Soliloquy of Stars: Sprint 3 Delivery

At the beginning of this sprint, the other leads and I met to discuss down-scoping our project. Originally, our environment was five islands of varying colors all matching a stage of grief. With the time constraints we have, we realized that this setup was going to create a lot of problems for different departments, and decided to switch to one island. 

This took some work off of a lot of people, however, Kate had to redo all of our cameras. So at the beginning of this sprint I worked with her to reformat the shot list and figure out where the characters would be when dancing across the new island. 

Then it was on to mocap cleanup. Finally the proxy rigs were working with the mocap data and we could begin the clean up process. The long, tedious process...

To do this, I've been watching the feet contact with the floor, making sure they are actually interacting with the floor. I also have been fixing any interactions between the characters. Things like when the Star character lifts the Black Hole at any point, when the characters hold hands or collapse together, etc. 

After doing a first pass of the clean up, I imported the fbx file in to the engine so we had an updated animation to play. I then update the rigs that are in engine. The Star character imported fine, but i was having a lot of trouble with the Black Hole. For some reason the neck joint would import in by the wrist joint. Eventually i figured it out with the help of Elijah. Once they worked, I mapped the semi cleaned mocap footage to the rigs. 

Perforce:

Soliloquy of Stars: Sprint 2 Delivery

This sprint was the sprint of problems for me.

 For this sprint, I worked with Kate, Emily, Jules, and Cheryl in the mocap stage to try and get live link working so we could capture real time data for the camera movements. We ran into a lot of trouble with figuring out how it works and setting up, but eventually we got a take for one of the shots where the camera moves. See the video below for proof of our progress:

Next I added the mocap skeletons from our take to perforce and wrote up some documentation for our rigging artists to follow. They needed to place the mocap skeleton from our two actors into the proxy meshes that Kase created last sprint. They had to move the joints in a very specific way to ensure our custom character rigs would map onto the mocap data properly. 

Once I had the skeletons from the riggers, I tested them in Motion Builder. I encountered some issues where the skeleton would almost map to the mocap's root bone but would only snap to the side of the character. Eventually we figured out that the ankles were put in the wrong place when being rigged, which was throwing off the scale of the initial mocap skeleton. 

After that problem was solved, I added the new characterized rigs to the unreal project.