The End

So with the rig completely working in tests, I thought it wise to show HOW it will function in the pipeline.
The main difference in it's use will be from Guards and the main character Elita (as the guards will have an extra setup that will come in with the mesh).

The video has little subs of what's happening on the left (so fullscreen might help)


20121022 1747 43Sub from Joshua Griffin on Vimeo.



As shown it's a fairly easy process, as the movement is loosely blocked out for the animator, making them concentrate on limb placement, debugging and slight weight adjustments.

However, there is one considerable drawback to this, and that is the animator is almost locked to the mocap performance. The information CAN be deleted quite easily, and 'vanilla' animation created with the rig, but this is one concern in terms of the performance itself, and it's processing from Ipi Soft Studio.

This research has helped me define a stable pipeline from gathering motion capture footage, to processing it and cleaning it for use in the game engine. This should save me quite a few days, and possibly weeks, within my schedule. It has also taught me how to script effectively and I'll be making a lot more use of self made buttons in the future, especially within multiple rigging projects.

The process of learning this scripting and pipeline has been quite fluid and a god-send in terms of saving time. Without this process I would be making adjustments to the actual motion capture, methodically cleaning curves in motionbuilder and maya - something that takes much more time, and also causing quite a bit of havoc when adjusting in maya after using motionbuilder.

With this research and rig setup complete I will now be able to reschedule how much time I have for animating, freeing up considerable time to use in perfecting the movements, camera choices and editing environment textures. There's a lot of work to be done, and this has saved so much.