Jay, WETA had to constantly ( and painstakingly ) tweak the muscle rigs to get them to work with the facial capture system. When they got it right they could slap on any capture footage and it would look and work great. Cameron did a video interview and explained some of that process. Very interesting stuff.

Thanks for all that cool info you posted!

Yeah mate, theres a fair bit in Cinefex.

I think theres a bit of the 'rose tinted glasses' effect when it comes to vfx. I must admit to having worn them in the past but now Im behind the iron curtain of the industry, you wouldnt believe what has to be done to get stuff to work. Its not all 'rig that and let the animators do the rest'. Sometimes stuff has to specifically tweaked per shot, just to make it work for 'that shot'.

Motion capture of any sort is a big under taking. I was talking with a friend of mine who works as an Animation supervisor at Lionhead games over here. He deals with mocap alot for cut scenes etc. He was saying that after seeing Avatar it made the mocap he does just look total crap and insignificant. He said that even the simplest of stuff they did was just much better than any before it.


later

J

Yeah man, Mocaps a hard thing to do, its not the "Magic Bullet" that people think or assume, theres a hell of a lot of setting up, character set up (not just the actual character its going onto but the virtual character) as well as the capture process and the clea up and actual application.

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"No pressure, no diamonds" Thomas Carlyle

Hey Steve

cool mate, I knew you'd be here at the mention of mocap. Thanks for chiming in too on it, I know you are a motion builder dude.

Hope all is well and modding is going okay!!

Jay

Ok so, I'm a bit late jumping on this band wagon but...All i have to say is this


God said, let their be greatness. .....and it was Avatar
Let Awesomeness Reign ...... and Avatar was so.


G-man

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I meant to ask, did anyone notice the 5 fingered 'human' Na'vi as opposed to the 4 fingers on the real Na'vi?


Jay

Can't say I did... though I did notice that the N'avi had 4 fingers.

And can I say how senseless it is that Na'vii has an apostrophe in it? What is that supposed to represent? Is their name actually Narble Vii and it's a contraction? They don't have a written language that we see, let alone one in latin characters, therefore the written N'avi is a human (english) representation of their name, which obviously should be a phonetic rendering of what their word SOUNDS like. And nothing SOUNDS like an apostrophe. Lame. QED.

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I wouldnt worry about it, George Lucas has been doing it with his stuff in Star Wars for years, Its just to represent something other worldly


J

Originally posted by Jay
I meant to ask, did anyone notice the 5 fingered 'human' Na'vi as opposed to the 4 fingers on the real Na'vi?


Jay

Originally Posted by

i askd my friend in the movie how they could tell that he was a foreigner and she said he has 5 fingers and they have 4

i couldn't see it because the 3d glasses made it all blurry but i figured someone who can see knows what they are talking about...

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that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

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Yeah well google Jake Sully Avatar and you can see when he's holding the rifle on Pandora, also when he held his hands up when waking as his Avatar

Jay

This should probably go in its own thread in the animation forum, but.. I'm going to put it in here, since its avatar related.

Animation and rigging peeps out there, this one is for you all.

The scorpions in Avatar. the animation that drove their rotors, i.E. moving in unison up or down to go foward and back, or moving opposite, Left up and right down or vice versa, to turn left or right... How would you rig this...

Via some bone structure? ( doubtfull i would think ).


Via Blendshapes with a controller? ( Don't know if its possible never messed with blend shapes )

or Via SDK Say, with some hidden control object, a sphere, or a cube or somethign that had the rotation nodes of the two rotors, keys to the control objects transform and rotation nodes...I.E. move the object up or down to get the rotors to do the same, and move the object left or right to get them to do the left or right movement. ( I personally think this woudl be the easiest and most effective way, but still want to know what you animation guru's think, for later use. )

G-man

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I will ask my good buddy Mr Jared Embley tomorrow at work, he's currently rigging my stuff. He's an awsome td and scripter so I'll throw the question his way as well.

Heres his website https://www.jazzimation.co.uk/

J

Much ablidged old friend

G-man

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I went to see Avatar with my good friend and all-round digital noggin' Jay and indeed it was a movie experience that brought a tear to my japs-eye.

The soundtrack is pretty damn good too, so I recommend it thoughly although I do beleive an opportunity was missed with the main theme when a remix of the 1979 'In the Na'vi' by the village people could have captured the movie's essence much better.

In the Na'vi
Yes, you can sail the seven seas
In the Na'vi
Yes, you can put your mind at ease
In the Na'vi
Come on now, people, make a stand...


Gio

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Gio

Creator of The Talos Project

I , out of boredom, went ahead and tried it with SDK and got pretty good results actually. a few quirks that i didnt take the time to work out. trying to key frame some things the scale nodes on a piece of geometry that i was useing as a stand in kept resetting back to default setting when i clicked on a new frame in the time slider, but..Other then that, it all worked pretty well for what i was thinking. Though i am sure there could be a mel script out there or one that can be written that woudl give better control and there is the drawback when using sdk's that If i wanted to animate say the craft flying from -10,-5,1 to 10,5,-1 in axis, i'd have to leave the control object at the origin and not parented to the driven object...of course i suppose i could use the rotate nodes on the control object as the driver so that the translate nodes wouldn't affect ...Non the less, it works, and its very quick and easy to setup and get a pretty decent control over the animation in little of no time. I am still interested in the feed back though Jay once you receive it.

G-man

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