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!