Last summer I was introduced to a project entitled “Enactment.” The basic premise of the project was to
develop a series of movies depicting a modeled actor completing numerous
actions, such as cutting a flower, sans props.
I had previously aided in importing the data captured onto the
model. From there the motion of the
hands was key framed in order to better articulate the
actions that were being performed. When
returning to work this summer, the majority of the files I had worked on had
been rendered and made into movie form.
However, after looking through the completed data, my mentor discovered
a few unwanted flaws that needed to be fixed.
As a result, I went back to the original Maya files that had been used
to render the movies, to fix the glitches.
For the most part, the problems were minor, having a slight twitch of
the wrist or odd head angle. To fix
these problems I used the graph editor within Maya. The graph editor is a window that shows a
graphic representation of the animation.
The keyframes are represented by points which
are connected by curves that represent the acceleration between the
points. By manipulating these curves and
points, it is very easy to edit an animation.
The problem that was found within each trial dictated how I would edit
the keyframes within the editor. If
there was a jump within the motion, the most effective way to solve the problem
was to actually delete the keyframes for the flawed joint. In deleting keys, it was important to isolate
the problem within the particular joint and also in relation to the correct coordinate
of motion. Each keyframe has an x, y,
and z component which translate and rotate the point accordingly. As a result, to maintain the accuracy of the
data as much as possible, the least amount of keyframes that must be deleted
the better. Another problem found within
the motions was that some of the joints were twisted at odd angles during some
or all of the animation. In order to fix
this, the graph editor was used again, which is more effective in editing than
merely rotating a joint manually because it effects the entire animation to
have the same changes. This time
however, the existing keys were manipulated in accordance to the correct coordinate
plane. Once the trials were edited, they
were re-rendered into bmp files and made and compressed into new movies using
Adobe After Effects.