First demos of what Megamotion is actually for.

[chriscalef]

So hey, just thought I'd drop back in here and share a couple of (blundering, first attempt) videos showing off what we're supposed to actually be doing with this thing.

Much more on the way, with clothing, better lighting, more physics, more interesting AI, and better animations - but here we have at least nailed down a process for rendering out of Blender onto a transparent background, and adding masking shapes and light occluding surfaces to at least begin to fit our characters into the background. It will get more fun when we're doing it in video with other things going on as well, of course.

The characters are stock caucasian male figures from Manuel Bastioni Labs, with BVH anims clipped from the CMU motion capture dataset and remixed in Megamotion.

[JeffR]

This is pretty sweet!

Especially the selecting masking and lighting. I noted in the Panic in the Streets demo they got shaded by the trees and that's a really slick technique!

[chriscalef]

Thanks, Jeff!

Yeah I'm still working on the shadow effects - I think I have a better way now, that leaves them not quite so dark when they're in the dark. Shading them one way or another is definitely not optional if we're going to have any sort of believability here. It's all Blender fakery of course, I'm just putting up planes above them that block the light when they're in shadowed parts of the scene. I finally figured out how to mix transparency into the shader so it doesn't have to be all or nothing. I'd like to figure out how to jack up the ambient light, too, because with my better version I have more light, but it looks too directional for a shadowed character. Blender is a complicated beast. :-)

Appreciate the feedback though!