More cowbell!

In my previous post I mentioned that there were a few missing cowbell hits at the beginning of Sister's motion capture data. As it turns out this is easily correctable from within iPi DMC. First I enable IK or FK on the rig which allows me to manually make a pose correction. Then I click on Refit Pose, and press Track Forwards and Track Backwards a few frames from the corrected frame. Very simple and elegant, especially with the multiple video references visible in the backdrop to 'rotoscope' the action to. This last point is especially important in this case because the motion has to timed to musical events I can't hear in the iPi DMC playback.

Also, if you run into a bad 'pop' in a joint, try stepping to a frame after the pop, hit Refit Pose a couple of times (and maybe Analyze Actor again followed by Refit Pose one or two times,) and then track backwards right through the pop. Sometimes tracking backwards can be more precise. (Note: you may need to track forward a few frames from the frame after the pop to help smooth the motion forward from that frame.)

For you techies who just can't get enough of this 'geek speak', tracking Toullie's 1922 frame performance shown above took 1 hour and 30 minutes to process. (iPi DMC's initial rough estimate was about 2 hours.) This was with a Nvidia Geforce GTX 260; with a GTX 480, I believe the speed could be two to four times better.

- Greenlaw