Attempting to animate over 200 bones by hand would have been very time-consuming so I needed to find a way of controlling the tentacles using the minimum amount of key-frames. This hierachy of bones connected to springs method in 3dsmax allowed me to control almost all the tentacles by wriggling their parent bone. To add subtle differences between each tentacle I also keyframed each root bone. This rig didn’t work when I had to jump the creature forward, at this point the tentacles would fly backwards into it’s head. For this shot I used a mixture of hand keyframing and ripple spacewarps.
Extinct but Still Swimming Prehistoric Nautiloid
28 05 2009Attempting to animate over 200 bones by hand would have been very time-consuming so I needed to find a way of controlling the tentacles using the minimum amount of key-frames. This hierachy of bones connected to springs method in 3dsmax allowed me to control almost all the tentacles by wriggling their parent bone. To add subtle differences between each tentacle I also keyframed each root bone. This rig didn’t work when I had to jump the creature forward, at this point the tentacles would fly backwards into it’s head. For this shot I used a mixture of hand keyframing and ripple spacewarps.
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Tags: animation, CGI, exhibit, mark breakwell, museum, wowmedia, wowmedialtd
Categories : Animated Characters, Events, Museum exhibits
Mocap for Muscle man
25 01 2009Part of the Fitness exhibit @Bristol Science Museum, this sequence is used as a larger than life projected VR aerobics instructer that encourages kids to take part in his exercise routines.
My brief was to animate a man without skin (so we can see his muscles) performing aerobics.
This was achieved by capturing Mocap data of a dancer performing the routine and then applying this to the rigged 3D CGI model. The hands, jaw and eyes were then key-framed by hand.
The only issue with this process was that my dancer was only 5.2ft and had a small frame wheras my muscle man was 6ft and strapping. This caused a problem with his arms moving his ribs so the shoulder bones had to be tweaked slightly to stop this from happening.
During experimentation with textures and lighting I produced ‘wet’ looking muscles. This was looked pretty real but my client rejected this as it looked like a creature from Hellraiser doing the Jane Fonda workout!
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Tags: animated muscle man, mark breakwell, mocap, motion capture, museum, womedialtd, wowmedia
Categories : motion capture, Museum exhibits
Quite a large product launch. The biggest (and scariest) project of my career……to date.
22 01 2009VT Shipbuilding (now BVT) staged a spectacular naming ceremony to commemorate the first ship to be built and launched at Portsmouth in 40 years. I was tasked with creating the screen documentary style video and a 140M High Definition projection that would play across the entire ship. The show was viewed by 3000+ spectators and was broadcast on the news. I spent six weeks working on the sequences but could only test the projection rig the night before the show – thankfully my graphics (based on the CAD drawings) aligned with the ship. The overall event won VT the RSVP corporate event of the year award. They’re currently building the new Aircraft Carriers so fingers crossed I’ll get another go………but will have to hire a ton of projectors!
Part 1
Part 2
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Tags: bvt, Events, HMS Clyde, mark breakwell, portsmouth, ship launch, vt shipbuilding, wowmedia, wowmedialtd
Categories : Corporate Video, Events, Museum exhibits, Presentation Content