L.A Noire and Facial Capture

L.A Noire (2011) used the MotionScan system (created by Depth Analysis) for which it recorded facial motion capture. It was vital that they got accurate facial capture in order for players to be able to tell when a character is lying. MotionScan is markerless technology so there is no need for actors to be put in any type of suit or have markers on their face. This reduces the time it takes and adds an ease to the whole process, it took around 30-60 minutes to scan the whole head. From here the actors would then be recorded in the capture stage where 32 cameras were setup in order to capture the whole head. Deph Analysis were able to record audio at the same time as the facial capture in order for it to all sync up. The body and neck movements come from a separate session of motion capture, the problem with this is that the body can sometimes look disjointed from the head and the movements aren't as natural and realistic as the facial expressions. It somewhat breaks the players immersion and for myself, I found it really noticeable.

"We didn't want animators touching up the data. Each time you do that, you lose a bit of the personality. We wanted LA Noire to be as authentic as possible"  - Oliver Bao, head of research, Depth Analysis

As the MotionScan system eliminated the need for data clean-up, it increased the amount of animations that were produced a day. Around 15 minutes of animation were achieved a day, in which an animator could spend almost a week cleaning up that data alone. Since the game was released in 2011, Depth Analysis is aiming to increase the capture resolution so that it can also include full-body. This will be really beneficial and will be interesting to see the progress of this. When this is complete it will be great to see how they compare together - the facial capture with separate motion capture data for bodies and full-body captures.

The faces themselves are very realistic and almost an exact match to the actor's face. When captured, the faces are of a much higher resolution (more suitable for film) so when transferred in game, it loses some of its quality but the core believability is still there. There are some eye movements which sometimes takes away from the realism of the characters yet it's not at the point of the Uncanny Valley. L.A Noire hasn't fallen into this category, normally when games or films attempt to achieve really realistic results, it ends up becoming eerie and feeling 'uncanny'. It's been said that because of the MotionScan technology that this was the main reason for escaping the Uncanny Valley. Because of the high realism in the face, it didn't have that 'fake' feeling or any of the eeriness associated with the uncanny.

Up and coming animation festivals

Last year I attended a couple of animation festivals - Bradford Animation Festival and Animex. I loved both and gained so much out of both. This year I'm only attending a few talks at BAF Game (mainly to help with my research for COP3) however I'm still planning to absorb all that I can and as I'll be attending some talks from animators I know that I'll get lots out of it. I think I'll also be attending some of the networking events held at both BAF Game and BAF - I'll be more prepared as I have complied a showreel that I'm fairly happy with and includes more highly polished animation than last year. I would also love to go back to Animex in February (money dependant) as last year it was invaluable. The range of speakers were great and I took something from each of them, even if they weren't an animator.

A recent festival that just passed was BFX held down in Bournemouth. This was the first year it had started up and it would have been nice to go however I had already moved back to uni and quite a few of the speakers I had already seen at Animex. It's definitely one to attend next year, especially for their careers advice and having industry people there to talk to about getting that all important job.

FMX is still on my list of animation festivals to go to but it's just the cost. I was annoyed that I didn't get the chance to go last year (and I doubt I can afford it this year) but there were some live streams that I got to watch so hopefully this year they'll be doing those again. It would be great to get myself over there as they too have a lot of industry professionals giving careers advice and there are many masterclasses and workshops.

There are a couple more conferences I would love to go to one day and I would have to save a lot up for this but it would be more than worth it. SIGGRAPH and CTN Animation Expo, both are world renowned and would be just incredible to go to. The speakers they have at each at always major industry professionals, people you look up and aspire to. Back in 2012, Glen Keane gave a talk on how he animated Disney characters (luckily I was able to catch this online) and it was so inspiring. It opened my eyes to the smallest things and I gained so much from it. That's what I love about festivals and conferences, there are people there that love what they do and have so much knowledge in their field, you can't help but be inspired and be motivated to do more and become the best that you can be.

Animator? I Think so

PPP3 this year is all about preparing ourselves for when we graduate. We need to be ready for life after uni and where we see ourselves being in the future. For a very long time now I've known that I've always wanted to be an animator and I've never strayed from that path, if anything these past 3 years have made me even more certain about wanting to succeed in this profession and knowing for certain that an animator is who I want to be. As I've known for a while now, I've been slowly gathering my own database of websites and communities where I can publish my work and get feedback, whilst also meeting new people in my creative field, such as:

• 11 Second Club 
• ShowMeTheAnimation.com 
• Twitter
• Tumblr
• YouAnimator
• IdeasTap

I've also got a lot of useful links on finding jobs, where a lot of cg studios are and how to best tailor showreels but I'll go into more detail with that in another blog post. There's not a lot of time this year so every minute has to count. It's going to be exciting but also scary stepping out into the world of work but I can't wait for it! Hopefully everything that I've been doing over the past few years will help me a lot; all I can do now is to just keep going with it and animate as much as I can. 

First Mocap Test with iPi Soft

On Tuesday I did my first test with iPi Soft - markerless motion capture. This is the main piece of equipment I'll be using for the practical side of my extended essay. I had previously tested it out during summer, however I wasn't able to export the data out due to it being a trial version. Because of that test though, I knew the basics of setting it all up and recording. When setting up the Kinect for recording you have to sort out the background first. Choosing depth mode when in the recorder allows you to see different colours, the main thing you want to get rid of is any areas of yellow so the Kinect can get the best scan as possible. Another thing to consider is what clothing you wear, you want slim clothing and if you have long hair, to tie it back. (I didn't tie my hair back so the head on the pure motion capture test was very wonky)

For this initial test I just used one Kinect. The more you use the better the scan, but it also takes longer to process. There wasn't much movement happening in this test, so one Kinect was more than enough for what I wanted to capture. Before recording you must take a snapshot of the background (once this has been done the camera cannot be moved), then you can go ahead and record. The actor must strike a T-pose before commencing any main action as this will help with the building and tracking of the character.

Once this was all recorded there were a few options within iPi Mocap Sutdio to edit the data and fit it onto a character. Using the tools such as refit pose (the model will be fitted to the motion capture data) and track forward (tracks the data onto the character) will get you what you need for you to export the bvh file and take it into another programme. It is also possible to import a pre-rigged character into Mocap Studio and retarget the data to it there. This eliminates the need for another piece of software such as MotionBuilder.

I tried taking the bvh file into MotionBuilder and editing it there, however I had some issues with it and wasn't able to pin the feet down too well. I thought by flattening out the F-Curves it would hold the pose, yet this wasn't the case. This test had a lot of issues with the feet, and this may have been due to the floor being shiny - it may not have coped very well with this. Hopefully the next test I do might work out better as I plan to do it on carpet.

I took the fbx file into Maya and retargeted this onto a character rig. I followed a tutorial with Digital Tutors which helped me greatly with this stage. Within MotionBuilder it is a much simpler process, however in Maya it takes a lot longer to do. Luckily a script was provided in order to speed up the whole process. Without it you would need to group each control and create other groups for retargeting. All in all it wouldn't have been as simple as MotionBuilder. To clean up the data I had to bake the animation and then simplify the curves. By simplifying it reduced the amount of keyframes there were and I was able to then go in and edit. I found this stage quite easy and had no issue with cleaning it up. Because of the restricted space that I worked in, the jump that I performed was very unenthusiastic with not much energy, so when cleaning up I thought I would make it more obvious that it was a jump and pushed it a bit further (without making it too exaggerated as this is what I want to keep for the pure keyframe animation version).

As you can see below, the first video is of the pure motion capture data that I retargeted to a character rig - provided by Digital Tutors. Underneath that is the cleaned up motion capture which I keyframed in order to correct the some of the movements. I had to do a lot more clean up and editing of keyframes than I had anticipated - this may have been due to the environment affecting the data capture. Maybe next time it might take less time but it all depends. Motion capture and keyframe could take up to the same amount of time.

Animation - Personal Project

I've recently been finishing off an animation I was doing as a personal project. As I had been doing a lot of animation with male characters, I wanted to have a go at animating a female. I decided to use the female mod of malcolm as I'm quite comfortable with it and wanted to see what I could achieve. I took the sound clip from 'My Best Friend's Wedding' as I really liked the tone of voice and thought I could play around with expressions a bit more.

Coming from my 11 Second Club entry in August, I tried to improve my animation and the flow of all the movements. I've paid a lot more attention to the whole body this time as back in April I realised that I just focused on the top half of the body. When one part of our body moves, it has an affect on other adjoining bones, so I made sure that there was movement throughout the body but in a subtle way. As always I took reference videos to help plan out my animation and made sure I created a thorough blocking pass before moving onto splining. The splining process, I did a bit at a time so it was more manageable and this way I could concentrate on each section and really try and polish them off. I've been trying to understand more about the graph editor, overshooting keys and breaking tangents to get more subtle changes between each motion. There's still a lot more I feel like I don't know and what I really want to try next is more exaggerated animation. The animations I've done so far have been quite realistic in the way I've followed my own reference almost exactly. I need to try and break away from this and really push the poses some more and go a bit more over the top with it.

The animation that is below is almost complete - I had already uploaded it to Vimeo as at the time I thought my file had corrupted and wasn't able to complete it to the extent I wanted to. Turns out it is fine now so I'm planning to go back to it and edit the eye darts, lip sync and render it out fully so it is showreel worthy.


Dumbest Thing from Siobhan Parkhouse on Vimeo.

Retargeting options

One option for my practical piece of work is to explore the option of retargeting with different pieces of software e.g within MotionBuilder or Maya. Retargeting is the process of transferring motion capture data onto another rig where it is then possible to clean up and edit. At the minute I am far more accustomed with Maya so it may seem that I find the process a lot easier, however what I'm finding at the minute is that the process seems to be much more complex than with MotionBuilder. It will be interesting to see which technique will be more beneficial to myself, not only for how long a process will take but also the results that it produces. Right now I will be testing out the Maya approach and then I will move on to retargeting within MotionBuilder. 

When it comes to retargeting within Maya you need to have a compatible rig. For this you need to either define an existing rig or create and define one from scratch. I will be trying out both techniques, for the existing rig it will be using one from Digital Tutors. Creating and defining from scratch is an option to consider and possibly taking further as this would allow myself to have my own model and rig that using the HumanIK system. Initial ideas was to possibly do a collaboration with Alex on my course, however it will depend heavily on our time constraints and available equipment on my part. As of now though, I am just working on tests to see if it would be possible and to create my own body of work that will help explore themes within my extended essay. 

Quick Motion Capture Test

Before I start properly on the practical side of this module I thought I should try out cleaning up some motion capture within MotionBuilder then taking it into Maya. I've been watching tutorials over the summer about how to use MotionBuilder as it's a new software that I will be taking on. The tutorial I followed for this test was from 3D Artist, Issue 58. Using the motion capture data that came with the magazine I plotted it onto a standard character in MotionBuilder, cutting up the data sequence in order to get a specific part of the run. It wasn't as easy as I thought it was going to be and I'll definitely need some more practice with the software as a whole.

Motion capture needs to be cleaned up as a lot of the time there will be sliding of the feet and some unnatural movements may also occur, e.g flipping of the joints. I managed to clean up some of the feet but I think it could still be improved more. I'm used to having a rig that I can have full control of e.g foot roll so I'm trying to learn how to compensate for this. The motion capture data I was working with was from optical motion capture, I however will be using markerless motion capture. I hope this won't affect the quality of the data and that I'll still be able to achieve good results with it.

One thing I need to test out is editing motion capture within Maya, I know it's possible to do however I need to explore this option some more and see if it requires a specific file type. The ideal situation would be to use MotionBuilder as part of my pipeline as this is industry standard. This is just the start so I'll have to keep testing and see where it gets me. Once I get the hang of it I'll be able to then implement my theory and knowledge of motion and performance to the characters and see if this has an effect on the overall appeal of them.

Final year begins...

Before I broke up for summer, I had to start thinking about what I wanted to do for the upcoming module, Context of Practice 3. Unlike previous years, this had now changed from a dissertation to an extended writing piece with a synthesised practical. With this in mind I immediately knew I wanted to base my practical around motion capture and the essay side to combine keyframe animation (which I specialise in now) and compare it to motion capture. One of the main reasons for doing something like this is so that I can explore a new technique and to broaden my knowledge within the animation field. At the minute I'm currently looking around the idea of 'keyframe animation vs motion capture - how this can affect the overall performance and appeal of the characters' - This is subject to change and is not a definite title as of yet. Over the summer I've been researching into several different topic areas I may cover such as, The Uncanny Valley, appealing animation, pros and cons of mo-cap and also learning the softwares I need to use in order to create my own pieces of motion capture.

For the practical side of the module I'm hoping to do some shorts tests to compare and contrast the animations between mocap and keyframe. The keyframe animation I'll be doing myself, using the raw footage of the motion capture as reference. I'm planning to exaggerate the performance and see if I can achieve more appeal in the movements and the characters. A possibility at the end may be to combine both motion capture and keyframe within the same scene to see if visually, whether or not there is a noticeable difference.

Throughout this module I'll be posting up my research and findings on the subject and will be heading off to BAF Game for some specific motion capture talks and workshops. This should all benefit myself a great deal and I'll be able to implement this into my essay. I hope to get some practical tests up soon, right now I'm planning on using iPi Soft - markerless mocap and then taking this into MotionBuilder for cleanup. I'll also be keyframing other animations and will be sticking with Maya for this. I'm looking forward to seeing how this all ends up and the research I've done so far has really intrigued me and I can't wait to really get started on it all!