As the title said, an updated animation video of the Musashi‘s deathly dance is available on VIMEO.
On that creation I used some basic MOCAP, that of course I needed to clean and tweaks.
Feet contacts were so bad. But the most inappropriate were the hundred of times that Musashi’s character cut itself with the swords!!!, lol. So keyframe animation were added for to control all that behaviors.
Another difficult point were the slow motion shot. As you maybe already know, MOCAP is recorder per frame, so every little imperfection or whatever happen, is recorded at that level. So, if you play it at a normal speed, it’s hard to see a non lineal movement, or non smooth, but in slow motion every single imperfection appear, making the movements not as smooth as desired. This were specially obvious when Musashi’s right arm with the long katana sword cut a single sakura petal in half. With the original MOCAP data, the arm and sword simple showed a non fluid smoothing movement, just up and down, shaking all over the time. So a good clean and delete of unnecessary in-between keys were done, making possible that smooth katana cut.
I also used some big depth of field on that video, as the most important I wanted to show were Musashi’s animation, and my skills for to use not only MOCAP, but keyframe. Background is just secondary on that video.
Musashi’s character have no facial expressions rigging, so not this on that video. Just eyes, blinking, and open or close the mouth.
What I feel proud about, apart from the animation, is the final result of the clothes deformations, as they truly deform and adapt to the movements in a right way, like real clothes of a samurai. I mean, they keep the original shape, folds and angles, whatever the extreme move, till able to expand and stretch like could do on real life. Has been difficult to do it, by the speed and energy of that movements. But since there’s nothing I can’t do, I did!!!, hehe.
Please, feel free to comment, or ask any question.
