more on my character. Also, at the first sign, people would see the trash bin first, and I put the trash bin lower, just show half of it, then it would not cover my character and people would see clearly of character’s action. Furthermore, the character

Props

As I set the story that the mid-age man talks to the trash bin, I put a trash bin in my scene. When I record, I put a chair in front of me same position as the trash bin.

Project Process:

There are so many classmates book the mocap room for assessment, so I just can book a 2-hour time for my animation recording. It didn’t take long for me and Youngdong to set up the motion capture system, and we do the user calibration, then we started to rehearse for few times to see how the 3D model looks like when we act.

Practice makes perfect. I recorded more that 12 times but just keep 7 times of the recording. As I act a lot and a lot, I can perform this story better and better. And every time when finish one take, I would check the record video again and again, and turn around with different again to see if there’s any problem about the hands or the head or other capture problems, so that I can improve my next take.

So I don’t need to spend a long time for cleaning. After that I import it to 3DS MAX for further cleaning and environment editing.

I use this image as my background:

Then I render and add the 11 seconds audio sound track.

Problems:

First problems I faced was that this arm move around and fly to everywhere when the model moves.

So I check if I can just move it back and it fail. Then I turn off the SKIN action for that arm, and it goes back and no problem for the animation.

Secondly after I render the animation as AVI, I need to add the sound track with it. But at that time I realize that this software doesn’t work in my computer. So I need to spend time and reinstall the software again. It takes time to do it.

Hopefully everything is fine in the end.