This week I started doing a cleanup pass with the feedback Dr Kennedy gave. I went back into my latest face cleanup file and saved a new version to clean in the graph editor. 

First, I fixed curves in the brows to stop random pops of movement and posing that were not present. Then, I went through each brow controller and cleaned the curves where visible pops occurred. 

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I then started on the eye cleanup feedback. Dr Kennedy recommended that I open my eyes up wider so that they look less tired. I pulled the curve down in the graph editor for the blink controller. This process consisted mainly of me dragging multiple linear curves down. I then got the right screen sharp corner of the mouth selected all the curves and brought it up slightly to be higher up

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Today was the 17th the day before the submission. I planned to submit my playblast today as I was confident in my body posing and props as well as my face cleanup I adjusted. I was a little nervous in setting up the files as my friends were having some minor problems with audio and it being out of time which made me uneasy for my submission but I cracked on finishing this assignment. I first checked that my camera was set up properly for the facecam playblast.

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I then selected the face controllers went into atom and exported my animation in my face animation file i then went into the body animation file selected my face controller again and imported the (data.atom) file. I then went into graph editor to align the face motion with the body. I accidentally made an error in using the tutorial frame number which made me confused as I thought had to use that certain numeric number, But with the realisation of talking to Dr Kennedy about it I realised I needed to use my frame number which solved the problem, I typed +=1940 (neutral frame) and the curves moved to where the body starts. 

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I then got really helpful feedback from Dr Kennedy for the body. I was told to make the arms more curved and pushed back and the neck looks less tense and angle more. I needed to move the feet further apart and make the clavicle and hands lower and positioned to similar degrees symmetrically. I made several edits to animation layers and kept adjusting all the controllers on different views. This was a very tedious process as I needed to keep looking at each different view while checking on right-cam and perspective cam.

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While fixing the arm I had an annoying problem of the arm flicking up abruptly. I went through the graph editor for the lower arm and forearm and tried making the curves straight by zeroing them only for the problem to keep happening. I realised that in the animation layer, the clavicle was keyed to move for one key causing a big spike in the graph editor. I'm glad I was able to find the cause of the problem but trying to figure out which controller and where in the graph editor was causing me to get a bit stressed.

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I then checked my facecam and made sure that the face video reference was parented to the face controller and the main playblast camera was parented to the head. I then checked everything was angled properly and that the Playblast cam was ready.

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I first checked under viewport for hardware rendering that my multisampling was set to a sample count of 8. Then in the Arnold rendering tab, I made sure my scene was 1920 by 1080. I clicked the camera icon to change the face cam angle of view to 69 as the viewing gate showed which parts of the face wouldn't show so changing that was important. I checked my face cam video was the right offset and made sure to add frame count.

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I had a worrying problem the day before submission. For some reason in the graph editor for the facial animation the animation didn't go in ones and was going beyond the frame range assigned to us. I was worried I missed a step in the tutorials so I frantically asked my friends and messaged Dr Kennedy about the issues as I felt I wouldn't have time to figure out the problem before the due date. My friends said to check if I resampled the curves and did the guassians. I went back to week 7 and realised I had done that tutorial. So now I was more confused about how this had happened. Turns out the problem was fixable. With the assistance of my friends, we realised that maybe we could just re-export the facial animation file. We imported the atom file into my body animation file and we compared the canon footage to the facial camera footage and realised that the facial camera footage was out of time. Finding the main reason for it being out of time was an easy fix. I just used the canon footage sequence and reparented to the face. I was glad that now I could submit with no worries.​

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I set my playblast camera up and made sure all the settings were right I then angled my body perspective camera and playblasted. For some reason my mp.4 files were not working in Handbrake. So I had to find another way to compress the files. I decided to use Adobe Premiere Pro and export it that way. One video was 3 gigabytes and from premiere, it became 20 megabytes which is much better sizing.

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I am very grateful for all the learning and help from my peers and my main lecturer Dr Kennedy. This assignment has taught me many new things about performance capture. I really enjoyed posing the face and being more confident in the graph editor. Now I'm more confident in how I clean curves and delete keys.

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