This week, we gradually completed the retargeting of motion capture data and began recording animation references based on actual movements, modifying the existing animation accordingly. Since the motion capture data lacks hand details, I need to complete this part of the animation in MAYA. However, due to my mistake during rigging, the character’s finger joints and elbow joints didn’t have their extra rotation axes frozen, causing gimbal lock issues throughout the animation. While MAYA’s built-in plugins can fix this, it significantly wastes time, especially for a 3700-frame animation.
Another point to note is that our motion capture was performed without props, so after retargeting the data to the character model, we need to create appropriately sized boxes based on our scene models. This ensures that each action can seamlessly integrate with the displayed scene in later stages.
At this step, we continue adjusting our animation and camera shots. As animators, we only need to ensure the animation is correct within the shot. However, software issues often cause lags or crashes when selecting character controllers and plugins. In such cases, I recommend using MAYA’s built-in scene cleanup function to delete the history and empty nodes within the scene, reducing the software’s load. I have always used MAYA2018, so some issues might be due to this version. If possible, I would try a higher version of MAYA, but for now, we’ll continue with the 2018 version.
Returning to animation production, I find that motion capture serves as a more intuitive animation reference. We can’t use the motion capture data directly; it needs modification to conform to animation principles. Using motion capture data as a tool to observe action timing and rhythm is an excellent method. In this project, I mainly combined traditional and motion capture techniques to quickly produce the needed animation. In later stages, I will also need to make changes to certain animation segments, knowing the current version isn’t the final one. We still need to add facial expressions.