Movement & Animation

In this chapter:

• Movement Direction for VR

• Motion Capture & Animation (basics)

Movement Direction for VR

Motion Direction

Building Character through Movement

article 1: Movement Direction: Creating Character

Vanessa Ewan leads the movement direction masterclass, guiding an actor playing Nora from A Doll's House using techniques to explore physicality and enhance character transformation.

Laban Movement Analysis

Laban Movement Analysis is a theoretical and experiential system for the observation, description, prescription, performance and interpretation of human moment. This can be used in acting and dance to create an emotional response from the audience. Rudolf Laban identified four factors of movement:

• Space: Direct or Indirect

• Weight: Heavy or Light

• Time: Quick or Sustained

• Flow: Bound or Free

Combining these parts creates the Eight Efforts:

• Wring
• Press
• Flick
• Dab
• Glide
• Float
• Punch
• [Slash]

Theoretical Imagery

• Theoretical Imagery: Laban Movement Analysis II
• Theoretical Imagery: Laban Movement Analysis II
• Theoretical Imagery: Laban Movement Analysis III
• Theoretical Imagery: Laban Movement Analysis IV

Motion Capture & Animation (basics)

Motion Capture

For in-depth information, contact Freark Broersma: [e-mail]

Hardware

IKinema project Orion: full body mocap from 6 HTC-Vive Trackers Perception Neuron Motion: Capture tutorial Perception Neuron Motion: Building tutorial

Software

Mechanim & Mixamo: in Unity 5: The Basic Basics! Mecanim & Mixamo: tutorial Character Animation Mixamo Import Character Unity Unity 5: Basic Artificial Intelligence for a Non-Player Character

Research on Facial and Body Performance Capture

Facial Performance Capture using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks video (2017) Facial Performance Capture using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks paper (2017) Convolutional Neutral Networks

Animations

Software and plugins:

• Houdini: https://www.sidefx.com/
• Unfold3D for faster UV mapping of 3D models

• Octane render - gpu render

• MDD Deformer for animation

• Maya nCloth

Tips:

• Cheat a more realistic background with depth of field

• 3 point lighting from movies can be used in the scenes

• Refractive index info n and K values for realistic reflection of certain materials:

  https://refractiveindex.info/
• Subdivisions off to see better quality in Cinema4D or Houdini

• Import .obj and .mdd files separately instead of .fbx -file to Clo3D for better quality

• Clo3D particle distance

• 5 for super good quality (resolution)

• 20 lower resolution but faster

• Clo3D quats for better quality

• HDR file for lighting with octane

• HDR files are saved at studio shootings to get similar light for example for 3D

  objects that are added