Last Monday, I booked a mocap session with my model, Shahnaz Indira at the Black Box.

Observation

For this mocap session, I'm not expecting big, significant movement, however, I'm hoping for the Optitrack to be able to pick up subtle movements, like the shoulders bopping up and down, the head tilting slightly, arm poses. So far, it looks like the optitrack is able to pick these movement nuances.

It seems the Optitrack has some issues capturing the hand that folds close to another keypoint, causing the skeleton visual to fold unexpectedly. For example, Shahnaz is recreating a pose where she puts her hand on her hips like so:

editorial pose: stand up

Another concern that I had with the mocap software (Motive) is the choice of avatars that they have available. The character of my model body doesn't typically fall under the conventional female avatar. Some of the body parts may be larger than average female avatar, thus it concern me with questions whether the captured keypoints will be able to be translated to her custom avatar accurately later during post-production. On preview, because her avatar on Motive is an average build female, the walking looks very odd and unnatural.

Final concern is the ways to keep movements as accurate as its original. Since we're not able to wear a heel/shoes on the floor, we're not able to emulate the movement of walking on a heeled shoes naturally. This is very crucial to fashion models who walk on runways, which I'm not able to solve for this mocap session. Hopefully, this will be able to be fixed on post-processing. Though it should be noted (to myself) that fixing everything on post is not really a good practice, especially for cases where it could have been done on site. It is interesting that this is something that I learnt from doing photography production, and it's quiet similar in the way the preparation are like (e.g, planning the shot list, briefing the model of what to wear & bring, planning schedules).


Issues
I made a mistake that is very much due to my worry of not meeting the deadlines (and also the fact that there are tons of other assignments to do from other classes too). The mistake is to not practice and rehearsing myself first before inviting an actual model in.

There are some issues where the keypoint in the skeleton shifted frequently every time I record. It might be due to the mocap suit folding on the model's body that causes the inconsistency. Another issue that could have been mitigated is wearing the head rig without recreating the skeleton. We ended up recording the facial expression and the body movement separately, which should be doable to merge on post-production. However, this mistake will cost me time on post-production and possibly money if this is in a professional settings. The solution to both of these issues are simply just to recreate the skeleton.

Shot List with Shahnaz

casting

1. Casting: introducing self, posing on the front, side, back with hand gesture fixing the hair on the ears, waving to the camera and smile.

selfie

2. Selfie: model off duty, smizing to the camera, playing around with the camera angles (also may be an issue on Live Link because the model was moving the phone around quickly and frequently while doing the selfie).

editorial pose: lying down

3. Editorial - lying down: model starts from standing up, lies down on the floor with one of the legs folding in front of the other, one hand on the floor and the other rests on the hips. Model keeps adjusting their posture slightly along with slight face tilts and facial expression changes. Posture change should be done slowly.

editorial pose: stand up

4. Editorial - stand up: model bends their knee and lean forward with hands resting on the waist to create a shape. Movements that lead towards this specific pose can be explored.

runway

5a & b. Runway: standard fashion runway walk (shoulders are noted to move up and down in a more pronounced way compared to average person walking) & another alternative style of fashion runway walk (with more sass and still poses in between the walks)