Extending the Unity base tutorial with:
1. Modifying of Car Tutorial for more ‘arcade’ handling – more manageable physics needed for next step ..
2. Merging in a waypoints solution to automatically drive cars around the whole track
3. Converting from a car race to a bike race – assets/animation in Motion Builder, physics setup, some custom player control, pelotons/groups and fine-tuning the code and assets, for a solid looking prototype.
2 Weeks development for this.
Example of some character work which combines auto-speech recognition, motion capture based body, and some crafty model/paint/rig.. Realtime rendered in Motion Builder.
Screenshots of the 3d facial sculpt, and texture for character creation
Sculpting and Painting in Mudbox, works by KD
A current 3d Animation production – which links into the Fanimania events system. Using the ‘Entertainment Creative Suite’ of tools which are Maya, Motion Builder and Mudbox, As well as a Motion Capture System and some background ‘pipeline and tools’ scripts. This is the sort of production that gets done out in a few weeks of work – with myself and one Generalist assist.
There’s a lot of automation involved in the process, such as dynamics physics solving, body motion capture, as well as various processing scripts that push the production through a graphics production pipeline. So in one sense this sort of production is quite technical – a bit like technical animation work for games. The good thing here is that ANY part of the production can be altered at any time – and the scripts and project setup mean that the production can be generated again start to finish with the change propagated through.
There’s a whole bunch of creative input too though – the cartoon rendering style, the motion editing, camera work, pretty careful integration of character and environment.
We’ve had to put on hold short film efforts. I’ve been working for the last few months out of the post production dept at FreehandTV doing some good things with Motion Builder / Maya / Mudbox.
Here’s two weeks worth of work for Fanimania, who I’m working for here and hope things to grow in a good and very animated way 
Here’s render test output of one of the shots. No Worries.
Basic production idea is .. First pass render is done at quarter size (512×288). To keep production flowing smoothly, expensive render processes like 3d motion blur, 3d rendered DOF, blurred reflects, high sampling rates for GI and AA, etc etc are done only in the next (and final) pass. Also here, resampling of animation is happening from 30fps to film format 24fps. Why? Well, sometimes things just happen.
Film Previsualisation Created in Motion Builder
Soundtrack “Reflection” Silver Bone Tone
This is more a side-project where some important processes could be practiced
The piece is not far from a completed set of film shots. This one remains as a several weeks ‘practice’.
Motion Capture for robotic type character
Customisation of Human skeleton, to something slightly different with regards to rigging and retargeting
Creation of visual storyboard, script, cinematography
Organising a reasonably complex scene and character into coherent set of data and visualising, pretty close to render-ready
Details on construction of the Arms Rig Extension to handle the structure of creatures arms.
The key thing here is that the rig works within a motion capture pipeline.
Motion Capture drives the character, the rig extension is ‘packaged’ alongside the character and solves the non-human bits, at all times.
1. Description of a technical solution to automatically generate solve for a 3 bone arm chain (shoulder to wrist).
The Seraph character has three articulations from shoulder to wrist. All the character animation for the project is driven from motion capture data, where the regular biped (and me the actor) has two bones in the chain from shoulder to wrist. Shots are built using Motion Builders Story Editor, using a Character track. Since animation clips are brought into Story as externally referenced files, and these files can be updated at any time – example for cleaning data – the cleaning of data was able to be done after most of the shots were built in Story. Ideal that animation data remains within a Character for all steps of the project. Character Extension is the solution. I’ve built a system in Motion Builder consisting of an IKChain constraint which solves the 3 bone chain, based on the nodes in the 2 bone chain, and minimal extra fussing. Animation of pole vector node is all that’s required (Quite easy as they are parented to upper spine anyhow and generally positionally fine for motion of the motion coming through).
The IKConstaints parameters are the skeleton start and end node, a Pole Vector node and the End Effector node. Three extra Parent/Child constraints are made. 1) End Effector Child/Parent links to the regular Character Wrist Effector on the Control Rig. 2) The First chain of the 3 bone skeletons Parent/Child links to the regular Shoulder Effector in the Character Control rig. It only links translation though – rotation is handles by the IKChain constraint for this bone. 3) A Parent/Child constraint to bind the Pole vector node to a suitable part of the body such that it has to be hand-animated only in a few instances where arm pose is extreme.
This system, consisting of the IKChainConstraint, the three extra constraints, the the 3-bone chain ‘extra’ skeleton are packaged into a Motion Builder Character Extension, and hence can be available as part of the character – including handing in Story mode, and inclusion of it’s data for import / export fbx Character data. (Option exists to include Character Extensions as part of Character data). Also Preferred angles are set in the skeleton chain also since Tpose and the character model itself meant that the initial chain (Stance Pose) was not nicely curved ready for a 3 bone chain solve. Attention was given to make sure the new 3-bone chain has optimal rotational axis (joint rotation), as well as optimal axis solve order for each joint, for purpose of the chain solver. Rotational axis consistent, Y axis pointing bone direction. Axis order Euler XYZ for each (except last node which isn’t important for the solve). The regular two-bone chain remains in project. Motion Builder recognises it as input data for Characterisation. However skinning binds the model to the 3-bone chain instead. After setup, the system remains stable, and solves nicely, and works in Story.
Red = Conventional 2-bone structure
Green = Character Extension 3-bone structure. Sky’s the limit really on which extensions can be added to conventional control rig.
