Episode 1

 
Out and about taking photos around London to find some nice locations for the next episode of Visiting. Not many sunny day’s left, need to get the shoot going!

Bit of a break while finishing up other projects but back on it and excited to get into the next episode. Next up location scouting!

I’m not totally sure what the end titles are going to look like as yet but had fun experimenting with the chamfered lettering above. I think any final text/titles on the video will be much more subtle.

Light shield animation completed in After Effects using Shapes, Turbulence Textures and Time Displacement to create the glitchy effect. Through out this project I’ve noticed in Lightwave 3D image sequences with large number suffix’s ie. image_9999.tiff slow down the scene considerably more than image_0001.tiff. So I’m always reseting comp frame ranges to start at 0.

The Visitors HUD elements are now complete, ready for positioning and distorting to fit the UV’s of the helmet. All elements were draw and animated in Adobe Flash, which I find the ideal tool for doing this kind of stuff and are based on Read the rest of this entry »

I’m very happy to of found out that the Rhiggit v2 toolset includes an awesome way of dynamically parenting items via ‘make constraint‘ without the annoying baking of animation. Making grabbing items a breeze!

I’ve now tried a few ‘budget’ markerless motion capture setups; 1/2 Microsoft Kinect’s and 4/6 Playstation Eye camera’s via Ipisoft’s tools. The Playstation Eye cameras requires some significant setup but allow for a larger area of capture and at a higher frequency (60fps at 640×480).  Two Kinect’s require a little setup but helps with occlusion (mostly arms swinging behind my torso). However I’ve come to really enjoy the process of using just one Kinect for creating motions for the Visiting character. The setup is minimal and full body motions can be captured in front of my desk, all be it a few meters away. I have found myself adjusting my behaviour a little over time when performing actions, namely widening my arms and legs to limit occlusion errors and ensure clear separation between limbs, I find this works well for ‘the visitors’ proportions and doesn’t subtract from the natural feel of movement.

Starting the motion capture process using IpiSoft markerless motion capture and Rhiggit Pro v2. Thankfully Rhiggit now comes with preset mapping for the fbx files that IpiSoft exports, which makes remapping setup a breeze in Layout. The ‘Animation Toolbox’  in Rhiggit Pro is insanely handy for mocap cleanup. I’m favouring the ‘Reduce Smart’ curves filter, it gives you a preview in the graph editor before having to commit.

After laying out the second shot I realised we’ll see the inside and so far it’s just been a white cylinder. So today I thought I’d model the inside.
Read the rest of this entry »