Lab:
This past Friday Chris Hall, Manning Qu, Oriana Neidecker and I got together to clean up our data. Each of us took turns sitting in front of the computer and getting to know the software a bit better. We started by bringing a simple walking animation Chris did with her group the week before. Due to her hair being in a pony-tail, a lot of the data around her neck was missing which was a good thing because it let us figure out how to use the software properly to clean up the data.
After the walking animation was cleaned up, the other three members head out and I was able to take a look at a horseback riding animation that I had recorded the previous week. The good news was that this information was totally clean and required no additional work but this – may have – led to complications down the line.
Workflow:
Overall, the process of using MotionBlender was pretty easy thanks to Todd’s great tutorial. The one thing that was a bit over my head was that the wrists don’t seem to be animation properly. In the attached video you can see that the forearms and wrists aren’t operating in the way that the skeleton is. Rather than fold at a 90 degree angle, the right arm juts out a bit more which makes it look like the character is petting something next to him as opposed to his own horse.
Final video:
While I’m happy with the fact that the animation plays well, there are definitely more con’s than pro’s in this first video; mistakes that can be chalked up to my first time using the software’s. For example, the scale of each of the different objects – the character, horse and bison – are all very off as is the scale of the foliage. The graphics card in my Mac is also preventing the character from appealing smoothly, instead it looks like a character from Goldeneye.
With that said, I’ve really enjoyed the process and look forward to learning more about the various softwares we’re using.