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| Project 2004 - Gallery | Motion Capture | FX Team |
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As part of the project, the C.R.A.T.E. team members had the opportunity to partner with the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design ( ACCAD) at Ohio State University to use motion capture for the characters of the animated segments. The overall agenda for the week was to travel to Ohio from Arkansas and participate in the motion capture process and learn how to clean up and manipulate the data. The ten members of the CRATE team were not only responsible for the 3d animation of the films, but were also the motion capture and voice actors for the characters. The plan was to tour the facilities on Sunday, do motion capture on Monday and Tuesday, attend Vicon Workstation and Motion Builder class on Wednesday, do facial and hand capture on Thursday, and finally finish with more software instruction on Friday. The team's goal was to complete all of the necessary motion capture for the Chemistry in the Kitchen animated short film, as well as receive instruction in the software that is needed to animate the characters for the film. If Chemistry in the Kitchen was completed, then the plan was to work on the Baseball and Batteries animated shorts as well. As the week came to an end we had completed the motion capture for all three of the animated short films, far exceeding our expectations of the goals we had set. The collaboration project went very smoothly with a seamless integration of project personnel from both sides. What is motion capture? Watch the "Making of" Chemistry in the Kitchen on YouTube. This video gives an inside look at the motion capture process.
Reflectors are also placed on the face to capture emotions and expressions given by the actors. Data gathered from these actors are then projected onto the 3D characters to give the “fictional” characters human-like movements much more rapidly than could be done by animators alone.
Preparation for the motion capture was exciting and strenuous. The 2004 project focused on each team member gaining experience in every aspect of the animation, from script development to final editing. With this focus, every member participated in the motion capture process. Walker, Bratton, Smith, Gehlhausen and Teffetalor became actors for the motion capture while the rest of the team directed.
From left to right: Reflectors were placed on Kent Walker's hand for hand motion capture; Heath Gehlhausen performs the mandatory "T" pose that allows 3D characters to be aligned with the real actors; Because of the minimal amount of props allowed - the sets had to be taped so that the actors knew where walls, counters, appliances, etc... were.
Video of motion capture at ACCAD. The actors in this clip are Heath Gehlhausen playing Stewey and Angie Smith playing Marta. Because of the motion capture process, it is easier for the actors to play the scenes individually. More than one character will cause interference with the cameras. Minimal props are also required to avoid lose of camera points. The video is a 19 mb .avi with mpeg4 v2 compression, playable in winamp and windows media player.
A total of twenty minutes of combined facial, hand and body motion capture data for 5 characters was captured at ACCAD, totaling over 7.5 gigabytes of data. This data needed to be cleaned up and applied to our characters. Kent Walker created a video that takes the viewer through the process. The video totals 106 mb, so it has been broken into 5 segments for quicker download. Each video is ~23 mb .avi with mpeg4 v2 compression, playable in winamp and windows media player.
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