Week 8: Leap by [giant] Leap

I come bearing excellent news, everyone; gather round and gape in amazement at the leaps and bounds of progress my animations have made this past week! (Well, not quite—but this has probably been my smoothest and most worry-free work week yet.)

I. Two Cameras are Better Than One…as are Brains

Cindy and I have taken to meeting up a few times each week so as to promote higher levels of productivity (in theory). This week, our methods actually ended up bearing fruit: with Cindy’s help, I managed to work out Rokoko Vision’s dual-camera motion capture mode, a service I had once believed to be impossible to utilize with my single-webcam Mac. Now, why go through all the complex setup and dual-camera-calibrating pain, you ask?

We have eliminated…most…of the wiggling!

I cannot, unfortunately, convey our progress through video due to the limitations of the blog website, but you’ll have to take my word for it. The addition of a side-view camera has improved the fluidity of our character’s animations tremendously, not to mention its far more accurate positioning of various body parts. Of course, there are still some tricky movements that seem to stump the AI-powered software. The move we currently have for “embarrassed” involves raising a hand to the back of one’s head in one sheepish gesture; however, the software apparently refuses to let the hand go as far back as behind the head and settles instead for waving the hand frustratingly in FRONT of the face. 

Anyway, all of this is still a massive improvement for the sorry excuse we had for “motion capture animation” last week. Cindy and I have been diligently fleshing out the dialogue and cataloging all the different emotions/poses we’ll need to be using throughout the entire game (e.g. “smug,” with hands crossed in front of the chest, and “shrug,” with…a shrug). In no time, we’ll have the “Tier 1” of this project done and dusted; it’s the Tier 2, the second layer of the onion, that I’m most uncertain about. 

II. Peeling Apart the Onion

Cutting into the onion of my project reveals a frightening inner layer of—drumroll, please—facial motion capture! In order to accomplish this next ambitious goal, I will most likely have to leech off a 30-day free trial of a different online software that can perform facial mocap without any additional costly equipment. Remocapp is currently my top candidate for this role, although I will have to double-check that its services come completely equipment-free. 

And so begins the next leg of our ambitious journey—we will now graduate from the heftiness of the body to the delicate features of the face. All I have to wrap up now is the mild clunkiness of some of our already-captured dual-camera animations, and we’re all set to trudge even deeper into the murky waters of Assorted Softwares I Have Never Had Prior Experience With!