For motion capture, the biggest barrier is the cost. We need expensive or mind-bogglingly expensive equipment in order to get detailed movement data. But this provides amazing opportunities! For the mocap software, un-suited people people are invisible, but can very much still affect the performers: we are ghosts.

The magic of post-production

I haven’t been satisfied at all with my latest Unreal projects. I have not been able to get the world building I want nor the aesthetic. So this time I decided to tackle the latter. Following this tutorial for post-processing toon-shading (something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time) I got to get a great part of the look I wanted. But the best came from an experiment: on the process of doing the border drawing, I liked the effect and thought about magnifying it and adding a purple tint. The result is this amazing neon edge filter that I love. The only issue is that I have it go after the transparencies and it masks a smoke particle system I added in the end.

For the interactions I added two trigger boxes to make objects “disappear”: one toggles the visibility of a big rock and the other subjects a column to a big force that pushes it away. At the same time, a smoke particle system -that was rendered invisible as soon as the map starts- returns to being visible. Getting the correct magnitude for the force was very tricky, I did not expect such big numbers. But it only took some trial and error to get a satisfactory result.

Mysterious non-virtual presences

This week we performed five different scenes in the Black Box Theatre, trying to exaggerate some actions (like in the charades game) and using physical assets to add certain effects to the shots. Bellow, you can see some of the shots of the performances and the virtual recreations performed by my own avatar.

This was one of the best takes we did.

Even though I got to use Motion Builder without any issues, when trying to export the fbx files to Unreal, I got several errors and could not make it happen.