Post-Production – Animation Layers

Whilst Mocap did assist greatly in capturing an authentic performance that brought the robots to life, it only got me most of the way there. Cleaning up the data is one thing, but I found there to be a great number of things that needed adjustments in the final shot of the short.

Something that had been an issue throughout was fingers. Even though both robots have fingers that have some kind of relationship with human fingers, when I connected the mocap data with that of the skeleton of the robot, there were issues.

With animation layers I have adjusted the fingers of the robot, as well as the head and arm position to match what was captured in the mocap stage more closely.

But this wasn’t the largest task of this scene. As mentioned before I captured the motion capture data whilst I had decided I would cut a lot of the script. This meant I captured fairly generic movement, and it was not working initially with this scene.

For the larger robot I animated a head turn for a line read, which didn’t have to be perfectly lifelike because it is a robot after all, so I tried to lean into that aspect. The smaller robot was, however, much more difficult. I was fighting against the performance that was captured on the day.

The original performance has it look in a completely different direction with it originally being the robot lost in thought:

With an animation layer I used the bones in the neck to perform in the opposite direction and have slightly different timings and angles. This was difficult though because if I did too much offsetting it made the animation look very unnatural. I wanted to keep as much of the original animation as possible, the larger curves needed to be adjusted, but the micro-movements that make a character feel alive are highly valuable still. It was a finicky process, but I managed to get it to work, with the animation now conveying a more depressed “giving in” body language.

Most of the shots have some kind of animation layer applied to the mocap data, for the larger robot a lot of the time I was fighting with the arms clipping into the torso due to the nature of the model. With the smaller robot I adjusted for eyelines, finger positions, and giving the character an appealing silhouette.

If I have done everything correctly, no one should notice any of the points I had to hand animate anything.