Had my second session! And hopefully the last.
He had asked me to make a story board to print out. I had to separate the animation into 'takes' short segments of animation, so it can be easily exported and imported while editing. So I basically took the animation and made it into the story board.
That I then printed out 2 and brought to the A meeting i had with the drama tutor Darren.
Now having the story board, I gave him a copy and we figured out when was a good day to have a session and what hours.
We figured we only needed to have 2 since there weren't as many takes as planned.
So we had a session on 2nd April. And we managed to get ALL of the takes done in the 6 hour session we had.
Durig the session we manage to get my characeters on the screen to go live with the actors.
At first, we only managed to get one model in at a time.
So during th elunch break I had to sort it out, and figure out a way to import more than one character at a time. I eventually suceesed.
What we were doing:
1. Had the 2 actors skeletons in a scene
2. File> Merge file> Import Coat's file.
3. File> Merge file> Import Tetra's file.
This method cause problems, the models would just combine with each other their meshes would be stuck together. and only one skeleton and mesh would be able to reall ymove.
I figured out dragging and dropping the files in from the asset browser fixed this problem.. So we were able to have all 3 characters move around in the same file.
We also figured out a much quicker way to capture the data.
In the studio there are 2 computers. in this area.
One computer with a monitor that is connected to a second, larger monitor on the wall.
Then next to this set up is another laptop, this laptop is optional, and is where I load my models into.
And usually, they just use this first larger computer, with the program that ONLY captured the motion capture data. It does NOT capture it with the models.
Only using this single computer takes a while to save, plot to a skeleton and export captured data.
Whereas, if you use the laptop to capture the data instead. It basically captures it as it is happening. Their's no time wasted to plot and figure out the data. Which can take form 5 - 20 minutes)
As the laptop is using motion builder. Which has a record function in it.
This is how we managed to get 21 takes done in a day. As we had to redo some of them due to the actors doing to far off screen and not captured half way through.
An example form the session.
The scene put onto the models.