JUST DANCE

3D toolbox motion capture sample video  and Animation 

Full unedited video of our dancing

 

Why Just Dance 

Maya and I both grew up around emerging technology like the Wii, which many of us used to play the game Just Dance when we were younger. We hold fond memories of learning the dances with our siblings or friends and dancing to our favorite songs, which is why our 3d scanning movement was inspired by one of our favorite iconic dances: One Direction’s song “You Don’t Know You’re Beautiful” from the Just Dance game.

It was fun learning the motions of the dance again and we practiced it together multiple times. We recorded the video of the both of us dancing together, however, it only translated one of us to the mannequins. Either way, it was extremely fun to create the video and go back to our roots of playing the Just Dance game. 

Tech Process

We first re-watched our zoom lecture navigating motion capture and its tools to understand the extent of our resources. From there, we looked into Mixamo for movements we thought were interesting and decided to adapt them to ourselves.

We wanted to create our own movements, so we recorded a video of both of us dancing along to a Just Dance song. We then clipped the video to our favorite part of the dance and imported that clip into Rokoko. Initially, we wanted to directly record ourselves in Rokoko, similar to the live demo in the lecture, but realized we wanted a more concise video – one without us getting into place and walking toward the computer to stop the recording.  

Self-reflections 

Maya

When I first came to admitted student’s day, one of the things I was most excited about was to learn motion capture, which is why I had a lot of fun during this assignment. Waverly thought of doing a Just Dance together, which I thought would be a fun way to capture movement, and it was. Growing up, I always watched myself on the screen during Just Dance, so it was a full circle moment to be able to render the avatar movement myself. 

Waverly

I had a lot of fun learning more about the extent of 3d scanning softwares and features. It was really cool to see movements translated from my body onto a mannequin with the accuracy that it had. It makes me wonder if this is maybe how the creators of Just Dance would try to go about filming new dances for future releases.