Tuesday, 16 March 2010
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.
Monday, 15 March 2010
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.
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.
“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"

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.
Thursday, 11 March 2010
Collect :
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








