Character Performance through Motion Capture
This was a 6 week group research project for our Master of Art program. The project looked to explore pipeline possibilities with Metahuman, motion capture, and Unreal. The mocap was taken through Cortex, then motion builder, and rendered in Unreal engine. We experienced many technological and practical challenges, but are very pleased with the result. My responsibilities on this project were concept artist, script writer, animatic creation, the mocap actor, and mocap cleanup. The programs used were Unreal, Autodesk Motion Builder, and Cortex.
The story takes place in the 1940s and focuses on a crime syndicate Mafia boss. He is exacting revenge on his superiors, as well at the rest of the Mafia family, for the mistreatment causes to him. In his monologue, we learn about his sinister plan for revenge.
As I was responisble for majority of the pre-production for this project, I created quick mock-up concept art. The goal of the concept art was to find the right mood and lighting for the short film.
As the animator for our small team, I was also the motion capture actor. Since I was actually in the suit acting, I knew exactly how I wanted the character to feel, as if I were to be key-frame animating him.
Since I was smaller than our character, this posed for some technical difficulties when bringing the mocap data into motion builder. We overcame this challenge by mirroring the data to better match the joints on our character.
Once the motion capture data was merged from motion builder to Unreal Engine, I began work on the clean up. I used Unreal Engine’s control rig to fine tune the motion capture. What specifically needed work was the fingers and facial animation.
To gather mocap data for the facial animation, we used the LiveLink feature in Unreal Engine to sync with my iPad. With the iPad, I could record my face as I lip-synced the dialogue. This proved to be a fairly effective method as we did not have access to facial mocap in the studio. After recording the facial mocap data, I went back and edited the eyes and blend shapes.