A few Updates - Jo's Digital Double (Patreon)

Check out this shot animated by Dan Fox!! I'd done an initial pass, and it just looked super stiff and robotic- I'm really really happy with this. Thanks, Dan!! So much respect for good character animators.

I probably could have provided him with a better model, though; this is a quick photoscan, passed through Rigify, which gave surprisingly decent results! Only good for extreme wide shots, but that's still kinda cool! It was one of my first tests with photoscans, with rigify, and with mocap:

You can see there a couple issues. 1.) I didn't set the white balance right, so she looks like an ashen zombie (also it's hard to see, but I had her half under an overhang, so the other side of her face is crazy dark),  2.) I could have spent a bit more effort preserving her feet (it's hard to separate feet from the ground sometimes. I've since starting putting a board down, so I have a flat surface to cut away from). Also 3.) her hand is weird cause that's just a random digital hand I slapped on her wrist. I've since learned to set up a couple stands for her fingers to touch while she's in scanning position, because without a reference point hands will drift around like crazy. 

Here's a couple early tests, one using the Carnegie Mellon mocap stuff, and the second one using some data from the Rokoko mocap suit. Even though it looks a little weird, I liked how natural it felt.

That said, the Rokoko suit doesn't work particularly well on ladders (that I've figured out yet), which is why Dan's help is so appreciated!

I get CRAZY excited about this, because it means I can just snag a scan of my actors on set, and if I ever need to manufacture a new shot (say, a wide establishing shot), I can throw em through Meshroom or Reality Capture (TOTALLY in love with RC at the moment), rig em up real quick, and animate them with the mocap suit, without having to get a bunch of people on set. It's a really really flexible workflow. Snag a couple environmental photos on set, and you can recreate the environment, too.

Oh also here's how that other train shot turned out- it works really well in the edit!!