diegomacario

Hey mike, I'm the Diego, the person who wrote this blog post and implemented the majority of it. Reading this comment, I feel the need to challenge some of your assumptions. I don't expect to change your mind, but here's my take on this:

- I have only been a developer for 7 years, and I don't have a degree in Software Engineering. I actually studied electrical engineering and upon graduating I landed my first job writing device drivers for graphics cards, which got me started writing software professionally.

- I did that for 3 years, and after discovering a passion for computer graphics I worked at Autodesk for 3 years on a desktop application called 3ds Max.

- After all those years working on that old and heavy desktop application I started seeing web-based applications like Figma as the right way to do things. Nothing beats the convenience of opening a link to launch an app, and of being able to launch an app on any device. That's why I joined Shopify's Spatial Commerce Team.

- My favorite programming language is C++, and the demos you see in the blog post are written in C++. I developed them as desktop applications, and compiled them to WebAssembly using Emscripten.

- I have never done "resume driven development." I studied computer graphics as a hobby for years because of a deep interest in it, and I was poorly paid all those years.

Thanks for your time.

Wow that's super cool! That's definitely the biggest challenge - how to keep the size of the mocap data small.

Our library is not the best at that, since it simply records everything to Alembic files, which are quite heavy.

Best of luck with Explayn. I really like the idea of learning from mocapped lessons.

Holy smoke that's so cool, thanks for sharing it! I love that your work helped increase the number of morphTargets in Three.js. That's real impact!

I love this so much, thanks for sharing it! We have been thinking about similar concepts at Shopify. Mocapped performances convey so much more emotion than images or videos.

Hi dolmen!

In the "Implementation Details" section at the bottom of the README I actually explain why I only display 4 curves instead of 10, and you can change the speed of the animation and pause it using the "Playback Speed" slider. If you set it to 0, the animation will pause.

Thanks for your suggestions about being able to select joints and displaying titles. I hope to improve things in the future!

Sorry for the confusion. Your second statement is correct. Sampling just means to evaluate the function at an appropriate t value. I will update the README to make this clearer.

Hahaha this is a fair comment. I guess my intention was to show the complex number crunching that happens in the background to make characters move. I'm still thinking about better ways to visualize things.

Thanks proc0! What you are describing (a hierarchy of bones) is exactly what I'm doing. I decided not to mention that to simplify the explanation of how character animations work, but here are the missing details:

- All the little curves that I'm plotting show the local orientation of each joint.

- To obtain the world orientation of a particular joint, it's necessary to combine the transform matrices of all its parent joints until you reach the root of the hierarchy.

For example, to get the world transform of a wrist joint, you need to combine the local transforms of the wrist, elbow, shoulder, neck, etc. joints.

Animation curves are stored in local space in glTF files, and those are the curves that I'm displaying.

I hope this explains things.