Month: July 2020

3d printed mo cap rig. works well. Vecro and chest harness from ebay. Foot buckles from thingiverse. The rest designed by me. The models aren’t the cleanest, but they do the job.

Step One- Unreal

Motion Capture using using Mannequin skeleton with IK 
Face Capture using ArKit
Retarget to custom skeletal
Refine animation and IK using blending etc

I’ve chosen Unreal because animation blending capabilities are robust and the VRMoCap plugin is an acceptable balance of cost vs quality. The downside is the use of the UE4 Mannequin. If I can find a solution to multiple vive trackers in headless mode in unity, i’ll consider it.

Step Two- Maya

Finesse key-frames
Avatar Modelling
Additional Re-targeting

Maya can easily re target skeletal setups and just a safe all-rounder to finesse the pieces.  I can use the significantly cheaper Maya Lt and bypass MotionBuilder because Unreal has the animation clip blending functionally I am looking for.

Step Three- Houdini

Add Procedural Effects to baked mesh

Houdini will be used for aesthetic flavor.  There is so much control in this program.  I will play with Vellum and VDB as well as clone to points. 

Step Four- Unity

Import to Unity, light and stage
Additional Re-targeting
Export to html 5

I’m really starting to see the benefits of Unity now- namly the build times, I can really cut out the unneeded bits, and also easily get it into html 5.

Step Five- Dreamweaver

Html 5 presentation UX

I think I need a separate post explaining why i’m going for web, but I think it’s the future and will serve the experience well. The capabilities of html 5 and game design in-brower experiences are serverly underexposed to the public and really underutilised. There’s so much to be excited about with html5 and i mean if I can get a motion captured performance into a 3d environment that works in just a web browser out of the box, what more do you want!