Soliloquy of Stars: Final Sprint

 Well, we've made it to the end folks. This sprint was a rollercoaster of emotions, it literally felt like this:

We start this sprint off with me trying to troubleshoot the mocap data, and figure out why the cleaned data wasn't matching the mocap data in the sequencer. I noticed that the frame rate of the mocap data in the project was at the original 120 fps that motion data is captured at. After hours of trying different solutions like changing the frame rate of each mocap section in Motion Builder and exporting them to unreal, and re-baking the animation to a higher frame rate, I came to the unfortunate realization that once you plot animation back to the skeleton in MoBu, you can't go back. Basically the updated animation was set to 30 fps, but the animation we had timed our entire cinematic around was set to 120 fps. This meant that all the shots, vfx, and lighting sequences were no longer in the right spot and had to be redone. Yeah, not great. 

Troubleshooting RAHHH

So with the help of my goated project lead Jules, we spent a half day re-timing the cinematic. Once this was complete, I helped set up a test render so we could catch any other errors with the project before the final render. And then, between the test and final render, I spent the rest of the time cleaning up my mocap section to the best of my ability. I then added everyone's sections together using the Story tool in Motion Builder, and placed it in engine for the final render. The mocap isn't perfect by any means, but considering the time we had I'm proud of everyone for their efforts!

Overall, there's been a LOT of hiccups throughout the duration of this project, but I'm proud of the product we created as a team. 

Soliloquy of Stars: Sprint 5 Delivery

 For this sprint, I tried to focus on mocap cleanup and getting my section of the data as cleaned as possible for this update. I couldn't work on it as much as I was out of town for the first week, and also answering a lot of questions from my colleagues about their tasks. I had to meet with a lot of different departments to review their work. For example, I had to check the lighting setups for each shot, as well as review the vfx placements by shot in the sequencer. 

Once, I got the mocap sections from my other animators, I had to put together the three sections of data using the story tool in Motion Builder. For the first character, the Black Hole, I was able to get all the sections blended together and exported as one file. For the Star character though, I ran into a ton of issues. With Emily's mocap section, somehow there's a namespace issue where the star's mocap isn't named the same as the star's skeleton, so the character doesn't map to the animated data and stays in a T pose. With my mocap section, there's no namespace issue, but for some reason the data still won't attach to the character so he also stays in a T pose. 

I couldn't figure out what to do for the star, so I figured I'd just put the Black Hole's cleaned mocap section in engine to show that progress has been made. However, when I did this, for some reason the Black Hole's timing is different than the original data, so it's not synced to the shots or the vfx placements. It seems like the data slows down in the middle of the dance?

Basically, there were enough problems that I didn't feel comfortable pushing these changes, so there isn't an update for the mocap in engine this sprint. 

This weekend and next week, my plan is to figure out these issues. 

:(

Mocap Attempts

Soliloquy of Stars: Sprint 4 Delivery

 For this sprint, we really focused on getting everything in engine and starting to get the vfx into the sequencer. One of the first things I did was make a document for the vfx artists called VFX Placements, it showed them what shot to place their effect, as well as what specific frame I wanted the effect to play or stop. It also had a column for our lighting artist indicating what colors we wanted the environment to be at certain points throughout the cinematic. 

Speaking of the sequencer, I went shot by shot and set them up with subsequences for VFX and Lighting. This way, everyone could work in the sequencer independently and not worry about overwriting someone else's work. 

I then checked with our rigging artist to review the final rigs and make sure that everything was working fine. We had some problems initially with the bones of the skeleton not matching up with the mocap data in MotionBuilder, and crunching the mesh as a result, but we got them figured out eventually (I had a similar problem initially with getting them into engine but that also was solved). 

I had to oversee a lot of departments this sprint and had a lot of people asking me questions about their tasks, so I didn't get a chance to do much more cleanup on my section of the mocap. Next sprint, I plan on making that a priority so we can show the cleaned data.