Motion Capture: Final Project - Bowling Barrage

I'm a little late with this post, but I feel like I needed to show my final project for Motion Capture here. This was by far one of the most fun projects I've ever worked on, and I enjoyed every single minute of it! Our job was to create a short animation using our own directed motion capture files. We would then take need to clean the files up and exaggerate them to make them appealing.

We actually started out in a bit of a funk, and had writers block for most of the first day. I randomly thought of the idea to have two bowlers competing against each other in their own styles after going bowling with my girlfriend and seeing how our friendly competition worked. After a group meeting, the idea stuck and the pre-pro began!

I first started out by drawing up some quick storyboards to plan out our idea. Below are some of the frames that I drew up that would eventually become our final shots.

Once our story was down, I worked together with my friend and colleague Taylor Gallagher to model assets for the bowling alley scene, as well as my other group member Sean Olimpo to create textures for the scene and the characters. We were really happy with the results and feel that the work we put in raised the overall quality of the project.

We then took our ideas into the motion capture room an with the help of our classmate Aaron Stoll, we recorded our motions into Cortex where we cleaned them up and fixed any issues with our data. Our next step was bringing it into Autodesk Motion Builder where we attached our character motions onto actor rigs.
With the actors moving, our jobs were to take all the clips, add the ball constraints to the characters, and add extra animation layers to better enhance the motions to make the whole scene more appealing.

Next, we took exported the actor animations as a .FBX and imported them into Maya with the characters and the bowling alley. All that was left to do was for me to clean up any problems with the layered animation in Maya, lighting the scene, creating the right camera shots, and finally rendering out the scene.

We had a lot of fun doing this, and we've been updated by our professor that our project was the best in the class, and one of the best he's seen! We're really proud of this and hope you enjoy it!

-Drew Kedra