I did quite a bit this week. I finished the clean-up of the arms and imported the performance footage into the scene. I did the props and hand animation for my scene too. In the scene Fred is holding a notepad and pencil in separate hands and then puts the pencil in the same hand as the notepad and shifts the hand around the notepad and pencil. I honestly enjoyed doing the hand animation, it was a bit of a challenge since the performance footage doesn't have a very clear shot of the hands, but I was satisfied to see the outcome, I think it brought more life to the animation to have the hands posed. For the hand swap of the pencil, I duplicated the pencil and positioned them where the pencil would be in each hand. I hid the pencil in the character's left hand until the pencil is swapped and then hid the pencil in the character's right hand so you can only see one pencil the whole time. I made sure the cut between the swap was pretty seamless and it looks like the hand is moving the pencil. The animation of the hand holding the notepad was a bit challenging because all the fingers shift around the notepad, I had to time each movement correctly so it matches up to the footage. I also had to resize the notepad a bit because it seemed a bit too small at first and I couldn't position the fingers around it to match the footage. There are a few points where the hands cut into each other slightly but I made sure it looked normal from the camera angle I was going to use for my submission. I plan to use an angle that is more side on and is similar to the angle of the Canon footage.

I added the facial animation to the animated body as well. I first implemented the feedback I was given for the face. I noticed that the change in focal length of my formative submission made the right side of the mouth droop down which was written in my feedback but in my file with the original focal length it was fine. I implemented the feedback using the focal length of my submission so I could clearly see the changes being made and make sure it looks right for my summative submission. At first I made a new animation layer to add the changes and then I merged the two animation layers and it somehow got rid of all my changes so remade the file and added the changes onto the original animation layer and lifted up the right side of the mouth using the graph editor. I had to lift it quite high but it seemed to match the footage more accurately. I also had to adjust the mouth on frames 108, 123 and 132. The mouth appeared to be too open in those frames so I edited them to be more closed. I also adjusted the eyes since in my feedback it was noted that the upper eyelids were too closed and made Fred appear sleepy, so I also lifted the eyelids to open the eyes a bit more. 

I think at this stage I am almost ready to set up my scene for submission. I have asked for feedback on the changes I have made and the body animation and will prepare my scene next week.

This week I went into the graph editor for the rig and for the controls and deleted all the points that were not in my assigned section so the character only moves for the same amount of time as the face. I also had to adjust the knees since they were broken. I created an animation layer and moved the knees controls so that they were in a position that made sense for the rest of the body. I was lucky that I only had to make one key frame for the knees and they were fixed fot the rest of the section because Fred doesn't move around at all. With the feet I made sure they were flat to the ground and created a plane to be the floor. I was also lucky with the feet because they are flat on the ground for the whole scene I was able to zero out the controls so they don't move or float around at all. 

For this part of the process I really followed Dr Kennedy's tutorials step by step because there was a lot of different file making and certain things that had to be done the exact same as the tutorial. This made the process straightforward and I didn't have any difficulties. The cortex was done for us so we didn't to do any data clean up before working in Motion Builder. For previous Motion Capture work I used Autodesk characters so it was interesting learning about the rig and skeleton of a Meta Human in the tutorial. I first imported the Proxy file that I downloaded from Canvas and saved it as a new file. I then imported the cleaned cortex trc file into the Motion Builder scene. Then I added an actor to the scene and placed it over the motion data. I had to adjust the actor a bit to make the data points match up with the actor's body. I had to widen the hips a bit and adjust the shoulders. I had to rotate both the shoulders to 30 degrees and then rotate the arms back down to the T-pose because otherwise the arms would be rotating around the shoulders rather than the shoulders moving and controlling the arms. After that I created a marker set to match the data to the actor. Normally I would have selected the markers from the list in the marker set section which was tedious so it was good to learn that you can physically do a lasso select of the markers and drag it onto the right section of the marker set. The actor was then able to do all the movements. Once I made sure the actor followed the movements accurately I then connected it to the proxy rig so I could use it on the Meta Human in Maya. Then I baked it at 23.97fps, this turned out to be the wrong frame rate so I had to go back in and re-bake it at 24fps. 

In Maya I made a new scene and imported the full rig file. I then imported the final Motion Builder file I made. In the human IK section I connected the Meta Human character to the custom rig. I could tell it worked because the shoulders lifted up. The knee controllers did not follow quite well so I will have to fix those up and make them point the right way. After the rig and character were connected, I had to adjust the IK blends for each control to 1.00. Then I was able to bake them together.