Part 1 - World building in UnReal
Getting the hang of navigating Unreal took some time, but I found the tutorial very helpful. I am still having trouble figuring out how to place my viewpoint exactly where I want to. Sometime's I wan't to get closer to an object or I would get stuck underneath my world and not be able to get back up.
I started with a very basic landscape that reflected the real world a lot:
But then I wanted to get creative and expand by making the land water and the sky a unusual color. I imagined this being another planet:
Lastly, I started creating glass spheres which I thought was really cool and changing the sky to be darker and more dramatic. This last scene was my favorite of them all. I would love to expand with this scene next week and instead of glass sphere make glass bodies:
I found world building really fun and can't wait to explore more with it!
Part 2 - Lab With Skeletons
For this weeks lab in MoCap we used skeletons to understand the human body and its form through movement.
First we created our skeleton by having each person change into the motion capture suits and placing 37 markers on them.
Once they were ready, we started creating our skeletons by having each person stand with their arms out, one at a time. Once, we selected and created their skeleton, we added a name and color to it.
Then we had all three of our skeleton (actors) come in and do the baseline T pose.
We recorded a scene and was able to see gaps in the data from our recording. Next week we'll learn how to clean up this data or figure out when it's worth it to just do another take instead.
Midway during our lab, Motive crashed and quit. This forced us to have to recalibrate the room again. Another problem we encountered was transferring our skeletons into Unreal. Eventually we figured out we had to rename our skeletons into Actor1, Actor2, and Actor3. We used a rigid body to create a camera for Unreal, but one thing to work on in the future is figuring out how to adjust the centroid so that the camera is able to navigate more intuitively.
It was also interesting seeing the skeletons "break". As the actors moved farther away from the center, their bodies would start to glitch because the cameras were losing sight of the markers. One thing that happened during our lab was Xiaotong and Chenshan's bodies merged. I think something happened when they both stepped out of frame and then reentered where the camera's got confused about the markers (see image below).
Doing the MoCap Dance