Pre-Beta Review Post

So this week we're supposed to talk about our Beta reviews, which have not happened yet. So I'll discuss my progress and compare it to where I planned to be.

It's been a real struggle lately to integrate Pinocchio into Maya. I was having a hard time with parts of the algorithm I realized I had not put in, and how I would create a Maya version of it. Pinocchio has a lot of its own classes and data structures which are integral for sizing the skeleton. At this point, Pinocchio is really putting me behind and its not allowing me to focus on the main aspect of my program, which is to create these realistic looking walk-cycles, so I've decided that sizing the skeleton to the mesh is not my top priority, and I'll focus on it after my animations are done and look good. This is disappointing to me, since I've spent so much of my time on it, but at this point, it's really taking away from my work, so I'm going to see what Joe and Norm think as well, before I go back to Pinocchio.

A lot of stuff in my project has changed. Rather than making a traditional Maya plug-in, I moved over a lot of my MEL code to a creating a Maya shelf. I wrote code to make the shelf and then have files to set different body parts. It's exciting and a lot simpler than doing this through a Plug-in, because it is easier to pull the information in from the gui and use it within my scripts. It's a lot easier to write in the MEL commands to create the animations because before I was doing a lot of this:

'MGlobal::executeCommand(MString("polyEvaluate -vertex"));'

And now I can just write 'setAttr "IKLeg_L.translate" -type "double 0 0 1;' and it's also much easier to create my local and global variables.

Here are some pictures of my shelf:

 You can see the little icon to get the parameter input window in the left corner. And
in the right corner "PhenoWalk" pops up as a shelf.

Here's a look at my Parameter window. Once you hit set, it computes the
blends and creates a walk-cycle of 34 frames.

Creating these animations are some of the more fun and yet frustrating parts about the project. Making them look realistic is taking up the majority of my time when I animate, but I think that's an acceptable outcome. It'll be interesting to test out certain parameters on the totally wrong characters. Already, I've been working on that, and it causes really funky looking walk-cycles, but I think that's the point. We need to have believable matches between the mesh and the walks. My only worry is making the animations long enough, at this point. If I can finish up these four parameters completely (I still have a lot to do for height and gender still), I'm trying to decide what other types of parameters I can implement in the next three weeks and how much longer I can make the animation. I'm trying to organize my previous work more and create poses that are just translated relative to the previous positions of the body parts. I think that's a much smarter way to go. If you guys have suggestions, I'd really appreciate it. A part of me really wants to create a tight-rope parameter, which makes a person walk slower and more hesitantly. I don't know if that has anything to do with phenotypes, just fun for me to watch. Hah.

Unfortunately my trial for Camtasia has run out and anything else I use puts a giant watermark across the video. Anyone have any suggestions for video capturing a screen on a Mac? Else, I'll have to copy my code to a computer with Camtasia when I create my final presentation video.