Wonder Studio

During the week, I looked into Wonder Studio motion capture of 3d characters. I made a basic test shot using Wonder Studios' in-house characters and a couple of shots with custom characters. Throughout, my tests I created a rough Google doc with corresponding solutions to errors I had while uploading a custom character. I discovered that wonder studio processes faster the more frames you specify a character to its correlating actor. Although, this has a bottleneck which I found 1 frame every 1-2 seconds sufficient for decent results. Additionally, Wonder Studio lights the 3d model with simple lighting to match the scene.

Throughout the week, I also explored what shots Wonder Studio has problems with and what steps should be taken to get an optimal shot. Furthermore, keeping the same amount of actors in a shot throughout its duration helps reduce mistakes. For example, if it's a portrait-like shot keep a similar zoom throughout. In addition, you want to keep the actor clearly recognizable in a shot by avoiding motion blur, occlusion, darkness, etc. Additionally, Wonder Studio can’t do interaction with objects or other characters. Wonder Studio also has a facial capture method using blender shape keys, but I did not get around to getting this working.

Therefore, Wonder Studio is a great way to get relatively simple shots done with some issues. But it will save a lot of time by doing 80% of the compositing and animation for you.

-Tyson