LEARNING OUTCOMES

On successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
    Plan a project which would benefit from motion capture
    Work and capture movements in a professional studio
    Edit and animate on top of motion capture to get a stylized/exaggerated result

CONTENT

    A workshop where students learn the basics of motion capture. They also learn/realise the differences between traditional keyframing animation, motion capture and animating on top of motion capture, and they learn to think about when to use which technique.

WORKLOAD

    The workshop has detailed teaching and hands-on work in motion capture studio, and lots of hands-on training and experimenting in classroom using Autodesk Maya.

STUDY MATERIAL

    Lecturing on motion capture (in the studio), example files/projects and Maya scenes (in class).

PREQUISITES

    3D Animation minor / 3D animation- course.
    Students need to be able to work in Autodesk Maya, have experience in building and animating characters in Maya.
    Students who have NOT TAKEN part in abovementioned courses, in order to be accepted, need to contact the teacher and tell about their exprience in 3D. The workshop would be very difficult and not useful for anyone without any such knowledge.

COURSE SCHEDULE

    Monday-Tuesday in the Motion Capture studio in Roihupelto.
    Wednesday-Friday in classroom in Väre.

WORKFLOW

    1. Students plan a movement/movements which they want to capture.
    - Preferably something which is relatively easy, for example a dance move, aerobic move, sneaking, throwing a ball, hitting a ball with a baseball bat etc. With a simple move one can learn the whole process. But it could be a full narrative scene with many different movements if there's enough time to do it.
    2. The movements are acted and captured in motion capture studio.
    3. The data is imported in Maya, where it is applied on student's own character or one of the course characters.
    4. Students edit/cleanup the movement in Maya, and experiment in exaggerating and stylizing the movement by animating on top of it.

Kai Lappalainen


Last modified: Tuesday, 28 March 2023, 4:35 PM