Categories
skills tech

This is a breakthrough. I feel like I can sleep easy knowing this data can get to me. I can generate a .txt with floats of various tracking points and rotation of the eyes and head. ‘even if’ i just extract and construct a rotation vector3 from the first three columns i’m in a good place. Unfortunately i’m not clever enough to interpret this string into an array yet, i’d prefer a third party plugin because i feel like it’s wasted time getting my hands to dirty in this, like i tried with writing shaders yesterday, when there’s a perfectly good solution out there. I think it would a foreach loop. I’ll come back to this just because i’m interested. So- Visage is a solution. Fclone seems to integrate directly with motionbuilder and unity, so i’d like to try that now. Then i’ll step up to Rokoko Studio. It’s pressing because end of FY is next friday, so if i’m going to spend dosh, I should make a decision soon. Also, I need to have a look at Autodesk MotionBuilder. I purchased a subscription to Maya LT just so I don’t have to deal with Blender.

Categories
performance skills tech
[INTERSECTING POST-DRAMATIC THEATRE AND VIRTUAL REALITY]

I have a theatre background, but i’m also an animator. I’m investigating if algorithms and humans can make beauty.

Formally, I plan to devise a best practice for digitally recording subjects in isolation and to create collaborative performance workflows.

This project, originally ‘Virtual Isolation’, is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

Categories
performance skills tech

strategy.cs

I need to focus on getting performance captured at an acceptable accuracy and the performance abstracted at a level that the limits of each will meet in a pleasing manner. There’s a few things to unpack here. On the left is Humanity, the subject, the performer, the verbatim performance. On the right is Technology, the distribution medium, traditional live theatre at least, full animation at most. The other part of this is the technology bolstering or adding to the creative process. I can confidently say in this situation, digital staging can be implemented as a foundation that will not distract from human performance, it is filling the practical gap needed to fill for the distribution of the work, which is why i’m allowing it to encroach on the left. To what degree the subjects are digitally abstracted on the digital stage is another dilemma. What i mean by this is that the subjects could simply appear as video planes in a virtual environment, or augmented in a small way to give fake depth.

Realised practically,  a footage plate of a recorded head could be a 2d sprite on a 3D body armature, I was even thinking perhaps in a ‘moon suit’ head bowl with digital refraction and reflection to disguise the simple footage plate. Another concept that I’ve executed previously is wrapping footage plates on 3d mesh to give the appearance of a head in 3d space building the cheeks and nose with topology. I realise I am not reinventing the wheel here, but I am combining a number of different methods to act as surrogates that fill in the limitations of each. I intend to layer performance.