Bleep’s Escape Motion Capture Production – Sp 04 The RED Group Sean Chang, Shawn Hove, Josh Huber, Ambrish Tyagi

Animation Storyboard Main character: Bleep Abstract character Motion captured Antenna captured as a prop Bad characters: Bloopy

Motivation for MoCap Main character is articulated Complex motions required fine human like movements, like Hatching out of an egg Dance of self-exploration Escape sequence after encounter with the Bloopy

Animation with 2D/3D Graphics It is difficult to key-frame or procedurally control complex human actions such as dance sequence in our animation Appendage like the antenna could have been procedural but we decided to motion capture it for experience

Maya Trax Editor vs. Motion Builder Tool for non-linear editing Works on character sets (vs. skeleton) Simpler to cut/copy/split clips unlike in motion builder where no simple way to split Time warping is provided whereas motion builder has linear scaling

Maya Trax Editor vs. Motion Builder Motion warping allows non-destructive animation by applying animation on top of animation (set keys on character) We found Motion Builder easier and more useful for blending clips due the tighter control provided for blending areas and blending weights Finally non-linear editing was done in Adobe Premier

Glitches Sequence with jumping off the mats had poor data since subject went out of capture volume Data points for the left and right middle fingers were occasionally confused with adjacent markers Hatching scene required substantial cleaning due to self occlusions All scenes were not able to use the data for the antenna

Gains Dance sequence came was captured well. Motion looked good The “flying in air” stunt came out nicer due to its non-human looks Blending results were impressive since the disjoint motions like the dance and falling into the pond were easily compounded

Improvements for another attempt Calibration of appropriate volume during motion capture Avoid banging into the cameras Avoid the use of closely placed markers (fingers in our case) The antenna would rather be procedural than motion captured Motion capture the other (bad) character too

What did we learn Able to work through the entire pipeline of motion capture Got a feel of effort that goes into post capture operations such as cleaning, blending, motion editing etc. Learnt how to work with Motion Builder and the Maya Trax editor