Setting Up for Animation

This past week, I have been working on getting everything set up and ready for animation. Mostly it has been file set up and organization so far because I haven't had any of the rigs functional enough to work with. Fortunately, the delay has given me time to find potential bugs and issues when I do certain stuff with the files.

The first thing I did (although a little out of order now that I think of it) was find and combine the base scene. I deleted a bunch of extra assets so the file wouldn't be as big, but it has some of the basic things so I can move the characters around the scene and not worry about them clipping into other things. I grouped the separate areas of the scene so then I could easily turn them on and off with visibility and not have to worry about them getting in the way. The main parts are the upstairs, the downstairs, and the turnstile. The turnstile is separate because the characters are interacting with it directly so I need to access it easily to animate it. Once the models were all separate, I created color-coded layers for each of the characters so they would stand out and would not get them confused with the others when multiple characters were in the scene.

After that, I started creating a file structure that let me organize by sequence then by each shot. Even though it is quite a bit of folders in the drive, it will help me keep things separate and not run the risk of me getting things jumbled easily. It is a lot of clicking when I want to get to a certain one but it is set up similarly to how the exported mocap animation was.

Below is the start of my Animation Work Space with the base files and a basic scene to work in.

Once the folders were set up, I started the tedious process (that I ended up redoing for half of the projects because I messed it up the first time around) of making each file for me to work on different animation shots. I started in the environment base, imported the mocap data for a character (if there were multiple characters I made a placeholder so I could go back and do the other ones later), add the character data to the color code layer, adjust the time slider to match the length, then save the scene in the proper sequence and shot folder. I would make sure the name of the file also included the sequence and shot number to make it even less likely to get confused. The file name set up went seq#_shot#_animation_v001 which will allow me to do multiple versions and iterate by just changing the version number at the end.

When I imported the mocap data if I didn't do it a certain way it would mess up the time slider, and I did not realize that it would be an issue until I test-played a scene. Which was one of the reasons why I had to redo it. The other is that if I imported multiple mocap data they would sorta combine on top of each other and make a mess of different characters' actions on one character.

Here is what the files ended up looking like:

Above is an upstairs scene with the Ring Master performing.

Below is a downstairs scene with all of the characters getting ready to push the turnstile.

This image is sorta illegal because I'm pretty sure the data is messed up, but I wanted to show an example with the characters in the scene.

Once I get the rigs I will start the animation. I think I will be getting the Ring Master's rig first so I will be doing a lot of the performance scenes. I decided that I won't be connecting the mocap data to the character rigs due to too much cleanup, however, I will be using them right next to each other and doing the animation based on the mocap movements.