Team Little Green Dog - Work In Progress

Greenlaw · **Posted:** Mon Jul 04, 2011 4:00 pm

It's been months since I posted any new info about our music video 'Pooper' so here's a brief 'behind the scenes' peek inside my computer:

Motion Capture for Sergeant Marshmallow

It took us a whole lot longer than we anticipated to get our motion capture workflow in place and stomp all the bugs out of it. We started this project last October (2010) and since that time our workflow and character rigs have gone through dozens of false starts and reboots before we established a system that was efficient and could produce results we are happy with.

I'd like to thank the crew at iPi Software and the many artists here who shared their advice and support since we began this project. Finally, we can move on and finish this darn project!

Stay tuned; more to come.

G.

JeanDellac · **Posted:** Wed Jul 06, 2011 1:01 pm

Looks ace, can't wait to see the full thing :D!

Greenlaw · **Posted:** Wed Jul 06, 2011 2:41 pm

JeanDellac wrote:

Looks ace, can't wait to see the full thing :D!

Thank you! And I can honestly say the same for your project. :)

Greenlaw · **Posted:** Mon Aug 15, 2011 12:32 am

Here's something new on our blog:

Sneak peek: Brudders CGI

The video at the bottom of the blog entry is the same one we posted here last month but the still images at the top is the first time we've shown in public what all three Brudders characters look like in 3D. If I can make the time, I'll post a few more 'preview' videos.

We intend to release a fully rendered teaser trailer soon. I'll let everybody know when that is up.

Right now we're a little sidetracked with another 'mocap' short we specifically wrote for Gothtober 2011. It's pretty funny and hopefully we'll get accepted again for this year's event. This one will be entirely recorded using iPi DMC with Kinect. (Well, that's the plan anyway.)

More later. :)

G.

nikfaulkner · **Joined:** Thu Jul 21, 2011 8:18 am **Posts:** 9

hey greenlaw,

thats looking great, i love the style of the characters and their skin shading.

any chance you could post a screengrab of your skin node setup? can't seem to find any info about it

(should probably ask this over at newtek really, oh well too late now)

cheers

nik

Greenlaw · **Posted:** Sat Sep 03, 2011 9:41 pm

Today my wife and daughter had to attend a birthday party and I finally got an entire day to myself to capture and track performances for our second mocap movie. (Note: Pooper is on hold until after October because now we're busy working on a new film for Gothtober 2011 (the tenth anniversary show!) to be released in October.) To keep things simple, this film was written entirely around using only the Kinect for motion capture, and the trusty but involving PS3 system would be used only if we ran into problems with the Kinect data.

I surprised myself when I realized I had recorded all the motions for three characters for a one minute film in under an hour. And this hour even included rehearsal time for each character!

Right now I'm tracking the data from this afternoon and so far it's looking good. The only tracking issue I'm running into comes when the performer sits down on the floor from a T-Pose; the tracker will consistently lose my arms as they become momentarily occluded by my legs. This behavior was more or less expected and fortunately I do not need any of this part of the motion. To work around the issue, I wait until the performer completely sits and settles down with his 'broken arms', and then I simply fixed the arms and start my actual tracking from this point.

Tip: iPi Studio allows you to copy and paste poses. It's a good idea to copy the actual start frame where you may have done some pose correction just in case you need to reset this at that frame or another frame. If you paste it on another frame, remember to click the Refit Pose button a couple of times.

At the moment, I'm already done tracking half of all the data, and tracking is taking about 0.37 second per frame. I hadn't noticed until today that Kinect data is much faster to track that PS3 data (about 0.67 second per frame,) most likely because there is a lot less data to process. At this rate, I expect to have all the motions for this movie tracked tonight, and I may possibly have all of it retargeted to the character rigs. It's too optimistic to think all the motions will be 'cleaned up' tonight but I'll pick up this up again tomorrow night and may have it finished by then.

Sorry, nothing to show off yet--I'm going to wait until after we present this new project during Gothtober--but I'm very excited about the unbelievably fast progress today and just had to mention it here. I truly feel like all the R&D I went through in the past couple of years is really paying off now. The data, even without the character specific-cleanup I intend to do in Motion Builder, looks remarkably clean, accurate and jitter free.

Unlike our first mocap film--the 'neverending' experiment called 'Pooper'--this second film is already getting done significantly faster than if we keyframed the animation, which of course was the reason we got involved with motion capture and iPi DMC in the first place. Hooray! :)

Stay tuned.

G.

Greenlaw · **Posted:** Wed Sep 21, 2011 3:01 pm

Just a quick post to keep this thread alive and report the progress with our second iPi mocap film. In case you missed our earlier post, the first film was temporarily put on hold while we work on a second, simpler film for next month's Gothtober 2011 event.

Our new film is progressing very quickly! Despite having little time to work on this project (mostly because of my 'day job' at Rhythm & Hues Studios + the usual 'life stuff',) we already have all the iPi DMC motion capture in place and about half the shots edited (three characters in a total of eighteen shots). A global light kit was created last weekend, and the audio (dialog and SFX) was mixed and edited last week. Last night we selected the music track.

All that remains is editing the rest of the mocap, most of which should only require minor tweaking, the lip-syncing, final lighting tweaks, rendering, and compositing. Well, okay, that's still a lot of stuff but at least we're still on schedule. :)

Oh, and we now have premiere date: October 29th! More info to come so stay tuned! :)

Greenlaw · **Posted:** Tue Oct 18, 2011 5:54 pm

A couple of tests for our upcoming mini-movie 'Happy Box'. The motions were captured using iPi DMC with dual Kinect Sensors and single Kinect Sensor configurations:

iPi DMC Dual Kinect Sensor Test for 'Happy Box'

iPi DMC Single Kinect Sensor Test for 'Happy Box'

G.

Team Little Green Dog - Work In Progress

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