We’ve met a lot of challenges this week.

One of the biggest pieces of our puzzle that must fit is the motion capture pipeline. Chen, Sai, Julia, and Paul went down to the Organic Motion room at the ETC early in the week and learned how it works. Sai then went down later and did a test. Looking at the output, one can easily say that it gives a good estimation of the movements, but when Sai imported a model from Maya to Motion Builder the resulting recording was not that good. On the other hand, skeleton output was very nice. So he tried to figure out the basic problems behind it. The main problems were …

1. Not having a proper IK/FK controls for the rigged model and characterization.

2. Losing data of rigged models which are modeled in higher versions of Autodesk products when exported to lower versions of it.

3. Skeleton faces in the opposite direction when you create it in Motion Builder for recording.

In general, the procedure for motion capture is to export a model to Motion Builder and then record actions. Having a lower version of Motion Builder in the MoCap room, Sai was facing problems with movements of the model. So he thought about reverse engineering; why not just take the skeletal data and retarget it to a model in Maya? Sai gave it a shot and it worked perfectly with a little bit of data correction.

We also did tests on the rendering and art pipelines. On Monday, Chen will speak to the team about what he needs from the creative team as far as using our render farm is concerned because we found that we were keeping him out of the loop during our tests. We also learned that all artists need to understand the perspective of the shot, so we built a pipeline around shots with distinguished perspectives which involves Julia making a rough model of the shot in Maya then sending the file to Cewon to do an art pass.

We tested different shading techniques on our Ramesh model and found a problem with the eyes. The concept art looked great on the page, but the eyes didn’t translate well to our model. So, we have had several meetings and sought the opinion of both our advisors. We are now working on a fix–Cewon will be doing a detailed drawing of the type of eyes the team decided upon, then Dorothy will remodel the eyes to that specification.

Joel Ogden is a great asset to our team and has delivered a rough of the Creature. We are planning on meeting with him next week to discuss the model.

We also had a final editing pass done on the animatic, fixing some timing issues. It is now ready for a rough soundtrack to be locked for use by the animators.

The whole team is pleased to be working so hard in the first few weeks, but we did discover one big problem: We don’t know each other all that well. While most teams are taking these first weeks and learning about each other, we’ve been at the grindstone. So, part of our mission within the next two weeks is to take our team dinner and have a little mingling time.