Motion capture

When we were given this project from the outset we knew we would have to use the motion capture facility to be able to create the most fluid and realistic motion we could get, with a little help from key frame animation.

We started this by going to the motion capture room setting up the different cameras and getting changed in to the suit.

 We then had to do a slight exercise before we could start capturing the data that we wanted, once we had done the warm up and set the program to the correct setting we were ready to record our movements. Luckily for us we had a plan of what motions we wanted for the character as we also knew the mannerism of him, he was going to be cocky a good role for Matt to play. We hit many problems whilst in the motion capture room, and still to this day we don't understand why this happened, one of the problems we were having was the nodes on the suit kept jittering about on the 3D live work space when we were capturing which meant the data was unusable.

Eventually all the markers were where they should have been and we managed to label them all accordingly:

from the vicon software the motion capture data is exported as a CSM file and here is how they look:

We tried loading the CSM files straight onto the characters biped but it completely messed up the mesh and just made it look stupid, with a little research on the internet I soon found out that the CSM files needed converting into .bip files so I found out how to do it and then converted them, here is a test of how the motion capture data looks on our character after the envelopes were edited: