This week my animation work was put slightly to the side, although I did continue to work on it, and I worked primarily with projects in the motion capture lab. At the beginning of the week we ran a hand capture for a group of researchers. Their hypothesis was that you could distinguish differences between people by the way in which they type on a keyboard and once that knowledge was gained, the location of the moving fingers could be predicted. In order to effectively capture the data, the cameras in the lab were moved in to create a smaller capture area. In addition, a different marker set was used for the hands than I had seen before. There were about 30 smaller markers on each hand, primarily placed on the joints of the fingers in order to capture the movement. Another small project I did some work for this week was for a grad student who works in the graphics lab. I believe the data that she was analyzing was for the top portion of a robot that is in the process of being built at CMU. The robot’s name is Dorothy and she’s actually a resident of the mocap lab. At the moment she’s only legs, hence the work being done with upper body movement. Basically what I had to do was import motion capture data that had been previously collected and place it onto a character in Maya. There were two different cases that needed to be juxtaposed against each other- one of a natural running motion and the other of a constrained run that had been calculated to potentially be used for Dorothy. At first I ran into difficulties placing the motion on the skeletons but after doing a little reading about .asf files I was able to solve the problem. After that, there was just the simple matter of sub-sampling the natural motion so that it could be rendered at the same frame rate as the other motion. Then I simply composited a movie of the two models.