Challenge 8 (Part 2): Body Mechanics
Add breakdown&smooth
After I added the throwing ball animation breakdown I realized that character(Ray)’s controllers are too complexed to be controlled (too many secondary controllers). What’s more, the complexity of character controllers make the adjustment of knees’ shaking quite difficult. Therefore, I turned to animate the default weightlifting animation.
I added breakdown to the character, increased some arm stretch and then adjusted the graph editor to make the actions smoother. I also added a little bit of shaking when the body stays still. Then I added some lights and ground plane to help demonstrate the animation better.
Problems: I think the weight of animation still need to be improved. The action is not power enough when the character is raising the barbell, which looks a little bit unnatural.
Render&Motion Blur
I used Redshift Render to render the final animation and added motion vector layer in AOV, which can help me add motion blur in After Effect later.
After rendered the EXR files, I put them into After Effect and adjust the timing and color balance. Here is the result without motion blur:
Then I added the motion vector layer to RSMB, which is a motion blur plugin for AE:
Here is the final result:
Match Moving
This week Dom taught us how to track the scene to build a camera and then let a 3D model follow the character in the scene. The main idea is build a camera by tracking the background and then track the character to get data of movements.
As usual, we rebuild the camera by using tracking points. We firstly added several tracking points to the background. At first tracking the static objects is quite easy. However, there are some people walking in the background, which adda some difficulties to tracking. We used another tracking method to solve this problem, which is forward and backward tracking .
After optimized the background tracking points, I then focus on the head tracking. I added another point group and rename it to “Obj_points” to seperate it to the camera points group. When adding points to the head, I focus on man’s forehead, ears and nose. Tracking head really takes plenty of time and energy. Finally, I got something like this:
After that I optimized the scene again and then loaded ironman mask model into the scene. Firstly I turn to frame 1 to match the mask with man’s head in 3D space. Then I clicked the buttom on the top slide, ironman mask automatically matched the points on man’s face. There is no shaking when mask is moving. I’m satisfied with the result.
Then I export Mel file and sequence to Maya. When the Mel file loaded, a camera with animation and a tracked ironman mask has already been added in Maya. After loading sequence as image plane and adding some materials to the ironman mask, we get the final result.
Here is the final result: