Motion Capture

Last Friday the programming team did some preliminary work for the motion capture we will be doing for the models we have been creating.
What we actually did was to physically go through the movements of almost all our characters. Travis videotaped the movements so we could review them later.
At present it seems like we will need over to a hundred different animations.
Besides allowing us to determine the number animations and how each should look, we also came to realise the need for the motion capture of Kali to be acted out by a female. Tim has kindly contacted an associate of his to see if some actresses may be interested in helping us out.
Once we had finished planning out the movements for our characters we captured some test animation to try out in Torque with our test model.

Otherwise work has continued on the creation of models and the rigging of our test model. Personally I have investigated into other engine modifications and have carried out some testing on the melee mod we are using. Collision tests have suggested the mod doesn't work as expected; i.e. between the nodes at the weapon tip and the weapon hilt are not being detected.
I've started to look at the code and to see if changes can be made to get better performance out of the mod. Strangely enough it appears that the actual collision detection is taking place in TorqueScript, whilst the C++ changes mainly relate to animations.


*UPDATE*
Further testing has revealed their is no problem with the mod, the time interval for damage for the animations was set to too short a time. The mod works by defining an amount of time that the weapon can do damage for each animation, unfortunately the time interval for one of the animations was set too low, meaning that by the time the weapon collided with the enemy the weapon was no longer set to do damage. A simple increase of half a second allows the animation to work. When we capture our own animations we must exercise care to have a time interval that will ensure the weapon is active for the entirety of the animation.