Hey everyone!
So I missed the mark on the weekly posts by quite a bit, but I have a pretty good excuse that I'll get into more detail in a second, I'm moving again! I just wanna give a quick update on the state of the animation so far before I have to completely focus on the move, because it's on Monday.
I have the motion capture suit now, I've had it for just about a week now, and it's been wonderful. I'm super happy with the quality of the motion capture aside from a few oddities from the style of motion capture that it is.
Overall though, it's basically let me do 70% of the animation work in about 30 minutes.The rest of the work will be getting the motion capture data corrected and polished, and fixing some position stuff, and getting the animation looking proper.
I was really not sure how to go about this one. Originally I wanted to do something like the picture below from harlequin141 where the subject is suspended from the ceiling, and swells up that way, but I couldn't find a spot to hang from my hands on, so I canned that idea. I might revisit this in the future as I'll have much more space to do something like this.
Another idea was just a simple lab experiment sort of like my 3 part lab sequence where we view her from the other side of the glass as she tries an experiment, but I decided to scrap that too because I've already technically done it before.
What I ultimately landed on was a scientist in the lab still, but she accidentally consumes her experiment, turning her into a pear.I went with this idea because she'd be sitting down in the chair, and I really wanted to do an angle from the back of the chair with her ass expanding.It's not going to be crazy complicated. I'm am in the process of cleaning up the motion capture, and getting it looking the way I want.
A lot of the time currently has actually been spent retargeting Caroline's rig to the motion capture data. I had to get a few plugins to get it to work properly, and quickly.I also had to essentially scrap Caroline's rig that I used originally for most of the animations, and replace it with a more rudimentary rig that the rig plugin could grasp better.This allowed me to generate a new rig that's superior to the old one, but it also meant that I had to redo all of the bone specific drivers, and fix the facial rig.
All of that is done though, Caroline's rig is fully ported to the new system and it looks awesome.It's great because I can quickly record new clips and integrate them into the animation relatively quickly. However, there's a bit of downtime because of some FK>IK conversion stuff, but that's totally optional.Other rigs shouldn't take as long, I'm not super concerned about having a full IK rig for something like background actors, and if those background actors all share the same rig, there's a good chance all the clips will look great on all of them.
But I had the idea for this animation pop up, I threw on the suit, calibrated it, recorded a few clips, and put it all away in about 30-40 minutes tops.
I'm still not quite ready to record a video showcasing the animation in progress yet though, but I do have a dance that I may port over that I recorded when I got the suit. The suit is packed away right now so I'm not able to use it right now, but I thought ahead haha.
I hope you're all excited for this project, I'm super glad I finally get to work with motion capture like this, and I had a blast using it and recording the clips that you'll see in this animation.
As for my excuse though, I am moving again! I have just a few days to pack, and our move-in date is on Monday!As I said, this will be my weekly post, and I'm not gonna be fully operational until at least Tuesday or Wednesday. I should be able to post again from there on, and but unfortunately, this animation isn't going to be ready by the end of the month.I really appreciate your patience for my projects. I really wanna make something for the month though, and I'm considering something like a speed sculpt video.I wasn't really anticipating to move this early too, and I was hoping that I could just focus on this animation for the rest of the month, but we found the perfect place for us, and decided it was now or never. As soon as I'm up and running again, I'm getting right back to work on the animation.All that's left to do currently is some animation clean-up, tuning the posing on some of the parts because it's a little off, and then animating the expansion (just keyframing the expansion drivers, should only take a few hours), dressing the set, simulation, lighting, then render. After render, it'll be off to sound and edit.Each of those should take about 1-3 days each, and some can be done in the same day.Rendering is gonna be the longest part, but I wont have a good estimate for that for a good second.
Thank you everyone, and thank you so much for your continued support!I'm gonna try to have that dance video ready soon ;)