CAGD 495 Week 5 - Christopher Coombs

Hello everyone! I'm Christopher Coombs, the project director, and I have many updates on the progress our group has made this week, along with a few setbacks. Our layout artist, Gavin, has made significant progress on the outdoor environment for our scene. Here's the progress that he's made this week:

We now have a road, driveways, and a few other houses as well. It's starting to feel like an actual neighborhood now. One thing I should probably note in these renders is how there's no lighting from the inside of these houses, as seen with the windows. I can't recall which of us brought it up, but one member pitched an idea for the interior of the house to be pitch black. I've played around with the idea for a bit and imagined the burglar holding a flashlight as our primary light source for every shot in the interior. It sounds pretty cool, but the problem is that by the time the burglar reaches the door to make his escape, he'll already have his hands full. He can't just leave the flashlight behind either, or we'll be eliminating our only source of light for the ending. Although I'm still mulling over the best way to implement this idea, it's likely that we'll end up scrapping it. This is something I'll discuss further with my team on Monday. We've also finally started the animation process. Here is a short demo reel of some motions we've been working on with Brooke as our actor:

    We were experimenting with the first few shots of the burglar breaking into the house. I recorded her lifting up the hatch on the roof, rappelling down, and sneaking around in the house. For the rappelling segment, we needed to make it look like she was airborne and not connected to the ground. To accomplish this illusion, we used a stool in the room. We tried two different poses, one where she leans back and holds onto the rope, and a starfish pose. Looking back at the footage, I like the former a bit more. Once the motions were recorded, I sent them over to Luis and Tyler for clean-up. I assigned them to retarget our characters in MotionBuilder. This is where our biggest setback of the week happened. 

As of right now, neither of the ported rigs are functioning appropriately. We still haven't been able to solve the issue of the gorilla not porting properly into MoBu. The software doesn't seem to like how the rig was created in CM. As for the human rig, Tyler gave it to me for troubleshooting. I was successfully able to port it over to MotionBuilder. However, I came across a new issue almost immediately. The skeleton was designed so that each joint rotates independently, without affecting the movement of the other joints. What this means is we are unable to even get the model into a T-Pose for retargeting. While this could be accomplished with its controllers, Motion Builder doesn't seem to like me using them. Just last night, after much troubleshooting, I learned that I could retarget our characters and send motion capture data through Maya itself. This could remedy the issues we're having, knocking out two birds with one stone for each rig. I couldn't say for certain, though. We plan on contacting Frank tomorrow to see if he has any ideas on how we can proceed.

    That's all for this week! As always, I'll keep you posted on next week's progress! Thanks for reading.

                                                                                                                                   - Christopher Coombs