Walking

I imported the walking.c3d file and found I could not scale down the empties which were far too big for the camera; meaning they would appear invisible in the camera view when they went to certain positions. You can also see from the image (left) that the armature shape is quite different to mine. Because the hips and shoulders are in such different positions I was worried it would greatly affect the sequence.

I began copying across the constraints, the master bone used two copy locations, following the left (influence 1.0) and right (inf 0.5) hip empties, this gave a better movement than if only one empty was being followed, like before when I'd followed the spine bone.

Copy Constraints Technique:
I compared how the body moved if it was following the hips or spine. Rather than remove all the constraints and add them manually there is a technique to copy across already created constraints, this is very useful for finger bones.

• Select the empty constrainted bone
• Shift select the bone with constraints
• CTRL C
• Choose all constraints

The positions and movements were looking ok but the hips were too high (because of the difference in armature) but I found for some of the bones I could move them up. For instance moving spine1 up immediately gave the model a more balanced and 'realistic' shape, I also changed the position of the shoulders.

Doing the drastic movement in the spine meant that his head was affected (it was pulled down into the body). The imported armature was not straight like mine, so I modified my armature in edit mode moving and rotating the head and neck bones, and the problem was corrected. I did the same for the feet rotating them to a 120 degree angle.

In the sequence the character turns around but for some reason the body doesn't turn with him. I obviously can't use this in my footage so I will only record the animation up to this point.

Because of the problems with the camera I couldn't fit the whole character in view so I chose to show his legs moving and the camera coming up towards his face, I also had to move the camera back with him. The camera had to be close to the model for it to show any footage which limited what I could do.

I thought it was a nice idea to make the character look nervous as he was slowing down anyway; so I got the eyes to move to behind him, and the camera to zoom to what could be there (angry flies), I'm thinking of adding in an environment behind him and an eery particle effect following him, which I'll create once I have all the different motion capture files working.