Friday, June 15, 2007
This week I spent the majority of my time working on BDI for Alex, the guy from Boston. I helped clean data that we collected from the motion capture session. This meant that I would look at the dot that the cameras collected from the reflective balls, and would label them the correct parts of the body. This would create a skeleton that acted out the motion of the person. Certain parts were harder to label then others. Such as feet could easily be mislabeled by the computer, and thus I would need to had fix the points. I would then continue through the pipeline, of filling in the gaps and removing unlabeled markers. The motion was saved as a Vfile and the skeleton was saved as a C3D file.
After about 4 days of cleaning data I began re targeting the motion. This would mean that I would then import the motion Vfile into Maya and proceed to connect it to a standard character. I would connect the skeleton, however, slight adjustments needed to be made in order to ensure that the character was moving correctly in correlation to the environment. For example the character should not descend through the floor when it walked. I would have to look at the graph editor, and rotate the feet to and move the character upward. This process started to become tedious, seeing as we had hundreds of motions needing this attention. The goal was to complete twenty motions per day, and send Alex 50 motions every other day.
Unfortunately while we were re targeting the motions we found that some of the VFiles were not compiled correctly. This meant that we needed to return to the Vicon software and re clean the data and export the files.
This week our new computers came as well. This means that there are enough for everyone to have their own now, and we are preparing for the arrival of the workers coming in July. However, the only location for the computers is on a table opposite the other computers. This means that at my new computer, my back is to the door. While this can be kind of frustrating at times, it is nice not needing to be relocated from now on.