Dear Anne - The Gift Of Hope

/ Anims /Dear Anne - The Gift Of Hope

Part of my work on "Dear Anne - The Gift Of Hope"
All parts are under copyright of 263 Films and/or their respective licensees. Copying prohibited!

Well, while working for 263 Films in Milan (Feb. 07- Nov. 07) on Dario Picciaus "Dear Anne - The Gift Of Hope", I was - beside TD-Consulting - responsible for the skinning of r.a. 30 human characters and the facial animation system of their faces.

We used a Vicon 8+ Motion Capture System with 28 cameras to capture the actors faces with r.a. 100 markers.

I got a lot of tipps from my good ol´ friend Dejan, which is motion-capture supvervisor at Weta Digital and while finding a good and well working system to place the markers on the face and the head, Andrea Brogi worked on a very complex constraint-system inside Motionbuilder, to get these bunch of markers moved in a proper way.

Most of the artists hate the process of skinning, whereas I love it:)

It was most interesting to see, how these "hundreds" of markers seemed to move each virtual muscle in the
virtual face of our characters.

After months of working by "trial and error", by skinning Annes and Ottos face "hundreds;)" of times, evertime in a different way, we found a good solution to get the muscles moved. We developed scripts to transfer skinning weights. We played around with different head-setups, different amounts of markers, which were also differed in size and reflection behaviour.

Unfortunately the production of this great and hyperrealistic movie has been stopped and 263 Films closed.

I don´t have that much to show, these small samples are a few artifacts, of what I was able to gather, when leaving Milan.

...................................

"Nihil est in intellectu, quod non antea fuerit in sensu" (Aristoteles)

Anne - Exercise - 1 (1:05min - 5 MB)	This is one of the very first more or less believable skinning results. We called those movements "exercises", where the real actors had to move their muscles in an exaggerated way to see what will happen on the virtual actors face. The skinning of all the markers was the hell, but the result - even if definitely not perfect, spoke for itself. But don´t look on her eyes too much!...they look horrible ;)
Anne - Exercise - 2 (43sec - 4 MB)	What looked good before, was unsatisfying, when the actor spoke "normal" (he/she had to exaggerate always). OK, imagine that the head moves and rotates too, for sure it will look much better, but anyway...not perfect! The next movie shows the corresponding acting of "Luizzle". Luisa was one of our motion-editors but acted very well and did a good job for me and my skinning ;)
Anne - Exercise - 2 (corresponding file) (42sec - 5.7 MB)	Here you can see the full extent of what expected me. 50 Makers on each side + stabilization markers for the head. We used them to extract the head translation and rotation. But even if the actors didn´t move their heads, the markers fu*ing moved, so - thx for the tipp, Dejan- we used a simple bathcap and glued the markers on it...and...it worked very well. *Dejan Momcillovic is Motion Capture SV @ WETA Digital
Ottos 1st SkinRender (1:17min - 9.2 MB)	The very first - and unfortunately only - rendering I saw. What kicked my ass every day and seemed to look horrible, was such satisfying to me :). It looked much better than grayshaded. OK, Otto doesn´t swallow and the larynx isn´t skinned nice, he also has no lower teeth yet, but... I mean...come on....isn´t that bad, or???