Applying the Motion Capture Pipeline

I learned a lot in last month's Motion Capture class and the final group project allowed my classmates and I to apply that knowledge to bring an idea to life. There was plenty of creative freedom so we tried to have fun with it. This was the final result.

We started by brainstorming the concept and building the storyboards, this was where we tried to get a sense of the timing since there was a certain limit we had to meet. This is also where we planned out what poses and actions we needed so we could get all the clips from the mocap actors, come capture day. We wanted to go for an older black and white silent film style so we drew a lot of inspiration from Charlie Chaplin.

Charlie Chaplin in City Lights

Once we got all of our clips on capture day we cleaned them up in Cortex. Some were a bit easier than others because some involved more complex motions, like falling over, while some were just walks and punches. Getting the clips cleaned up as much as possible was paramount to having an easy time in Motion Builder which is where the characterizing and animating would happen. In Motion Builder I used story mode to blend the different takes together. Part of the project requirements was to have three visible blends on in the camera shot. See if you can find all three. If you can't then I've done my job.

While I'm taking care of the animation in Motion Builder, my teammates were building other parts of the project. One person worked on lighting, while one did the environment building, while one did facial animation. By working with this type of pipeline we were able to have a clean consistent feel for the animation. Another possible pipeline we could have tried was splitting up everything based on time. This would mean one person did everything in their time range, including body animation, facial animation, lighting, camera, etc. then it would all be compiled at the end. The issue I have with this workflow is that it puts a lot of unnecessary work in the final stage of compositing, and in our situation, it probably would have not saved us that much time if any. Plus the biggest issue is that there are now five different cuts where five different styles of work happened so it could make the animation look choppy and inconsistent, same goes for lighting.

Something to note about the facial animations, which one of my teammates did, is that while I was working on the blending of the animation in motion builder I gave him one of my initial passes so that he could start working in Maya while I was still cleaning up and enhancing the motions. This way we were both getting work done and we could replace the body animations later while not affecting the facial animations. This is a common workflow technique for riggers and animators, where the rigger will give the animator a simple rig to get the blocking done and later give him the final one for more detail. Same goes for modelers and riggers, the riggers only need the volume and geometry that deforms, not necessarily all the wrinkles and pores on the mesh, so it's all added later. But it all depends on situation and time, but you always want to maximize efficiency.

I also handled the compositing of the final product, which was done in After Effects. Like I mentioned earlier we really tried to capture that old film look, this is what influenced my decision to create the film grain and vignette. This theme also influenced my font choice. Below are a few resources that I used to capture to look we were going for.

Silent Movie Title Card
Some Good Silent Film Fonts
Song - Hyperfun

This month was a great new learning experience and I'm really glad we got to apply the work in such a way. See you in next month's classes.