Tuesday, 23 February 2010

Personal Research Artefact 1: Motion Capture Lab Session

The motion capture lab session takes advantage of a motion capture facility which was originally built for the analysis of movement for biomechanical research within sports. The facility has the ability to capture motion for export in a c3d file format, which is Autodesk MotionBuilder friendly. A semi pro Thai Boxer is used as an actor to look at how the hardware reacts to specific martial art motions. The sets of motions are specifically chosen to look at a range of issues that need to be considered when animating. These consist of mass and weight, speed, sudden stops, spins and follow through. These issues are focused on to establish whether an individual element within motion creates more problems than another when the process of motion capture is in effect. The other area of interest is whether or not this method for creating motion within CGI is efficient for the motion needed. This area consists of the time taken to organise the motion capture lab session and to capture the desired motion while also taking into consideration any cleaning up of the data needed. Also any extra costs associated with the overall process.

Fast and spinning motions performed by the actor, such as the fast kicks and the spinning kicks, created difficulties within the motion capture. This was due to the cameras struggling to keep up with the refractive markers attached to the actor, as well as certain markers being obstructed from view by body parts. This created areas of the motion capture data to have blank spots, this intern added time to the cleaning up of the data as well as creating inaccurate motion.

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