The Wunderland Rig 00.1

What is the Wunderland Rig?

The input mocap Rig in yellow and the the keyframe rig in black

The Wunderland Rig is my journey to develop a tool that can be useful to blend motion capture files with a keyframe animation.  Working as an animator for about a decade, my ambition is to gradually work with huge, or even massive projects. I can understand the frustrations of having to much to do in one scene since in Alice I have about 5 rigs/actors moving at the same time in only one set.

On the other hand, I want to leave the animator's position for a while and use the actors movement to sketch the action. The finessing would occur later  in Keyframe animation. Even if I have scenes where a character runs in motion capture and then flies in the keyframe. To "Blend" those actions would be very useful.

The capture process in Ipi

Because Alice "Adventures Underground" is almost a "no budget" project, the affordable solution for mocap was to use both kinects (depth sensors) and pseye cameras. As capturing software, I used Ipisoft Studio for body capture and Faceshift for... the face. Both need to be captured in separate and then brought to Blender. The Wunderland Rig will need to interpret those "signs" and translate them as a motion sketch for me to continue my work.


Then, and since I'm not a coder, I had to come up with alternative solutions and some constrains and use some "MacGyver" skills in order to make a working rig ready for the film. The rig's name was Hybrid rig, but, as an homage to it's main project, I decided to call it "The Wunderland Rig". Why Wunderland is written like that? Because my Alice story arc (my expanded universe) features World War II and Hitler's involvement in the Vorpal's technology. Hence Wunderland.

On The Muscle system
My muscle system is nothing much than another detour in the Blender developer's wish list. It works by using the shrinkwrap modifier (only Blender geeks can handle this part). But the Shrinkwrap can sometimes perform with not so perfect surface snap movements. Ex: when the skin slides over the muscle, the shrinkwrap is not ready for a smooth sliding. The function detects that the skin is going into another vertex of the muscle and it snaps when and if you're using a lower poly mesh. I realized then that using a smooth modifier on the muscle affected zones could ease those movements. The muscles can also be simulated by using softbodies on them, that will have cool effects on the skin, specially if you`re animating a larger creature.

Inspirations
My experiments in this way of creating muscles in Blender came from two sources: first, I loved the Blenrig that J.P Bouza made and shared, and second, Weta digital tissue solution gave me some ideas about having ways to simulate skin and muscle wiggling.

Final toughts and the future of the Wunderland Rig
Well, at this point I will be cautious since the Wunderland rig is still an half achieved dream. I am an animator, a  3d artist and a storyteller. I have built this system mainly out of necessity, to shorten the gaps in motion capture and ik animation.
I think that there's nothing wrong in using both systems. The purists may say that motion capture is a cheat, and it's not animation. In my mind (and in my heart) they may be half right and I think it's not a bad thing to use actors to input models. Even in today's hollywood's standards, most of the captures are tweaked by animators, fingers and faces are corrected, but for marketing reasons most of the times only the actor/performer gets the higher credit. But I am very proud of using a mix of both techniques. I know it's the best part from both worlds.

As for the future of  Wunderland rig, an interface needs to be coded into an addon to allow the switching on and off of the ik joints from the mocap input rig. If I want to have an upper torso mocaped and the legs keyframed, I have to select the joints, go to the constrains tab and switch from there.

Also, I can see huge improvements on the muscle system, but those still depend on the future of Blender. The improvement of both the shrinkwrap modifier and the implementation of a gpu subsurf would make it more accurate and faster to work. This way of deforming muscles depends on mesh detail and softbody simulation, the higher your skin, the best it can interact with your muscles.  For now, many characters in the film are heavy clothed and have most of the  muscles turned off.