Experiment:
 Create and edit motion-capture animation for use in Digital/VR presentations
Objective:  To produce a piece on music and the way a musician's brain works in action To create a mo-cap workflow for the animations of playing instruments To determine the best balance of mo-cap software and manual animation
Dune: volumetric

The Drummer

By: Andrew Polino

4/17/17 | 4 hrs

Work:

We conducted our first mo-cap test in the studio using the cheapest, simplest setup (as outlined here : a Kinect, a tripod, and a Unity plugin called Cinema Mocap).

Per the limitations of this setup, we couldn't obscure our 'drummer' (Sohail) from the Kinect, so we couldn't use a drum kit. Sohail played 'air drums' for the first take.

Then with the help of a handy tutorial provided by the Cinema MoCap developers:


He cleaned up the animation and added a digital 'drum'.

Then he inserted the drummer animation into a 360-environment (built on the DomeMaster3D plugin for Maya) and added a soundtrack (using GarageBand) giving us the rough demo of a session musician in VR:



Overall, Iteration 1 left us with a pretty good feeling about the potential of this project and further uses for mocap and a desire to take things further.

Next Steps

Work out a process for animating hands and fingers
Try out workflow on other 'instruments' further exploring abilities/limitations of rig
Consider experimenting with different mo-cap hardware/software

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