Setting Up Your Character

Setting up a digital character involves two main steps, mechanical setup and deformation setup. Mechanical setup involves creating the skeleton that drives the character and other skeletons that are used to add motions of different types, as well as creating all the controls that are used to animate the character. Deformation setup defines the relationship of each vertex of the character to the skeleton. To maximize the control over captured motion data, it is desirable to obtain the data in the simplest format possible. For this purpose, a translational file, which contains a stream of marker position coordinates over time, is used. By using this file, one can design the skeleton inside the animation environment and not abide by what a motion capture studio delivers. To obtain decent facial data, one must apply enough markers to the face so that there is enough markers placed along the lines of the main facial muscles. The two most widely used computer facial animation systems are the ones based on premodeled shape interpolation and the ones based on cluster or lattice deformations. Most of the facial systems today are a combination of both. The state of the art in facial animation software is a muscle system combined with shape interpolation. This kind of system is not widely used because of the lack of available commercial technology, as most of the currently existing systems are proprietary. There are many instances when one needs to interpolate rotations between different captured motion data files. Common cases are the blending or stitching of different motions or creating a looping motion for actions like walking or running.