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"Garageband"- A Short Computer Animation -May, 2008Sangyoon Lee (sjames @ evl.uic.edu)Electronic Visualization LaboratoryUniversity of Illinois at Chicago |
In project 3, fundamental requirement is to utilize motion data that we can capture in EVL motion capture studio. The secondary need is to combine some music with human motion. This does not mean that we should have human like character. However, we should give a good sense of the combination in audio and visual. Rhythm of motion in some form of moving visual components. Here, this page explains pipeline I contrubuted to team project more in depth.
- Team Project Site
You can find general overview of this project in the following web site.
http://www.evl.uic.edu/sjames/cs527/project3.html
- Final Animation
Project3_FinalAnimation_720p.mov (HD720p, quicktime H.264, 1:30secs, 129MB)
Project3_FinalAnimaiton_Low.mov (quicktime H.264, 1:30secs, xxMB)
Guitarist_Solo.mov (640x480, quicktime H.264, 1:30secs, 32MB)
2. Work flow details and Contributions
- Role of Player
Guitarist
- Character Animation Overview Video
For the character Animation, we used multiple H/W & S/W to get the final animation. More details of this pipeline is available on project website. Following video clip shows these steps and how character animation data flow to the end.
Project3_Guitarist_Workflow.mov (640x480, quicktime H.264, 120 secs, 68MB)
- Character Design
Since out team designed overall concept as some sort of dark side, I choose holloween like theme for character. Big icon for this event is pumpkin head. Guitarist's head directly modeled by this concept. Single instrument, Guitar, also modeled in Maya software.
Started with sphere polygon and divided into 12 pieces along with radius and re-shaped to form pumpkin like model. Head model textured with image. Since the inner side of head is supposed to have candle, I made another layer of inner head sphere polygon and set to use brighter yellow color.
There is a point light located inside head so that pumpkin shaded brighter than outside of it. This light only affect head mesh (all other objects in the scene unlinked from light relationship via Maya relationship editor). In the early draft rendering, we found that the stage mesh is linked to this light by mistake and made much brighter stage on leftside (refer to this video clip. Final_draft.mov - 15MB). Since the light is inside the pumpkin head and should move together as character moves, it is linked to head bone (parenting).
- Motion Capture
You can find general overview of this project in the following web site.
- Post Processing of Motion Data
You can find general overview of this project in the following web site.
- Motion Retargetting & Fine Tune
Prop setting
- Rythm & Animation
FFT & Maya Mel Scripting
- Rythm & Animation
FFT & Maya Mel Scripting
2. Lessons
In general, I have enjoyed a lot during this final project. Especially sharing experience with others was very fruitful.
- Keyframe Animation vs. Motion Capture
Following short video clip shows the idea of music beat and human motion. I made this for fast prototyping, so it is not so well tuned but gives good sense of rhythm and motion. Thanks plasticman in motionbuilder. Music I used in this test application is "Hungarian Dance No.7 in F major" by Kissin Evgeny (I am not a big fan of classic music. Don't worry about it. Just used to test application.)
Final words... I would like thank all our team members for their hard working.