Alpha Review Comments and Other Remarks

So, my Alpha Review critiques were okay, but a lot of it had to do with the clarity of my presentation however, so that is good news. Basically, everyone seemed to like my project and progress once my work had been explained again to them. So that's good news, because that is easier to fix. I'll have to go through presentation with Joe before the final presentation, for sure.

One of the major critiques I got was that my walk-cycle (which I totally agree with) was bad and very unrealistic. I wasn't necessarily going for realism at that point, I was trying to key in the general motions so I could refine it for the future. But, yeah, I think with more focus on the walking part, people will be more excited with how things look.

The other critique I got was using data versus using my artistic ability for walking. Joe and I talked about it, and I'm going to use data from the motion capture data I've gathered this past week (and more data to come in the future), and use them as a basis for my walks. I think people want to see concrete data go into this since my work is based on creating realism, and I totally understand that, so I will bring in MoCap data for now, at least, and see if that works better.

Lastly, I realize that a lot of my focus has been on the auto-rigging side of things, but I find that part to be harder, so I thought I would attack that first. But I definitely plan on focusing on the actual animation aspect of my project going into Beta.

Now, about my progress for the week.

Continued working on keying up walk-cycles. We had to do a walk-cycle for my Computer Animation class, so I think I will use some of my work there and bring it into Maya. I need to go into the lab tomorrow to work on that. Also, we had to capture different motions through the MoCap in the lab, so I'm working on getting that data into MotionBuilder and bringing that into Maya as well, so I can play around with the keyframes in MEL. I'm trying to clear up most of my walk-cycles recorded, rather than the minimum four needed for class. Minus the Computer Animation assignments, I was still MEL scripting the other cycles and I think I'm getting a better handle of the poses.

Writing out Pinocchio's algorithm into MEL/Maya took a backseat this week. I was really trying to perfect the walk-cycles, but I'll be getting back into it this weekend. I've been re-reading the Pinocchio paper to help understand the code better, they explain the algorithms out, which is a lot easier to read than code.

Lastly, sigh of relief, Beta Reviews pushed back a week! This is good news, because next week we have DreamWorks, Sony Imageworks and Microsoft coming in AND my uncle is getting married, which I need to be a part of, so I was getting really worried how I was going to manage to finish everything I set out to do for Beta.