MOTION CAPTURE  by Ludovic Habas 

An ambitious project

When Ki Studio contacted me to take care of the rigs on the show project for the big RIZHAO water park in China, I was more than enthusiastic. Indeed a big part of the animation was going to be done in motion capture and it was a first for me.

Mocaplab

This is the studio Mocaplab, one of the first motion capture studios in France, which was going to deal with motion capture.

For the rig, I worked in collaboration with Mocaplab. Their experience in the field has made its realization relatively simple. I followed their directive.

The difficulty

The difficulty to manage afterwards was to be able to allow the animators to retouch motion capture animations.

Development

My idea was to make a second rig more adapted to the animators then to develop a tool able to transfer the animation of the first rig on this second rig. Once the rigs and this tool ready for use there was one last little problem.

Indeed motion capture animations record a key to each frame. So there are thousands of keys on each sequence of animations. Not easy to fix for a animator in the state. My idea was to make a second tool that would allow the animator to create animation layers as needed on the animation controllers.

The overlay hiding the multiple animation keys made it possible to correct it more easily.

Cloth

On this project I was also in charge of the cloth. Everything has been managed in 3ds Max directly.

A second project

The adventure was renewed more recently on a new project, simpler, always with the same team. On this project, the smaller budget to limit the rig system. Only one rig was created by Mocaplab directly. I then devoloped a script able to add directly on these rigs, controllers and layers of animation for the manual retouches.

In project

With these experiences, we have with CG-Animation to invest on our own motion capture solution. For the moment in test phase, we will not fail to keep you informed about our developments.