3D Scanning for Animation

After attending SIGGRAPH this year and talking with Dr. Paul Debevec about the subject I am convinced 3D scanning will progress more and more into the realm of motion-capture where the fields will merge within 5 years. With Image Metrics' release of Emily, a 3D face tracked onto an actor's head, we see the current state of the synergy. So far, the use of 3D scan data in animation has been to capture key poses, this still leaves simulations to drive the actual motion. By capturing the full performance in 3D, the best of both worlds can be had by being able to use the animation uncut and or pulling key poses off choice portions.

Are we there yet? Not exactly. It has been pointed out that Emily was still animated by humans using the scan data to target a face rig. But, it is a good running start for the industry's jump over the valley.

File Handler Works!

This past weekend has been very productive. The script is now automatically picking out the file extension and using that to filter out the other files which the user doesn't want (e.g. thumbs.db, OSX files, etc.). This makes it faster for the user since they simply choose the first file of their image sequence and the script takes care of the rest.

The next step will be to create the image viewer. I see some trouble coming since Maya doesn't have a resize for the image command. One work around will be to load up the files as an animated texture and do screenshots of each frame with a perpendicular camera through the saveImage command. The thumbnailed images will be used for the GUI window while the full-resolution images will be used by the script for the actual processing. The image dimensions also need to be queried so the height and width ratio can be applied correctly to the NURBS plane. After doing some research it seems querying the outSize of a node will work.

How to fix getFileList

When you use the MEL command getFileList, make sure there is a trailing "/" on the folder string you pass to it. Otherwise the command returns the folder string you passed to it initially.

string $imageDir = (dirname (`fileDialog`) + "/"); // Stroke must be added
string $fileList[] = `getFileList -folder $imageDir`;

This was a frustrating bug and hopefully this will show up in search results when someone else has this issue.

File Handler Progress!

After some frustrating times with fileBrowser.mel, I went back to using the fileDialog command to pass a path to the image sequence file handler so I'll only have to call up array elements. Theoretically this should save some processing cycles and makes it a little more cross-platform friendly.