Project Description.
This was a project I did for a module for my MA in Animation and Digital Effects. For this module, we had to use motion capture and create an interaction between two characters with a large size difference between them. I chose to do a dance between a little girl and her teddy bear.
I wanted to keep the character design for my characters very simple, as working with Motion Capture was something I had not done before, and I didn't want to cause more complications.
I based the characters on a concept sketch I had done previously of a little girl holding her teddy bear.
I wanted to keep the Teddy Bear's design simple, like a traditional Teddy Bear. I also used a Vray fur sim on him, and I was so happy with the results. I think he looked really sweet and fluffy and was exactly what I had wanted from his design.
I modelled both of the characters in Maya and Zbrush, and re-topologised the characters in Maya as well. After that, I finished the project in 3DS Max, which was quite a challenge as its a software I haven't used as much as Maya. I rigged and skinned my characters, and also created a facial control rig to toggle through the multiple expressions I created for my characters.
I found that using Motion Capture was very tricky. The initial cleaning up of the frames to avoid any capture issues and issues with the capture causing areas of the mesh to intersect was easy to sort out, and was enjoyable to do so as it meant just replacing the data with key framed animation.
However there were other issues that were annoying, and produced a horrible result, one being that the whole animation was horribly jittery, the only solution to which was to delete every frame from the data on the feet, and then manually add a slider to every frame, and then delete every 5 frames. This process was just tedious and time consuming, but unfortunately unavoidable.