Video capture...

Not entirely sure if this video capture will work. But here goes anyway - this video shows the mocap data in its raw state and after a few iterations of clean-up using Character Studio's Layer system to overlay keyframes and then collapse them all down afterwards.

Well the video resolution was rather poor and it was certainly less than I captured it at.

Okay so here's the next video demonstrating how the weighting on the character is working so far. 

Here's a link to Youtube - for a higher res video.

http://youtu.be/2rllEvpRlgY

There will be a couple more videos to upload tonight, after the kids goto sleep and I can capture with some piece and quiet.

Here's a link to Youtube - for a higher res video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjbDwQQZyf0

Here is the final video capture showing some muscle deformation using the Bulge Angle Deformer in the Skin modifier. I created a couple of simple animations to test the joints but I wasn't able to get the Morph Angle Deformer to work with my current version of 3DS Max. I will investigate to see if I can get a patch for this as I think this is the way to sort out the joints as you create morphs by stacking edit poly modifiers on top of the skin modifier and it means you can shape the verts precisely and not have to work with a control lattice which is how the bulge angle deformer works.

Here's a link to Youtube - for a higher res video.

http://youtu.be/nBQez39AX5g

Have to tweak the shoulders

I decided to test out the shoulder and was struggling with positioning the upper arm bone and the clavicle in particular to get some decent deformation on the shoulder joint. It seemed that no matter how much I tweaked the envelopes and paint weighting, the shoulder just seemed WAY too wide.

In the end, I decided to remodel the shoulders going from the image below....

to the bottom image here. 

This gave a much better result. I will upload some more pics of the shoulder in motion and I thought that it was going swimmingly.

I went up to UCLan on Wednesday afternoon to see Mario and I got some mocap done. I was surprised at how small the mocap suit was. Anyway I managed to capture some data but not sure how good it would be. I did notice that the capture software was set up in a very odd manner - with only a single spine link and 2 neck links. Apparently that's how it comes and it's not adjustable. So not that impressive for a £50k system.

After bring the BVH files into 3DS Max, I found the data to be pretty dirty. Here are a couple of images showing the drooping clavicles and the turned in elbows.

So I decided to get the rigging done to the best of my ability for the first stage. I did a torso twisting animation whilst crouched down and it seemed to work okay. This was using just the envelopes and paint weighting. I haven't gone into vertex weighting yet - so not bad. 

The next step will be to do some more aggressive poses and animations to test the shoulder joints and then to see if I can get some muscle bulges into the biceps and triceps as a start. I have a feeling that the pec and lat muscles are going to be tricky to emulate.

Oh - I must have a go at a breathing animation showing his rib cage rising and falling! Okay that's all for now.