Collaboration: Kerry Murphy

Animator Kerry Murphy works with Fashion designer Amber Jee Slooten to come up with a bodiless apparition of an arrangement of plastic around my skeletal figure as a final solution to my data. First, Murphy came up with a nude female body with the texture of stone sculpture in an equally rugged environment. Second, with Slooten, he covered the nude body with a garment that echo with my movements while the body disappeared. Below is an excerpt from Murphy’s workflow that gives an idea of his working process (Kerry).

Workflow :-

“DAZSTUDIO:

Create a character in DazStudio.

Export the character to FBX.

Save the Daz scene for later use.

 

MOTIONBUILDER:

Import the FBX into Motionbuilder.

Characterize the Daz character and rename it.

 

<optional>

If you want the character to have IK in the fingers/toes you have to create extra bones.

You can duplicate all the bones of the tip of the fingers and parent them to the bones you duplicate them from.

Easiest to do this in Schemetic view (ctrl-w)

Then position them a little bit outwards, so they stick out of the mesh.

</optional>

 

The Daz character is already in a T-pose but has a slight bend in the arms.

It’s best to rotate the arms to get a correct T-pose before adding the Controll rig.

It’s easy to see when the pose is correct when the icon on the right turns green.

 

Add a controll rig to the characterised character and rename it.

 

At this moment you should have a fully rigged character that’s ready to be animated.

Best to check if the rig works as expected before going onwards.

 

Save the Motionbuilder file.

 

Now you can import the motioncapture file into the same Motionbuilder file.

Make sure the motioncapture file has a different namingscheme than the character you just set up.

 

If the motioncapture file is not characterised you can follow the same steps to characterize the motioncapture file.

 

At this point you should have two characterised characters in Motionbuilder wich one of them has animation.

 

Set the “Character” to the Daz character in the right panel.

 

And set the “Source” to the Motioncaptured character.

 

The Daz character is now following the motioncapture file.

For clean up purposes you can bake the retargeting to the controll rig of the Daz character.

By pressing the blue square with the davinci icon: Bake(plot)/Bake(plot) to controll rig.

Now the animation is in the controll rig. By adding animation layers you can add motion ontop of the motioncapture data.

 

If your happy with the animation it’s time to put the animation onto the skeleton.

Same blue icon: Bake/Bake to Skeleton.

 

Now the animation is baked onto the skeleton of the character.

 

The motioncapture transfer to the character is done, and you can save it out to fbx to use in any other dcc app.

 

 

<optional>

MOTIONBUILDER:

To take advantage of the the Dazstudio blend shapes there are a couple of extra steps.

Select the whole daz character tree in the schematic view except for the geometry.

Then topmenu: File/Save Selection and save it as FBX.

 

DAZSTUDIO:

Open Daz studio.

Import the just created FBX in an empty scene. It should come in without geometry. Select the root and export.

Make sure there are no rotation limitations. If there are , select all and Edit/Figure/Limits/Limits off.

Export to .bvh.

 

Open the original Daz scene in wich you’ve made the character.

Import the .bvh you’ve just created. When imported, a popupscreen shows up.

Select show details and map the “file nodes” to the correct “figure nodes”.

When done hit accept.

 

You have a character with motion and blendshapes.

You can export this for example as an .abc to use in other dcc apps.

</optional>”


Kerry Murphy’s digital product of my movement data is insightful because it is the first time I realize the possibility of removing the body while maintaining a Sari-clad Mahari. The echoing plastic bags moving in my twists and turns, did not have a skeletal base. The idea of a soft core is the central takeaway from this collaborative work.

Finally, with the aid of a colleague, Erin Kathleen Bahl, I create a webtext for my visualizations such that I have all my animation work in one single view.