Week 12

This week we tried again to collect the motion capture data, we booked out the studio for double the time to make sure we could get what we needed this time. After calibrating the cameras I put on the motion capture suite and we took a few takes and this is the data we go just on the biped, the actual character isn't ready yet as I haven't edited the envelopes yet. 

I realised this week that I probably wasn't going to be able to use the character I had modelled because his arms were far too close to his trousers, I now realise that I should have modelled him in a 'T pose' because I either widen the influence the arm and hand has and the leg moves with it or I widen the leg envelope and the hand moves with that. Luckily I have a save of the model in sculptris where everything is done but his arms so I am going to go back and sort the arms out:

Week 11

This week It was time to do the filming in front of the blue screen, this was for the live action that we are going to put into the 3d environment. Using markers on the floor I was able to direct Tom, the other member in our group, to do his actions so it would line up with the 3D character when he is imported into the 3D environment. I also started looking into turning the drawings I had done for the background of the project into the 3D environments they needed to be. I wanted a rocky mountain feel to it so to create most of the geometry I created a plain and put a displace modifier with a smoke map onto it which made it spike up giving the basic landscape  I wanted:

I then messed around with the gradient map and bump texture until I got the desired rough gravely look:

After that I messed around with a few different backgrounds and stuff to see what designs would have what effects:

Week 10

This week I ran into a bit of a problem when I tried to insert the 3D character into 3DS MAX, the face count of the character was a little over 3million and obviously MAX was running incredibly slow, that is when it wasn't crashing. I tried using the reduce tool in sculptris but it was simply taking far too long so I had a look around to try and find a better solution and I stumbled across a program called Mesh Lab and this allowed me to choose the number of faces I wanted the mesh to have rather than pretty much doing it one at a time so I managed to get the face count down to about 60 thousand and MAX seems to run it fine, obviously some of the quality was lost but it still looks good and even if it didn't I wouldn't have a choice because it needed to be small for it to run in MAX. Here is how it looks before the faces were reduced:

and after:

After opening the character in MAX I Dragged a biped in and in figure mode I moved and resized the biped to fit in the mesh. After this I put a skin modifier onto the mesh and added all on the bones from the biped, now if I move the biped the mesh will follow it. 

Week 9

This week the attempt to gather the motion capture data went a little better than last week but still not well, It took me a while but I actually managed to get the cameras calibrated but unfortunately it took me so long to get to that stage we had no time left to actually do any motion capture.

 Again we booked it for next week and we should get it all done then. 

I managed to get the 3D character completely modelled this week, though I still need to texture him and rig him up: