With this in mind, Jesse would have 2 to 4 of his students and performers come in once a week to don the mocap suit so we could record their performance. The idea being that whatever the final product for the presentation would look like, it would likely involve the motion capture data we had saved.

During the course of the next few months, we would go on to capture about 15 performers.

At the same time, we were looking to hire an animation student for Work-study at the CIM to work with Jesse on this project. For a while, we never got any responses back, and we were running out of time. I then worked with Jesse a bit to get the ball rolling, and creating some concepts based on the ideas of space exploration and architecture created by the motion trails of performers.

I also sent Jesse screen recordings of each performer with full motion trails, while orbiting around the viewport to get a sense of the space from many angles.

The process for creating these motion trails in a 3D DCC is a bit more involved and frankly tedious. Our QTM software has the ability to visualize the motion trails, but I don't believe there's any way to actually export the data, so the motion paths have to be created in other software. I'd worked out 2 methods for generating these motion trails, 1 method for Blender, and the other for Maya. 

The method for Blender is quite a bit simpler in my opinion, though there are 2 hang ups that make the process a bit rough. Despite these hiccups, once you have a handle on the whole process, I think it can be a bit simpler, mainly due to Blender's curve objects, and the built-in functionality to extrude them out to create geometry.

Maya's process is still pretty easy itself, and there's no large hiccups that occur, unlike Blender, however extruding a path along a curve to create geometry, especially when the curve is noisy due to being based on motion capture data, take's a bit of tweaking with a bunch of different settings across a variety of tools. All in all, the process isn't too bad, mainly tedious, and I'm more comfortable working in Blender when I get the opportunity.

Quite a bit of thought and work involved to create something so simple, especially considering that the functionality already exists, the data just isn't usable beyond victualing a motion path, unfortunately it is what it is. That said, once you've gotten the process down pat, it's pretty simple and easy to run through for a series of paths, or for automating.

1. Instead of an armature, parent a Nurbs Circle to any desired joint.

2. Use the Animated Sweep, this will create a rough Nurbs Surface that follows along the whole animation path. It will intersect and flatten out at various points based on the Circle's initial starting point and rotation, and the animation.

3. To fix this, go into Isoparm selection mode, and selection one of the Isoparms that run's the whole length of the tube, and Duplicate Curve Surfaces in order to duplicate and separate it from the initial Nurbs Surface, which you can now hide or delete.

4. I recommend cleaning up this new curve surface using the Rebuild tool in the Curves menu, and tweaking the settings to your liking to get a relatively clean and even curve that still follows the path. I typically set the Rebuild Type to Curvature.

5. Now create a new Nurbs Circle, and snap it along the curve path and place it at either end point.

6. Under the Surfaces menu, select both the new Nurbs Circle and the Curve Path, and do an Extrude. In the options menu, I found most of the time that Style: should be set to Tube. Result Position: to At Path, Pivot: to End Point, and Orientation: to Profile Normal.

This should give a similarly clean tube that follows the path of the animation pretty closely, but in my experience some more tweaking may need to be done to certain settings, as well as occasionally deleting history to fix seemingly random errors. Due to this, I find it's a bit harder to run through quickly or automate.

That's the basic idea behind the whole workflow to this project, was to create geometry or motion paths from joints of a performer's capture.

It was around this time, late October to early November, that time was quickly running out. I was the only person working on this at the time, yet I couldn't dedicate all my work time as we have other on-going projects that you can see all around this blog site, and due to certain rules and restrictions, Jesse wasn't allowed to pay me out of pocket to work on it on my own essentially as freelance.

Fortunately, just a few days to a week later, we finally got a response from an Animation student, who was interested, Nikki Hartmann. Alan and I sat down and met with her and Jesse, and brain stormed ideas for a final product that we could feasibly finished in roughly 2 weeks time. Also a deciding factor, Nikki knew a bit of 3D modeling and animation with Maya, but was still only a Junior student and had a primary focus in 2D animation, and I was in the process of moving out of my current apartment and looking for new places. Due to this, I knew I would be gone for at least a week, so whatever we decided, needed to be something within Nikki's current skillset.

Eventually Jesse decided on 2 parts for the final animation/video.

• The first part was an 8-10 minute "atmospheric/weather" effect, based on something he saw in a similar performance from someone else. This was pretty simple to do in After Effects, which Nikki had experience with, so with some images of paint splatters that Jesse wanted to make use of, we gave those to her and set her on her way.

  • The process by which Nikki created her part of the animation was interesting, we took the motion data from the performers again, this time constraining the Maya camera to the hip of the performer, this could then be exported straight to After Effects with all it's animation data. Using this, Nikki would attach one of the various paint splash images, have it follow this motion data from a flat perspective, while use various stretch and distortion effects as well as fading opacity.

• The second part was 6 minute animation from yours truly, to create a more 3D animation based on the motion paths, and explore the it's space.

  • It would start with a 4-5 minute build-up, where 1 motion path would slowly appear, and stretch and displace, to create almost a "rift" type effect. The camera would be locked from above so it appeared 2D.

  • At the last 2 minutes, the camera would finally pan down and we would start to get the 3D perspective of the path, additionally, more motion paths would start to appear twisting around based on more joints by a performer.

The rendering for this was a bit rougher than I expected, firstly, it was a bit hard to visualize as Blender started chugging with all the dense paths, along with various modifiers, effects, and a geometry node group that would do a disintegration type effect. This, plus the 6 minute run-time at 30 fps lead to a much, much higher render time then I initially envisioned. In my own experience, most animations I've done were maybe a minute at most, typically being around 10-30 seconds, at 24 fps, so I guess I didn't have a great concept of how long it would take.

When I got around to finishing the up the main part of this, with all effects, I started rendering.

Each frame only took about 1.5 seconds on avg/frame, using Blender's Eevee. Not too bad, right?

Well, the total amount of frames came out to a whopping 10,800.

"6 minute animation * 60 seconds per minute * 30 frames per second = 10,800 frames"

Then,

"1.5 seconds per frame * 10,800 frames = 16,200 seconds / 60 seconds in a minute = 270 minutes / 60 minutes in an hour = 4.5 hours total render time"

That's a not insignificant amount of time to render, and by this point in time, I had about ~ 2 days to finish and get something to give to Nikki for finishing and polishing.

The idea was to render out all these motion paths as white masks with a black background, that way, she could easily take the footage into After Effects, and use the same paint splash images as the weather system, using the white masks, to get those same colors warping and flying around.

The finished concept can be seen below:

All things considered, I feel it turned out pretty decent.

Now as mentioned previously, this was essentially to act as a mask video for compositing in After Effects by Nikki. At the end of the video, we get up to 6 different motion paths. If rendered out as one part, it would look a bit bad, as if an image was overlaid on top of the white, it would be the same image for all of them, and frankly not look right considering they're all different paths that extend out from each other.

To fix this, we wanted to render out passes individual for each path, this way Nikki would have more individual control over each of the elements.

This was pretty simple to set up with Blender using the Render Layers in the Compositor.

The caveat to this, was each layer had to render separately, each of the 6 elements, which meant the render time increased significantly...

Fortunately, all these layers don't appear until after the build-up occurs, around the 4 minute mark, which meant we could get away with rendering just one render layer for 5 minutes, and saving the rest of the other render layers for the last minute.

When rendering each of the layers for the last 2 minute, the average render time jumped up around 10-12 seconds per frame, to go over the math again...

"10,800 frames - 7,487 frames (the starting frame number for the 4ish minute mark) = 3,313 frames"

"3,313 frames * 11 seconds avg/frame = 36,443 seconds / 60 seconds/min = 607 minutes / 60 minutes/hr = ~ 10 hours total render time"

Just by rendering out separate passes for each motion path, without adding any extra geometry or details, the total render time more than doubled. And that's only for the last 2 minutes, compared to the ~4.5 hour render time for the whole 6 minute sequence with only 1 render layer.

Needless to say, I severely underestimated how quickly seconds added up, and I had to make sure I got everything right as much as possible in the first pass, because I literally did not have enough time to make changes and render it out again.

Somehow, I managed. The concept seemed good, only made a few small tweaks, I did have to do a few renders, but being at the CIM, I was also able to take advantage of the 3 workstations, and split the whole sequence into 3 parts to each computer. When everything was done, I let them run all night, and had the finished product.

That essentially finishes off my role in this project, I took the mask videos and handed them off to Nikki, who did a great job compositing them together in After Effects, along with the 8-10 weather/atmosphere video she did, Jesse, Alan and her met and discussed small changes that could be made within After Effects without the need for re-rendering the 3D content, and the project was finished just in time for Jesse's presentation.

You can see the final finished product below: