Cleaning Data

Cleaning the F-curves that hold the information of the animated frames at the rate of one hundred and twenty frames per second presents one of the most grueling tasks in this entire process of capturing motion. The computational translation of the moving body results in a considerable amount of noise causing unwanted jitters in the movement. Sometimes due to occluding, that is misrecognition or nonrecognition of marker information by the cameras, certain parts of the body fail to maintain resilience and continuity in the capture. This results in movements that animate the apparition in a ghostly manner, the neck turns 180 degrees or the wrist twists in an awkward fashion, or the ankle bends in ways that hurt even while seeing. I clean all this noise using inbuilt filters or by manual interpolation. The interpolation process is a way of manually smoothing out any jerks in the movement. After cleaning the data, I start working on the 3D animation process. Choreographic visualization requires the conversion of movement to data and then to objects. As a beginner in animation, I find it hard to find solutions to the facial capture in animation. I do not attempt to work with it in my own experiments with 3D animation. In fact, I find an European animator interested in my 3D data for his own experiments with digital animation. I lend him my data and he comes up with a few interesting solutions to both my facial as well as my movement data, which informs my understanding of the translated moving body on screen. In the following paragraphs, I explain my process of working with the 3D data right after I clean the data.

After cleaning, I prepare a two minute sequence for further animation.