Kevin Leong
Computer Science (B.S.) & Creative Computing (B.A.)
The Dancing Knight
The dancing knight project was less of a project that taught me new skills, but something fun I wanted to see animated. With motion capture (MOCAP) technology always changing and improving, I wanted to try and implement some MOCAP into my projects. I thought that the process of doing this would be challenging, but turns out - with a well modeled and rigged character, as well as a clean MOCAP animation, it is quite easy to accomplish!
First, I found a rigged model of a knight on Mixamo and imported that into my scene (shown on the right). Since the character was already rigged, I didn’t need to do anything else with him. An image of the paladin is shown to the right.
Next, I downloaded 11 dancing clips from Mixamo. This included things from a nice idle pose, a cool flip, and several hip-hop moves. One at a time, I inserted them into Maya and, using the Trax editor, I arranged them to the right order. While this worked for some animations, I needed to add some position adjustments and rotation adjustments in between the MOCAP sequences in order to make the animation more smooth.
After, I imported one of my favorite songs from 2019/2020: Blinding Lights by The Weeknd, and set it as the background music for my animation in Maya. I also added a point camera to track the knight as it moved around the scene. All that was left to do was the create a floor with a nice radial gradient and light my scene with 80s-inspired blue/purple lights and my animation was done!
I had a lot of fun making this dancing knight. I got to work with some really well-crafted models and very high-end MOCAP animations! Not only this, I learned a lot about blending sequences, and how to make several different movements flow cohesively into one choreographed routine.