Long Week

Hey all!
This week was a topsy-turvy sort of week, with the death of my cat on Saturday, finding out I probably have an internship with DreamWorks this semester to continue my work from the summer, and then getting sick. Regardless, I did manage to do a bunch of research for this project.
I started off looking at the official website for Maya C++ API and MEL scripting, trying to get reacquainted with how to set-up a plug-in, which I will dive into writing the framework for this weekend. Joe also sent me two websites that give some really good explanations of programming techniques in MEL and Maya API, so those have been extremely helpful in teaching me good Maya programming techniques which will be necessary for the final product to run smoothly.
I've also been looking over the code for Pinocchio, the automatic rigging tool developed by MIT. I'm considering if it will be possible to incorporate their code into my framework, and how much of it will be useful. They provide meshes that one can rig, which could be really good starting meshes for the earlier testing of my plug-in. Though I won't use this one, it's kind of creepy:

Besides research and looking at ways to set up my framework, I've been working on figuring out the system architecture of my project. Since there's going to be a component of using background data and then pulling out the data based on inputs, I'll need to figure out how to create those algorithms and incorporate into my plug-in. I have a good idea of how each part of my system will fit together, but I still need to draw it out on photoshop and post it on here. I'll probably be able to finish that when I start setting up the framework this weekend. Expect a post sooner rather than later this week.
Once I've set up the framework, I plan on looking at a lot of data. I still don't know whether it will be better to collect data about different movements through mocapping, or if I should look for videos and find relative examples. For instance, I've been heavily influenced by the work of Body Motion Lab, which could be a very useful source of data.
Anyway, here's to coding, data gathering, and diagram making this weekend!