Summer Scholar Report

Over the three months of my summer scholarship program, I have worked on the VR short film: “Minimum Mass” with Sean Pickersgill, Raqi Syed and Areito Echevarria. The goal of the summer scholarship program is to develop motion capture data, re-target the mocap animation to digital characters in Unreal, and display the animation sequence in a VR scene.

In undertaking this project, my job was primarily focused on capturing motion data by using Opti-track Motive system. We managed to have plenty of coverage to capture actors’ performance with 22 cameras on set. My job consisted of acting and capturing performance in the mocap stage, mapping animation data to 3d characters, cleaning up and animating motion capture data in multiple 3D software, solving technical issues and retargeting animation in Unreal.

During the process of this project, I have leant how to optimize results by planning tasks ahead of time and setting priorities. Sean and I often prepared a list of work for the day and establish a time frame for completing each individual task. While we were shooting motion capture scenes, we created real time motion capture on stage in order to make sure that the animation data all lined up with the digital environment. As the project progressed and evolved, one of the biggest challenging Sean and I faced was re-targeting skeletons in Unreal. Due to the complexity of the character skeleton, re-targeting it in human rig in Unreal was problematic. After many hours of researching and testing, the issue was successfully identified and finally fixed.

What make this scholarship program great to be part of is that I trained to be an effective self-learner, a good team player, and a problem solver in the workplace. With a lot of supportive from every team member, I have the chance to learn the general workflow and develop work in a professional pipeline. I truly appreciate the opportunity to work for this summer scholarship program.