Ok, the one thing missing and now so obviously missing from the "ship in a bottle" project is people or rather sailors for my ship. So as I need some sailors and I need a break from modelling the ship I have set about building a generic character shape which I will make alterations to using ZBrush to generate the different members of the crew of my ship. I need these characters to move so I have rigged my generic model with a skeleton from Character Studio. I have loaded some mocap files that I download free from off the web - I know this goes against my desire to produce everything myself but I just do not have the time or money to build a motion capture studio and mocap movement is so much better than hand animated. In the end piece of video I plan to use Character Studios standard walk motion mocap files and mix in other mocap files downloaded from the web and then adding hand animated stuff done by myself to the mocap files. After all I doubt I would be lucky enough to find a load of mocap files specific for the movement of 18th Century Sailors so its the only way I could get this done other than spending a year hand animating each member of the crew. So here area few animted test videos showing the new generic character (now nick named Mr Pink) and you can see how mocap data adds so much to an animated scene.
I have added some crew to the next still image. Can you spot them?
After some thought, I may have a new project idea and maybe I will build my own mocap solution. I have found some mocap software online and downloaded a trial and trying it out now but really need a good bit of space to do my acting to camera stuff. Watch this space for updates on my progress.
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