Asset: Spray Paintin' Man (Patreon)

Video of him animated.

Just something to go along with the graffiti! A further experiment with the custom-rest-pose method, and my first to attempt anything besides idling; it's a spray painting guy with about 20 seconds of Rokoko suit mocap data.

There are definite benefits- the whole thing feels a lot more naturalistic than I'm used to with animated photoscans- but there's still a lot to improve. Hands are the next thing to tackle! This guy's hands are mostly blobs that work okay from a distance, but having actual animated fingers would add so much. Also any sort of physics sim would be great. I'm trying to figure out if there's an easier way of than doing that than a full-on cloth sim, because it'd be great to have them be a bit more lightweight.

My goal's to be able to easily make these guys and create reasonably seamless digital doubles that work well in wide shots (the stuff in Salad Mug tends to be decent at best and bizarrely uncanny at worst).

You can also see some artifacts from the photoscan app (one of the biggest reasons I still use Reality Capture, actually), where the auto-exposure would change the values so I'd get these bright faded areas on my butt and other shaded areas. It's a double bummer because not only does it look weird, but  the lack of uniformity hinders attempts to properly fix it with Nathan's HDRI de-lighting technique. I wonder if systems could possibly use the exposure metadata to normalize the values for reconstruction? Anyways- it's a good argument right now for using methods that let you implement higher dynamic range source images, so you can keep the exposure consistent.

Also! I apologize that I haven't figure out how to cleanly export FBXs with animation data yet (you do use those, yeah??), but I'm sure there's a way to figure it out for the future.

Blend File:
Spray Painting Man (Blender 3.0)
Spray Painting Man (Blender 2.93)

EDIT: OKAY SO- I've been doing everything in blender 3.0 because it renders ludicrously fast with Cycles X and I can't give it up, but it totally slipped my mind that that's not a great way to distribute assets!

But! I was able to get a version to work in 2.93 after running into, like, 7 "argh what that makes no sense at all" type issues (like, the rig had full animation data, but wasn't moving??)- but the 2.93 version should work alright now! :D