Motion Capture 01

Edoardo, Christer and I went for a few days this week to do some motion-capture! 

It was a lot of fun, but admittedly on Monday we stood around scratching our heads for 4 hours (Christer was in a mo-cap suite for the whole time!) and hoping Adam would come back and save us.

 Tuesday (today) I finally got to record my own animations, and we each decided to export one animation each to work at home. Here is one I got working in MotionBuilder 2012 with one of the default skeletons.

I followed a tutorial on how to apply the dots animation to one of the default 'Actor's in MotionBuilder.
Not sure how to use my own model and skeleton yet, but tomorrow we might find out.

3rd Person Action Camera

Last time I tried to rid the third person camera, I had used this code when extending from UTPlayerController for my CustomPlayerController:

simulated event PostBeginPlay()
{
    super.PostBeginPlay();

    SetBehindView(true);
    bNoCrosshair = true;
}

The problem with this method (or perhaps I didn't follow a tutorial correctly), was that every time my character died, feigned death or hit a cut-scene it would revert back to first-person. I wasn't sure why, but quickly found another tutorial that worked easily and well from here.
It is an 3rd person action camera that allows the player to run in all kinds of directions, and it works well but...



As shown in the video, the animations are dreadful, and I'm not sure if I can fix it easily. The class I had to extend was UDKPlayerController instead of UTPlayerController, and I think the lack of guns and item pick up is due to the fact I'm no longer extending from UTPlayerController and UTPawn. I cannot feign death or do what the original UTgame allowed....

So which is better? Should I revert back to the previous method and try to redo the tutorials again? Horrible animations aside, this was the perfect camera setup for my game, but it has taken quite a few features away that I could have taken advantage of (though not sure if I would) like picking up items.

*EDIT*
May have found an alternative solution with this other third-person action camera, which is built to extend from UTPawn & UTPlayerControl. I will try to see if I can do this tomorrow, since it's a tutorial dating back 2010.

Cecilia from A pose to T

I've prepared a rig and re-positioned the model for the motion-capture we're going to attempt tomorrow.

Cecilia WIP 03

I studied the edge flow of several high poly models and tried redoing the topology. I also remodelled the hand and foot, using my own hands as reference, since I wasn't satisfied with the way it looked.

Her dress is mostly done, and I will take her into Mudbox next to start adding detail using normals and to texture it better. 

Poly count: 5808 / Tris: 11,562

It is unfortunately going rather slow, but I would feel much better getting character modelling out of the way at this early stage so I can focus all my energies into getting the animations working perfectly and in the game.

Cecilia WIP 02

Have made the hair mesh, tomorrow I will make the dress and then take it into Zbrush or Mudbox, I'm not entirely happy with it, but it's getting there.

 I have found a nice guide on the edgeflow of a woman's face: CG Arena