T-Shirt Contest

I won the T-Shirt contest! So not only will my design be on every new t-shirt but I also get drive on access to the school. Here at Universal there are the theme parks and the backlot. The back lot is where all everything behind the scenes goes on (ride repair, stages for recording movies, advertising etc. The school is located in the backlot which you need clearance to get into. Normal clearance covers just walking into the back lot. You need special permission to drive onto the backlot and I get that privilege for a while now!

I had a meeting today with the founder of the school who chose was judging the design. He asked if I could make a larger resolution image (bigger). Now I think this is common knowledge but I will explain anyways. A rasterized image (normal picture) has a certain resolution. Once you go beyond 100% the image becomes blurry/pixelated. A vector image on the other hand can be scaled up infinitely with no distortion or blurring. This is because vector images are driven by mathematical shapes. I never really took the time to teach myself about vectors to much because I never really needed them but, because Jeff (the founder of the school) wanted a larger resolution image/vector I though "What a great time to learn!" In about 2 hours I had converted my image into a vector. Now it can be scaled as big as the school wants!  Oh and he did as that I change the color around "DAVE" to be white just to make it pop a little so that was the only other change that I made to the design.

 

Motion Capture

We have moved on from lip syncing and hand keyed animation and into motion capture.  Motion capture is great for quickly getting realistic animation.  The system we use here at DAVE School uses infrared cameras.  I believe there are 12 in all and are positioned as pictured below. 

Now the actor wears a suit with 53 super reflective spheres placed all over his body.  The cameras looks for these and communicate with each other to figure out where in 3D space these spheres are located.  There is a lot of math going on, its actually pretty impressive.  They are all doing real-time trigonometry to solve for 53 unknowns.

Now no system is perfect and the flaw that this system has is occlusion (when the spheres can not be seen by any of the cameras).  Using 53 markers makes occlusion less likely though.

So this information is recorded and processed into a file that we can edit.  There are a lot of steps and filters to go through to make sure the end result is good, however that being said I could probably do all this in a matter of an hour and end up a 5 minute animation all smoothed out.  We do of course have to go back and hand key the hands, facial expressions and such (unless you decide to capture the face and hands as well.  This is done in big films sometimes ex; The Hobbit, Avatar)

Now your probably wondering wow this is cool, but how expensive is it.. well, each one of these cameras cost $18,000.  Then you have to figure x12 is $216000 or at least thats what I'm told.  So its not really a cheap setup.  Even if you want to rent out a Mocap (Motion Capture) studio, it cost thousands of dollars a day.  So we are very lucky to have this great studio to work with!

Here is an example we were given.  This was pre-recorded and the exercise was to get rid of any noise.  Ohh I forgot to tell you, these cameras sample/record 120 times per/second.  So in 1 second that camera calculates and record the location of all 53 points 120 times.  That's a lot of information to work with.  So this is when apply filters that get rid of this noise, the same filters in fact that are used in music production actually.

Karate Mocap Link

This isn't from here at the school, I just did a simple search online, but this is what the actors with their suits look like.

Lip Sync

Theres more to animation then just walking and running, jumping and climbing stairs.  Speach is an important part and the best way to show someone is talking is to animate their mouths (obviously).  This is where lip sync comes into play.

 

Now its not as hard as I thought it was going to be but that being said it is still a litlle difficult.  In short we take our original model, copy him (so now we have two of the same) and change the copy to make a smile face for example.  What we can then do is blend the original into the copy using a slider.  The more you move the slider the closer it gets to the changed copy.  We have to make lots of these copies.  I think I ended up making 20 or so.  One for every shape the mouth makes when talking, smile, frown, sad, blinking ect.  It is probably a little hard to grasp but tell you what ill make a video and post it below along with the clips I had to do for class.

These first two are only head and mouth movement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_DgMEXqBss

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl_8Og5KP2Q

 

This one is a full body animation with lip sync.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imOoCJLGHZQ

 

So.. I was having a problem with recording the screen but Ill get that worked out and posted later.

 



Obstacle Course

For this last project we did I was a little surprised because we got quite a bit of time to do it. The project was to have Skippy go through an obstacle course. We got the project Friday and it isn't due until tomorrow (Wednesday) morning at 8am. That’s about 4 days for a project that could technically be done in a day. However, out instructor had a meeting in LA with the director of the school along with the academic director to talk to a studio that does Pre-vis.

Brief description of Pre-Vis. Basically it’s an unrendered animation that directors will have made so that they can view and adjust camera angles and timing of a shot before the final shot is made in real-time. So when it comes time for the real shot to be, well shot, or rendered, the camera angles and timing are already all figured out.  I put some exaples below with the previs being on the left and the final shot on the right.

 

Now back to the obstacle course. Skippy had to go over four items; stairs, a cube, a ladder, and a fourth item that we could create. I decided to do something on the simpler side and made him go through some tiers.

http://youtu.be/8qZtTdVeEEY

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