JoeMocap

 Phew! What a tricky week! We jumped right into the facial tracking component of the performance capture process this week; beginning with tracking the brows and eyes.   In my scene, Miri's brows pull a variety of expressions - lifted high, settled low, and an anxious lifting of the tops. The tracker points on the eyebrow tails were placed on her temples and as a result were not visible for most of the shot, so I elected to track an eyebrow hair instead. It was a tricky and time consuming process. The eyes were less challenging, though I am considering returning back to fine tune them after some feedback if possible. All trackers painted on were visible except for the upper eyelid, but I was able to apply trackers to the eyelash root on both eyelids and it seemed to work well. The main issue I encountered was that the upper eyelid felt like it moved side-to-side a lot and I genuinely couldn't tell if it was a result of the eyeball moving around a lot or due to a drifting track...

 We began this week's class with an introduction to performance capture and the differences between performance and motion capture. This semester's assignment will require us to think much more about facial expressions, intention of movement, and the emotions of the actors and what they are trying to convey. I was assigned the frame range 1673-1940 (roughly 10 seconds) using the female character 'Miri'. I imported the sequence into a browser application called Syncsketch which I have utilised in the past to scrub through frames of a sequence to annotate and identify key moments and poses. It's fantastic for animation studies and I highly recommend. From here I was able to begin studying the performance details and make notes on the specific frames that key actions take place. My notes are linked on the Syncsketch page attached on this post. https://syncsketch.com/sketch/YzhiOGM0NmEw/?offlineMode=1#/27659610/28720942/f_1729 In this scene Miri is spilling the beans t...