SIAT students create motion capture avatar in newly upgraded studio suites

The suites in StudioSIAT include a Motion Effects Studio (MES), a sound-motion hub control room, animation and video effects suites, and a future sound recording studio.

Like Trisha, Long, and Zak, many SIAT students have begun to utilize these spaces for projects that have components of design, illustration, animation, sound, and effects.

Cappu is one of the first student projects created in the editing suites and began as part of a one-semester, self-directed IAT 387 study where students learned how to use the PhaseSpace motion capture system and how to use it within Unity animation and gaming software.

The goals of the course, overseen by professor Halil Erhan throughout the Spring 2024 semester, was for students to create a digital figure using motion capture, including developing the associated algorithms and animation techniques.

“We wanted to create an original anthropomorphic animal character and allow someone to transform, at least virtually, into it,” says Trisha. “Our goals were not only to learn how to work with mocap, but also to gain more experience with the character design to rigged mocap-model pipeline.”

This pipeline refers to the entire process of creating a usable mocap avatar—designing the character, drawing the concept art and reference artwork, building the 3D model, rigging (adding a 3D skeleton to) the character, and using that fully rigged model with mocap.

While production studios frequently have separate departments for each of these steps, Trisha, Long, and Zak completed all stages of the project themselves to gain experience and practice, a significant undertaking and remarkable achievement for the trio.

After designing the character artwork, the students tracked motion using marker points on a mocap suit. This data was transferred into Autodesk MotionBuilder, a 3D character animation software that processes and maps the raw position data to an avatar. All data was then passed to a model in Unity where custom animations were triggered from the gesture-detection data.

A major technical focus of this project for Trisha, Long, and Zak was learning how to use PhaseSpace for Unity and developing documentation for future students.

“This proved to be one of the hardest parts of the project,” says Trisha, but the students hope their work paves the way for future students using this mocap system in Unity.

Cappu is equipped to be used for motion capture and is a readily available asset for other SIAT students to use. By allowing students to explore motion capture without having to start from scratch with character design, building a 3D model, and rigging it for motion capture, Cappu will enable future SIAT students of all stages of experience to explore motion capture at StudioSIAT.