Business of Animation /film collection presentation

Motion capture is defined as

The creation of a 3D representation of

a live performance.” This is in contrast

to animation that is created ‘by hand’ through a process known as keyframing.

Motion capture (Mocap) used to be considered a fairly controversial tool for creating

animation. In the early days, the effort required to ‘clean up’ motion capture data often took as long as if the animation was created by an animator, from scratch. Thanks to hard work

by the manufacturers of motion capture systems as well as numerous software

developers, motion capture has become a feasible tool for the generation of animation.

Software tools for working with motion-captured data, such as MotionBuilder ,have evolved to the point where animators now have the means to edit and blend

takes from multiple

capture sessions and mix and match them with keyframed animation techniques;

allowing great control of style and quality of final output, for anything ranging from realistic to ‘cartoony’ motion.

MoCap can provide substantial time savings for animation projects. Animators can captured 200 animations during a 15 hour of recording with a motion capture system. Which would have taken one animator up to 4 months to accomplish the same amount of work.

Motion capture can make the animation process much easier, especially when trying to

recreate character animation that is realistic, such as the interaction of multiple

3D characters, or characters engaged in sports activities. Simple ‘ambient animation, such as a character standing around doing nothing, is much easier and more realistic when captured than if these subtleties where animated by hand.

Vicon prides itself on the support and customer care provided to our users and supporters. Having been involved in game production for more than 10 years, and being the parent company of the world's leading motion capture service bureau, House of Moves, Vicon can offer deep experience and technical solutions to our games customers.

FLEXIBLE - LARGE & SMALL VOLUMES
Sometimes you need to capture 500 full-body moves, sometimes you want just 50 but with face data – with Vicon you don’t need multiple systems and setups. Vicon MX T-Series cameras are so straightforward to setup, reconfiguring for a face shoot is a question of minutes not hours. The system ships with calibration wands for both large and small volumes, so there is no new kit to buy. In fact, Vicon is so flexible thatyou don’t even have to have a dedicated facility – you can just take it out of the box, stick it up and start capturing. Vicon can even make major league sports teams happy – now you can go to them, rather than them to you. Need to shoot 15 of the world's best tennis players during a tournament week? Vicon MX wins the match in straight sets.

With market-leading hardware and proven production pipeline tools for game engines and CG FMV production, Vicon can offer you the most advanced, most experienced motion capture system available for game production. So whether sports, sim, or fantasy, next generation “next gen” or old school, first person or third person, Vicon can get the moves you need.

Mo-Cap walk

Mo-Cap walk

Suit set up

Suit set up

Manual rigging requires time-consuming placement of joints to make skeletal animation look realistic.

By implementing a tool that will be able to auto-rig any character/mesh the user creates.

Meshes must be restricted to a standard, predictable pose – for example, the classic T-Pose.

The user selects the mesh, opens up our tool GUI, and clicks the button to automatically rig

the mesh with a few custom paramters. The tool will then automatically create, proportion,

and attach a skeleton to the mesh, enabling the user to animate with ease.
At its core, the tool will fit spheres into the volume of the input mesh,

and will use a searching algorithm to find the best pathways between these sphere-nodes.

The resulting tree becomes the positioning data for the skeleton joints, and is then bound to the mesh.

ART / Automatic Rigging Tool

ART / Automatic Rigging Tool

Motion Capture

Motion capture, featuring a Vicon Motion Capture System set up with 12 MX Cameras and 800 square feet of space. After calibrating the cameras and placing proper markers according to the Max Biped format, I captured many of my motions including walking, turning, jumping, and dancing. I then cleaned up this data, labeled the skeleton accordingly, and exported it in a useable format [bvh] to use for other applications. In my case, I designed a character controller which takes the motions captured and puts it in a move tree, allowing the user to control where the character is moving based on user input. I rendered the skeleton as cylinders in OpenGL.

The addition of, fully integrated motion capture tools provide everything you need to do motion capture tests. The ability to solve for several cameras in a single scene provides a means to produce 3D point cloud data by matching points in each camera. A day or two saved in a Motion Capture Studio by pre planning shots pays for PFTrack in one go!

The, fully integrated image based modelling capabilities allow users to quickly build up 3D environments by using the background image as a guide. The Auto-Mesh tool allows selected solved auto and user feaures to be used to generate an editable mesh. This is a great tool for the modelling of organic shapes and Topologies. Image based modelling tools in 5.0 provide an integrated environment which delivers a much more flexible solution. Perfect for pre-visualisation and animation guidance, textured models can be exported to all major 3D applications.

The Polar Express, the Lord of the Rings, or played most any video game, you’ve seen motion cap­ture. Actors dress up in funny body suits with lit­tle white balls over them. Filmmakers run the cam­eras through a com­puter, using the actors’ move­ments to ani­mate a com­puter gen­er­ated char­ac­ter. It’s a quick and easy way to record com­plex, real­is­tic char­ac­ter move­ments with­out hav­ing an ani­ma­tor labor over it for weeks. Some say that most films will be made this way in the future.
I don’t think so. We all know the say­ing that the eyes are the door­way to the soul. The eyes and face allow us to read the feel­ings of a char­ac­ter. Audiences see those expres­sions, and when they are played well to match the moment, we become engaged in the char­ac­ters. We know what they’re feel­ing. We care. That’s the magic of act­ing.
Mocap will never be able to show such expres­sive­ness on its own. Right now, mocap has a hard time cap­tur­ing eye and face move­ments, but that’s just a tech­ni­cal prob­lem. They’ll fix that. Even if the motion cap­ture per­fectly cap­tures every­thing, you still need actors that can act on a green screen, with actors green suits, and objects don’t exist.

Actors are all about emo­tion. They’re not automa­tons used merely to record their move­ments. They are humans and need human inter­ac­tion. They need the same emo­tive respon­sive­ness from their co-stars that they’re try­ing to por­tray on screen. There are few peo­ple who can per­form well clad in a rub­ber suit oppo­site a sim­i­larly clad actor with dots glued all over his face. Dave McKean, for exam­ple, learned this les­son while film­ing Mirrormask.
This is where ani­ma­tors step in. Animators can take the cap­tured data and tune the emo­tional per­for­mance on close­ups. In fact, work­ing with the actor, they can cre­ate an awe­some per­for­mance. This is exactly how they made Gollum, the best char­ac­ter in the Lord of the Rings movies (It’s a crime that Gollum wasn’t nom­i­nated for Best Supporting Actor).
I think the best approach is in Sin City.

Let actors be peo­ple in real cos­tumes, and give them real look­ing props — even to the point of hav­ing a car mockup on set. The rest of the room is green. They can act & react, and the direc­tor can still do crazy visu­als. The whole thing can be done in a large (though some­what pricey) garage exactly as Rodriguez did. In fact, the mocap advances may help here — give the actor a real gun that hap­pens to have a lit­tle flu­o­res­cent ball on each end so the com­puter can pick it up, and that 9mm pis­tol becomes a badass alien Zap-O-Ray.
Mocap is great. The work the TVD peo­ple are doing is awe­some, and I am excited that this may bring mocap within reach of aspir­ing inde­pen­dent film­mak­ers. It’s just another tool, though; not an end in itself. A movie still needs a well struc­tured, inter­est­ing story, and a per­for­mance that we will draw us in. In other words, don’t for­get the per­for­mance in all the technology.

STEERING CONTROL

At any time the application level is allowed to change the desired velocity and the current goal (position or orientation). The locomotion engine ensures the continuity of the trajectory and minimizes the computation time so that complex crowd animation becomes feasible.

We project our motion database onto lower dimension spaces by applying a statistical method. Seamless and continuous motion interpolation and extrapolation can be generated in real-time. Moreover, a proper spatial and temporal normalization stage allows animating any H-ANIM compliant character.

Performances of various subjects on a treadmill have been recorded with an optical motion capture system. We constantly extend a large database composed of walking and running motion cycles with different subjects and speed values.

Our objectives are to provide believable animations, adaptable to any virtual human size, and to offer continuously tunable parameters, such as speed and personification, while smoothly steering their behavior to achieve position or direction goals.

B. Submitted short film for Flatpack 2010.

“Britain’s most exciting and innovative film festival” / Lonely Planet
“Like the perfect mixtape” / Electric Sheep magazine

Each year, Flatpack Festival celebrates the wild frontier of film culture. Presenting work in an eclectic array of unexpected spaces and places, the festival centres on the shared experience of watching great work that you might not otherwise get to see. Flatpack provides a platform for new filmmakers and moving image creativity together with a playful and original programme of cult classics re-imagined, silent cinema re-scored and archive material re-invented.

"OFF TO THE PICTURES"

Submitted short film for Flatpack 2010.

six days of cinematic adventures in venues across Birmingham, Flatpack 2010

Biomechanics
Simple to set up and easy to use, even a beginner can be up and mocapping in 30 minutes - saving you time to concentrate on your results rather than mocap technology.

A systems will not restrict your subject’s movement so you can be confident of the accuracy of your data. You can choose to work with a suit or strap system which can be localised to the area you are analysing. There is no risk of occlusion or marker swapping which means raw data is based on actual movements not calculated. The data you capture is the data you work with.

Incredibly light and portable you can take Animazoo systems to your subject rather than have them come to you. They are just as at home outdoors as they are indoors. This means that you can Mocap data from athletes in the field – in their normal environment. Many motion capture systems have no lag so you can view data in realtime. This means that you can direct your subject and view the end results at the same time. You won’t go back to your desk and find you have to do it all over again.

Systems perform with no lag in realtime. Users can direct performance and view the end results at the same time. That means you won’t go back to your desk and find you have to shoot all over again. Perfect for visualization for the hard-to-please art director. Data output is incredibly clean (even when raw) and foot data is very accurate as it doesn’t suffer from the ‘mushiness ’ associated with other systems. Data output is in bvh format allowing easy integration into all industry standard software including motion builder, maya and 3DS Max so there’s no need to splash out on new programmes or training.

Widely used in the world of animation our systems save time, money and the hassle of hand animating from scratch. So whether you want to turn a car into an athlete or an actor into a cartoon mocap can animate with complete realism.There’s no solving which saves loads of time and the data retains nuance even with fast moves.

FLATPACK presentation short film . "King /CRATE /Kong"

Doritos film contest.

title : DORITOS OF THE 4th Kind

Doritos are abducted by Aliens ,

(with a near by cow)

brust into hundreds of little flying Doritos and signs back to the aliens, like in the film " Close Encounters of the 3 rd kind

Comic Crunch/ animation comic. / Satirizing the Present Recession in the world today.

Working animatic/ story board with brief outline.

Money washing down the drain, people imprisoned by debt and bankrupsey, one man breaks free to fight back at the fat cat bankers of the world. He is not enough by himself, but with the help of his fellow financial prisoners all together they can bring down the dam walls , holding back the true cash flow, and free the economy from the evil fat cats, but with the down fall of the the bankers and money men you can be sure they will be back!!

meet the monsters???

1.BEEF

2.FLAMIN HOT

3.PICKLED ONION

Progress with MONSTER MUNCH / 3D Advert. BEEF MONSTER /COMPLET.

Collect :

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Send 3 x 40g promotional packs or 1 x 85g pack of MONSTER MUNCH of any flavour together with your name and address, post code, and size of T-Shirt (S, M, L or XL) and a cheque for £5 made payable to MONSTER MUNCH T- SHIRT offer to :

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GRAPHIC DESIGN

Creative juices flowing through your veins? A love for cutting edge design in advertising and all forms of marketing activity? If all you love to do is create compelling design that makes brands come to life, then this is just the ticket. Individual and creative team entries both welcome.

Which basically means what is the history the future and present development of a digital animation

based platform media ( my choose motion capture )

how did it work how does it work and what we you be doing in the future to keep up with other

media formats, what type of customers do you have and how do you approach each project,

what is your pipe line

L5 Animation - The Business of Animation

The course aims for Level 5 are to provide learners with: 1. advanced visual communication skills; 2. implying an inherent consideration of ‘design’ factors such as audience, 3. context and form (platform) in the construction and presentation of meaning through animation

Critically evaluate historical, contemporary and personal practice(s)

Apply technical and analytical skills to the conception and/or

production of a wide range of effective visual communication media

Demonstrate an understanding of the often complex, dialogical

relationships between theory and practice