This week was pretty crazy to say the least. We held the first full length capture for Professor Duesing’s animation which incorporated all three of the actors that had been cast for previously. It was the first time I had heard full pieces of the dialogue and afterwards it was agreed that the material “made you think” to say the least. The script, in addition to the insanity of the actors provided for quite an interesting capture. After the capture session, it was my responsibility to clean and process the data to see if we could successfully use it throughout the entire animation. Once the data was cleaned I needed to create the specific motion files that would be imported into Maya. This requires using a program called BodyBuilder. The two important files that are created within this program are called .asf and .amc files. The .asf file holds the information pertaining to the skeleton of the data and the .amc file is the actual motion collected from the capture. In addition to working with the motion capture data, I also built a simple model of a wooden doll in Maya. I’m told the doll will be used in Sang Il’s short “teaser” at SIGGRAPH where he will be presenting his paper on muscle and skin deformation. Apparently my model is supposed to depict an exaggerated version of the disadvantage of using a standard marker set when attempting to capture subtle movements of the body. I was incredibly excited to hear that my work would be used- I could almost consider it as my SIGGRAPH debut…What’s also exciting is the fact that I was present at the very first capture session that Sang Il had for his research and now I have the opportunity to see the finished product as well.

Final Render of Wooden Doll!