July 2012

The Lionhearted Achilles

Dane Aleksander—computer animation student at Carleton University.

HECTOR!

Trojan Warfare II opens on a beachfront with our hero – the lionhearted Achilles – destined for the city of Troy.

This is an animation reel of The Lionhearted Achilles—a game character animated with a motion-capture pipeline at Carleton University. The motion data was captured with a Vicon system at the Azrieli Pavilion mo-cap studio, and then re-targeted to a Human Inverse-Kinematic (HIK) and edited in Autodesk Maya. We aimed for a polycount of about ten-thousand, with consideration for additional assets and optimization within the game development environment – Unity 3D engine. Trojan Warfare II was demonstrated on Windows PCs in December of 2010 as an Interactive Multimedia and Design (IMD) degree term project. ^[1]

Autodesk made a leap with Maya 2011 in terms of the interface for manipulating motion capture data. These screenshots are from post-production on the motion data collected at Carleton University for Trojan Warfare II. The Vicon system had only six cameras, enough for basic animation however limbs were most often resolved in post in Autodesk Maya. With the Maya 2012 release, Autodesk have further simplified this animation pipeline by implementing motion-trails as an optional interface that also indicates the displacement of keyframes over the animation timeline. This visual guide became incredibly useful given the tedious task of editing baked, motion-captured animation.