Summary
PG Ruff's Project 3 - motion capture
Capturing Motion Graphics
In order to capture the motion I wanted, I took a video of myself and uploaded it to Plask, which converted my movements into an animation! I was inspired by a cowboy dancing/swinging a lasso.
Full video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MGUXf2ry3TRySYDxQI7yJCiXREUgYvEw/view?usp=sharing
Editing/Rigging Mannequin
Next, I imported the mannequin file into blender to personalize it and add bones/rig it. I started by adding a hat!
Then, I attempted to rig the model by adding the rigging add-on and producing a skeleton
However, I ran into many problems applying the bones to the model. I was troubleshooting by trying to decrease vertices, and I even removed the hat and tried again. I kept getting the same error:
After a few hours, I gave up and moved to using Mixamo to rig.
And it worked! I was able to animate my mannequin with the cowboy hat on, but I had trouble applying my captured movement to it because the rigged mannequin file would not import into Plask. However, after trying multiple times, it worked!
Animating
Final Animation:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qvMFkBlzbeqaV7CC8eDDOcUIDo-Mu9Yh/view?usp=sharing
Reflection:
Overall, it was an extremely rewarding experience to capture my own motion and apply it to a digital mannequin/figure! Despite the motion not being as smooth as I imagined, I was happy with the overall product and look, as it still brought that cowboy motion and energy. Some parts of the process were rather frustrating, such as rigging the mannequin, but I overcame the challneges by switching mediums and using Mixamo, which is helpful as the software is used in my other classes, so it ended up working out. Moving forward, I would love to use the XR lab to capture a smoother motion and learn how to rig a mannequin in Blender.