Making rotoCap Data Useful

In order to be adaptable to each user's situation I have come up with a scheme to re-interpret data coming from rotoCap into a usable format. Motion data such as this is converted to keyable attributes which could be used to drive the user's own character rigs or anything possible via the connectionEditor. All this is done by essentially drawing the slider around the drone.

The image above shows the boundary box of the sphere's motion-extremes across the image surface. The dark triangles were some previous diagnostic graphics, ignore them. Scaling the green box redefines the parameter range of the drone (sphere) outputs by clamping the X and Y attributes. Additional number fields will be added to the drone's GUI section for North, South, East, West. Each field will define what the extreme value is for that direction or to ignore that parameter or clamp it to infinity. The user should be able to just plug in the extreme values from the control rig, blank fields are ignored:

• yourFaceRig_eyeControlSlider.minY = 0.0 = drone.South
• yourFaceRig_eyeControlSlider.maxY = 1.0 = drone.North
  

Example: The user would like the drone's Y-axis movement to control the blink slider for an eye rig. When the sphere rises, the eye gets wider; completely open equals an attribute slider value of 1.0. When the sphere lowers, the eye closes till 0.0 is reached. By translating and transforming the box, the drone's movement is filtered to the desired animation curve equivalent of amplitude and frequency in a visual and intuitive manner.

Simulation
User Defined Drone Attributes

• Target Name = eyeControlSlider
• North = 1.0
• South = 0.0
• West = SKIP //ignore
  
• East = SKIP //ignore

Output = 0.85

.85 would equal a slightly closed eye, or 85% open. The eye is parented to a null-dummy node which acts as a buffer between rotoCap and the user's rig just in case the user needs to remove portions or all of rotoCap from a scene which actually is the ultimate goal. rotoCap should work behind the curtains and leave as little impact to a scene beyond passing attributes in the form of a bare-bones node network.