Motion capture summer animation project by “Third Floor Studios”

Andy Beane has formed a large summer class with many students with different academic majors and skill sets to come together and make a finished animated short. IDIA’s Trevor Danehy assisted the class in creating their workflow pipeline with the integration of motion capture. The class, which named themselves ‘Third Floor Studios (on account that most of the work takes place on the third floor of the Arts and Journalism  building), wanted to use motion capture to assist them in animating characters due to the rather small amount of time the summer session allots for them. Motion capture is the process of recording a live person’s physical movements and transferring them to data that can be applied to an animated character. Ball State’s Biomechanics Laboratory provided the motion capture facilities and equipment to capture the actor’s movements. Trevor Danehy helped line the workflow in binding the tracking point data to an animated character’s digital skeleton, using programs such as Autodesk Maya and Motionbuilder. A concentration on keeping the software pipeline as minimal as possible is pivotal to creating an animated short in a set timeframe.