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RESEARCH.

FAMOUS™.
 

             This is a system which primarily works on existing motion capture data.  Therefore specific hardware to obtain the original data is required.  What is highly intuitive about this system is in the way it works with the motion-capture data. As can be seen from the screen shot, markers on the geometric model correspond with the traditional markers used to generate the motion-captured detail on the actor's face.  These markers can then be further assigned vertices on the 3d model by 3d painting in weights using clusters.  The clusters are colour coded depending on the weight assigned.  This allows for explicit handling of the geometry by further defining falloff regions for the clusters.  Clusters may also be overlapped and proportionally shared or smoothly interpolated.  The system also allows for collision detection by letting the user interactively set the minimum distance constraint between two clusters.

                    As can be clearly seen FAMOUS™ allows for a lot of control over the 3d geometry that was missing from raw mo-cap data.  Another problem with motion-capture is that most hardware systems generate key-frames for every single frame of the animation.  This can lead to a confusing mess of data which is almost impossible to tweak.  FAMOUS™  allows the user to assign keyframes to specific clusters, and in turn, create and delete keyframes.  The system also allows for  tweaking of keyframes using familiar 'ease-in', 'ease-out' function curve handles.   Finally, it also allows for algorithmic head movement or motion-captured movement.  The relevance of this last feature being that motion capture generated data can over exaggerate when transferred to 3d geometry.
 

Examples of FAMOUS™ in action :-
ANIM1 - GURU.mpg (791 KB)
ANIM2 - KING TAMAHO.mpg (1.55 MB)