Hello all!
Well as I’ve been saying for quite some time, Enola is a very story-driven and character-driven game, and some of the events in the game relate to this girl Angelica (the girl you’re trying to save).
Last week I was testing the motion capture setup using my Playstation Eye cameras and iPi Desktop Motion Capture. The system yelds pretty decent results, considering I only have 2 cameras, and I’m about to get a few more so we can get better mocap. Here you can see the result of that first mocap session.
The software generates an animated skeleton that can then be imported into Maya. I then used the retargeting tools to transfer the mocap animation onto my Angelica rig. The motion needed some adjustments due to the different sizes and proportions, and I also added some minor changes here and there (mostly to make some poses stronger).
Finally I added the finger and hand movement because the mocap doesn’t provide those.The face was animated using Face Robot, and the speech generator saves a lot of work.
As you can see, the animation has some rough edges, but overall the animation is pretty cool, and I think it delivers the “cute and likeable girl” performance very well. I could very well spend hours and days tweaking this shot, but there comes the time when you need to decide if you want to have a perfect animation or a finished game.
Just something I figured I’d mention: this is a very particular flashback scene that happens during the cabin level. There are many like this one in the game, actually. There will be many mini-cinematics in the game, so this mocap thing will be really REALLY useful.
For an indie motion capture, that's impressive, but it's still really rough from a pure animation stand point. Hopefully you can get a few more cameras to help smooth out the jerky motions and stiffness.
Best of luck to you guys!
I can see where it needs some work, but the other motions of the overall body was kind of nice, made it seem more organic with the entire body moving instead of just an arm and mouth wagging about like the old days ;)