JoeMocap

 One project down, another one immediately begins! Such is the way of university, but seeing as this is our last year I know I need to go in with 200%. For this project we are reworking our whole workflow to incorporate/entirely replace our old software with Shogun and Unreal Engine 5. I am TOTALLY new to this - I have opened Unreal a total of ONE time(s) and it crashed on me within minutes. I'm a VFX student so our use of game engines has only really just kicked off and I'm slightly behind the times in that regard.  Overall though, I am really excited to have some way to not only use the more advanced technology at our disposal (the new suits, the new screen and camera setup, the Shogun capture tech etc) but to learn how to use Unreal 5 in any capacity; for motion capture or any other use. If I have discovered anything about my learning style it is that I do much better learning how to use new software by having exercises or projects to use it for, so this presents a fantasti...

  Face Body Overall, I am quite happy with how the results came out. Next time I would like to spend more time on the hands and arms as I ended up a little unsatisfied with them. I think I was able to do an alright job of the face considering I was really intimidated by it at first. I genuinely really enjoyed learning this process and would honestly not mind doing it again . I think I have learned so much and hope that an opportunity to utilise performance capture again comes up. There are so many small details and being able to get really into the nitty gritty was fantastic.

 This week presented the main final animation that needed to be done - and probably the most complicated part - the hands and arms along with parenting the lip balm. In the past we worked with the Autodesk Character Generator human rigs and I had struggled to get the hands to pose without them looking like they had gone through a meat grinder. I hoped the Metahuman hands would be easier to work with. Right off the bat I found the lip balm lid had come off the base and the controller on the lid had no keyable attributes so I couldn't see if there was a value that needed resetting. I found the main lip balm had some keys on it that were not part of my frame range so I deleted them and had a hand resetting the parenting and position of the lid. I think the file for the lip balm had been made with the people working with the lid off in mind. I began with figuring out where the lipbalm should sit on the hand. I initially couldn't figure out how she was holding it but I zoomed in and...

 This week I moved on to the home stretch - cleaning the body. I found the process of trimming the frame range straightforward, though very time consuming to check all of the keys and make sure nothing was missed. I was really lucky to get a shot with relatively little foot and knee movement - she doesn't walk around in my shot and stands on the same spot the whole time. I actually ended up moving straight to the feet as her knees had no glaring issues and the floating feet were throwing me off more in terms of not being planted on the ground like hers. Before cleanup For feet I began by shifting the model so that she was standing at zero, and then I added a grid to determine how much clipping was occurring. Using a split screen with perspective on one side and orthographic on the other was super helpful as it allowed me to cross check all of the technical changes (exact number values etc) with the visual reference video. I added the necessary lift around frame 1920 for the last al...

 This week I took a minute to breathe again after the face. I worked on getting the body set up and ready to work on in Maya. I began by importing the proxy rig and motion data from Cortex into Motion Builder. I did the usual remapping process, but was extra careful with aligning the body parts as I knew they would look more obvious if they didn't match. A big problem that I encountered was with the shoulders; this seemed to be a consistent issue with the class and was due to Metahuman having different placements for the clavicle joints. After much trial and error I was able (with the assistance of Dr. Kennedy!) to get a good idea of the level of exaggeration required to get the placement of the shoulders to where it needed to be for the Maya animation to look as correct as possible at this stage pre-cleanup. Shoulders too low; looks correct in MotionBuilder but dropped too low in Maya Shoulders roughly corrected; highly exaggerated in  MotionBuilder but translates correctly i...

 This week I began the unforgiveable task of cleaning the mouth. The main issues I encountered were with the corners of the mouth. They were usually too high up and needed to be pulled down in several areas - particularly when she says and rests on the word "DIE" The retargeting also seemed to mess up the pose I created for the part where she makes a FFFFF sound. The bottom lip didn't roll inward and the top lip appeared distorted, so this took up a majority of my time to fix. Her teeth were not visible but I assumed this was down to shadows. Without the tooth ever so slightly visible you couldn't really tell she was making that sound. I did notice that shifting the camera made it look a bit distorted though, so I may end up tweaking it further. The provided facecam did feel more accurate but maybe it was distorting the perspective. One of the corners of the mouth seemed to droop more when I changed cameras so I will look to fix this before I move on to the body. Befo...