Hi ! You really did a great job here and I have to thank you for it! I had an interview for a mocap cleaning job in a gamedev studio and I had never done mocap before, nor used Motionbuilder. They gave me a test (basically, looping a mocap of character running) and this tutorial was a great help to me. I can say that I got the job thanks to you!
Great tutorial. Gave me much more insight than most other tutorials on MoBu, including those done by professional tutors for professional sites. Thanks a lot for sharing. I'd love to see more of this kind!
Thanks for making this very informative tutorial. Im a total noob with MoBu but this video demonstrates a lot of essential techniques i can tell. I hope you do more.
Thank you Dan, I've probably watched this 10 times by now, finally learned the final portion of adjusting the root's X value via constraints at the end. I'm going to use all these techniques in a Maya>Motionbuilder>Unity tutorial series on my own channel and will give credit/links to you in my videos.
Thanks for doing this Dan! We are trying to get our animators up to speed on Mobu but of course we are also under deadlines doing film work. Great to find some examples by animators that folks can watch and follow.
Hi Gideon. I can't reply directly to your comment because it's a linked comment on Google plus, but here's the answer to your question: You could do that, but you wouldn't want to. Degrees of Freedom, which is what I'm using to constrain the root marker in Y, tends to be a global rig setting, by which I mean that it would apply to every animation you're going to do with your rig. While our walk cycle is set to zero in X, we don't want to constrain the X-axis for every animation we're ever going to do with this rig, because lots of our animations will have both X-axis and Z-axis movement on the root marker. We constrain the Root marker in Y because in 99.9% of animations we're never going to lift it off the ground.
Dan Lowe Hi Dan, Thank you very much for the fast reply. If i hadn't checked back i would have missed your answer. I have gotten something wrong in my question. I had the thing with the constraints wrong and i understand what you were doing. I have been doing it the same way the last week now. I thought it would eliminate hip movement on the x axis for some reason. Not sure why i know how the game engines work with root motion so i know why the root should only move forward in a walk cycle. I have another question now. The root was originally stationary at the center of the coordinates. Why are there even any keys on the x and z axis? It is only constrained on the y axis so it should be the only axis with keys on. But i have to say that your tutorial is fantastic. Usually tutorials are made by people who also only more or less get what they are doing and you have to piece together what they are trying to do yourself, but your tutorial as absolutely amazing. You can really see that you know what you are doing and know how to express it. I have built my own small mocap studio at home with ipisoft and 6 cameras now and this helped a lot. Motion capture is something really interesting.
Hehe i just posted my comment and thought.. Hmm.. Maybe on their site lol. So i will strongly consider a subscription just to hear you and Krisjans talks. Love your work! You should post more tuts though ;-)
Hi Dan. Awesome tutorial, helped me out quite a bit. I was wondering if you could touch a bit on all those other constraints you used on the character "to better represent how he looks in engine". I'd really be interested in how you set all those correctives? up. And PLEASE, if you have the time, go ahead and do more of those! Thanks!
Hey Dan, just wanted to say thanks for the great tutorial! I've just started getting into the Mocap side of things (I work in games too) and I've been going through this process in some form or another, so it's been super helpful to see some great tips regarding workflow from someone who's doing the same thing. I'll be keeping an eye out for updates :) Thanks again!
Amazing tutorial! Thank you very much for sharing it! I wanted to ask if you maybe can recommend some good exercise to get used to MotionBuilder? Just in your opinion what could be useful to practice most?
at 57:25 couldn't you have flattened out that line by constraining the root in that axis additionally to the y axis. That way you would preserve hip motion in that axis and have the root stay on center?
Fantastic, it's the first proffesional video i see of this tutorials, if only i can have one licence of that software... can i do this in some other free/open source software? Thanks for your video!
+chrisnieve There are other tools that are able to deal with motion capture, but they would likely have a very different workflow. You can get free 30 day trial versions of Autodesk's software (including Motionbuilder), on their website. Otherwise, a lot of people that are starting out with 3D software like to use Blender (www.blender.org/), although I personally have no experience with it and no idea if it deals with motion capture.
That is such a great tutorial for beginners that want to work with mocaps!! Can you do more? You should even do commercial ones for CMVFX or something like that.
+Nicolas Fischöder Thanks Nicolas. Glad you enjoyed the tutorial. It's definitely my plan to do more, I'm just not sure when, as I'm often very busy. Hearing positive feedback from people like yourself is encouraging though. Hopefully I'll get time to do something new in the next few months. Thanks. :)
Hey Dan! Are there any places I can get mocap sessions online? so I can learn to clean them up and putting them in my locomotion system :) Amazing tutorial, really interesting! My dream is a job at ubisoft! You keep it up!
Hi Dan, i heard u did a talk on GDC 2016 about how to replicate yourself into a button hehe. Was that talk recorded somewhere? Obviously i'd love to hear what you said :)
Hi Jonas. Thanks for the interest. The talk is on the GDC Vault (slides are here: gdcvault.com/play/1023114/Animation-Bootcamp-The-Animate-Button). Unfortunately video of the talk is only accessible to vault subscribers. I'm not able to post the talk publicly because technically it's owned by GDC.
Hi Dan, First off great tutorial, please do more. I am just learning MotionBuilder so forgive me if this is really obvious. First how do you change Z to be the up axis. Maya makes it easy MotionBuilder not so much. Second I am trying to get MoCap data into UE4, I understand you are with Ubi so if you don't want to answer that's fine. :) For UE4 the character and Root never move from the Axis. The character runs or walks in place. How do I do that with MoCap data?
One thing I have found to help with this: Keep in mind what you will need to be exported. For example, I need CryEngine, so the facing value is always needing to export in -Z axis. I dont change motion builder, I just make sure that with the root system in place, I rotate the animation starting/looping point to bake the animation in the direction I need it to be before I hit bake/plot to skel/control rig. My problem currently, I cannot get my root to snap to the ground, it only snaps to the hips and not where I need it to be in the game engine.
Hi Dan, i was wondering... after following your tutorial and learning from the steps you go through, i initially got a looping animation working, which for me was quite an achievement :-) So the mocap data i was working on, is coming from a shoot i did in my backyard with ipisoft (markerless mocap) and as you probably know, it doesen't produce the most accurate results. So one of my knees were bending inwards at one step. So if i wanted to apply a corrective adjustment to that part, i would make that before i fix foot sliding right? Or what is the prefeered way to do this? Finally this video is still one of my favorite motionbuilder videos which i keep returning to because you cover so many aspects of the mocap cleanup process in such a nice detail. I seriously hope you will do more. Anyway thanks for making this video! Great help :-)
+Jonas Mølgaard I would fix the bent knee and any other mocap reconstruction or retargetting issues before fixing foot sliding, yes. You can either do a correction on an additive layer, or if it's a really jittery data, it can be better to just delete any problematic/jittery keys for that effector (in the curve editor), on the base layer, and let it interpolate between the keys that are left. And thanks for the kind words. :) I do want to do more tutorials, but unfortunately it can be hard to find the free time to do them.
Hey dan, I'm aiming to become an animator in Ubisoft Toronto and currently making a new portfolio piece. Question is, how much should I put my focus with animating and editing in MOBO as supposed to hand keyed anim in MAYA? What do you also look for in a mocap portfolio piece (length, content, actions)?
+Link The Love . Hi! I think regardless of keyframing or mocap, the most important thing to show is a good understanding and execution of core animation principles (like so: vimeo.com/93206523 ). That's the most difficult thing to achieve since it takes a lot of practice, and so it's what studios generally look for most. The 3D app that you use is less important. It's always nice to see on a resume when the applicant knows how to use the same software that you use in the studio, but it's not essential, and if you're a really good animator then most studios are willing to let you learn their software on the job. The question of keyframed vs mocap for showreels is a tough one: In general, I'd say studios prefer to see keyframed animation, just because it's clear that it's all your work. The issue with mocap is that it's possible that the original data was already very clean and well retargetted before the animator even touched it, so maybe the animator actually did very little to the motion, and the credit should go to the mocap studio that did the retarget. That said, I sometimes think it's a little unfair that companies focus so heavily on keyframing when hiring, especially if the job is for a game where you'll be working exclusively on mocap clean-up. There's an art to cleaning up mocap and while it draws on a lot of the same fundamentals as keyframing, it also requires different skills and experience, and I think that should be respected when looking at applicant's reels. Personally, I would do maybe 60-90 seconds of animation on your reel, with maybe 75% keyframing and 25% mocap. Show your animation as clearly as possible (no crazy camera movements, or effects). Also, if you can show your animations working as part of a system in a game engine, that's always super nice to see, but not essential. But remember, the main focus should be on good animation fundamentals, good body mechanics, and breathing life into the character.
Dan Lowe Hey Dan thanks, for the reply. I found everything you said incredible helpful. My 12 principles is a bit rusty, so I've got to work on that. I'll also keep in my the content for my reel. I'm currently animating combat take downs since I am inspired by the animations from Assassin's Creed and Splinter Cell. Once again thanks!
38:21 Story mode is still on, dude. It's still playing the animation clips in the Story tab and not the animation data in the take itself until it's turned off. Yeah, this is an old video but any info helps.
Even though the Story button in the top left of the Story Tool is active, the Story _Track_ is muted, so it has no effect on the scene. Even if it _was_ active, the Story Track is a Character Track so it only affects the Control Rig, and not the Actor or c3d markers. The issue here was that at 13:00 I moved the Story Clip to frame 0 and baked to the Control Rig, so the Control Rig has keys from 0 to 142 but the animation on the c3d markers is still left at frame 839562. So later when I switch back to the Actor, it's not showing any motion on the c3ds and Actor when I scrub, because the keys are all way off in the future, outside of the current timeline framing.
Thank you for sharing this very information tutorial. I have downloaded some free c3d data I would like to use those for my practice but only problem is those data don’t have the T pose at the beginning. Please help me on the question. How will I map the actor to c3d data if I don’t have the T pose for c3d data ? Any suggestion how to proceed in this situation ?
If you pose the Motionbuilder actor body so that it matches the C3D markers, and then assign those C3D markers to the actor in Marker Sets, I think it should still work. You don't need the T-pose exactly, it just makes it a lot easier and gives you better feedback, which will result in better quality. Just be aware that if the marker setup is different in every shot that you have, you'll have to do a new actor setup for each shot, which is very time consuming. Check the Motionbuilder help files for more information on how to drive the actor body with C3D markers.
awesome. thanks for making this!! i just dont manage to get my workflow with xsi done. making the character in xsi, bring it to MB and characterize and drive in my mocap file and plot that to the skeleton, no problem. but i dont manage to get the motion back onto the skeleton in xsi, it should work with fbx merge, (add and update animation) but what ever options i choose on importing the fbx, it either creates a second set of animated nulls/bones or it doesnt load anything at all. i never just loads the motion. you dont happen to use xsi, or ?
Do you know why humanik calculates roll joints quite weird when working with mocap data? i have been trying to find a better solution :/ so far i drive the forearm twist using a aim constraint and some null objects, but not sure how to approach the shoulder for a better system.
+fla3d Hi. The last time I had to do marker reconstruction was about 5 years ago (it's handled for us by the Ubisoft Mocap studio), so if I'm honest, I'm not super familiar with Blade. Assuming that the FBX export that you mention is exporting a skeleton rather than marker data, then the advantage of exporting C3Ds is that you get to use Motionbuilder's Actor Body tools to do your retargetting. This gives you much more control over the retargetting result than a basic skeleton to character retarget, so you generally get much better results. Again, I don't know exactly what Blade is capable of though, so maybe you're talking about different things.
+Dan Lowe Hi, thanks for the reply. I'm a teacher and we have here a Vicon capture system, I'm trying to build the best pipeline as possible. So I've been doing a lot of tests comparing the use of the C3D mapped to an actor against just the skeleton from Blade and all I've got was more labor with the C3D. After I characterize the skeleton from Blade I was able to use the same retargeting tools as when I use the actor. So maybe I am missing something, if you have some more information I'd be glad to hear. Best regards.
I'd be happy to provide feedback on your pipeline, but I'd need to know exactly what you're doing and how you're doing it. If you were willing to record your workflow and share it, then I'd have a better idea whether what you're doing seems right to me or not. It's entirely possible that you're doing an approach that I don't know about, and it gives you better or faster results. Or it could be that you're outputting data that looks really good but isn't feasible for actual production (for example skeletons that are allowed to stretch give a really good retargetting result, but are often prohibitively difficult to implement in game engines). Alternatively it could be that you're satisfied with a level of quality that I wouldn't be, and so the subtle differences between the two approaches maybe aren't apparent to you. Also Mobu's actor tool isn't the easiest to work with and there's a lot of nuance to getting great results. It could be that you're getting comparable results with the skeleton because you're not hitting the ceiling of what the actor tool is capable of. Again, without seeing the details of your actual workflow it's difficult to tell.
man, how do you keep them walking in 1 spot WITHOUT moving. can this only be done with programming? I would like to make the default motion be stationary and have the game control speed/movement.
This depends on what you mean exactly. In Motionbuilder you can make a character move on the spot by creating a pose from the first frame of your cycle, and then pasting that pose to the start and end of the cycle on a layer. However, whether you want to do this or not depends entirely on the game engine you're using. At Ubisoft I can integrate a cycle into our engine as "speed scale anim", which means that it can adjust the speed of the animation based on another parameter from code. That said, another company that I worked at had a physics driven animation system, so your animations had to match a specific speed because that was the speed the character's physics object would move at. If you can give me more information, maybe I can provide more answers.
hi thanks for sharing this tutorial so i have a little problem in motion builder with some mocap, when i import them they appear under plane,but in max they are OK i know i can fix it with animation layer but i want to know if there is a method to fix it automatically because there is a lot of mocap and if you can told me how i can clean up a mocap automatically without key frame animation especially the foot sliding thank you in advance
It depends on the type of animation and the engine. The root object (the 3 pronged object at the base of the character in my animation), usually needs to be constrained in some way or other to match requirements of the engine. So for example, on a walk cycle you'd usually zero all rotation and any X-axis translation because game engines usually expect movement cycles to be in a straight line. Usually you'd leave Z-axis translation as it is, including any forward or backwards drift, especially if the motion in your engine is animation driven. Sometimes engines require you to make your Z-axis translation linear though, so it depends. The important thing to understand here is that I'm only talking about the root object (which is sometimes called the reference object, displacement object, or any number of other different names, depending on the developer). The pelvis should do whatever it was doing in the mocap, and is free to drift away or rotate away slightly from the root object. It shouldn't drift too much because the position and orientation of the pelvis relative to the root object needs to be consistent for when the game blends from one animation to another, but if you find that's the case and is causing blending issues, you probably shouldn't be fixing it in the animation as much as going back to the capture stage and recapturing.
Not at all. Maya is a great program for learning animation. Motionbuilder is a program that has lots of tools for dealing specifically with motion capture animation; tools that Maya doesn't have. That said, Maya is the industry standard for keyframe animation, and has other advantages that Motionbuilder lacks. Also, Autodesk is working right now on porting many of the Motionbuilder tools and functionality over to Maya, so in a few years mocap studios will likely move to Maya. If you're learning to animate, I'd recommend starting with Maya and concentrating on keyframe animation. It's really important that you get a strong foundation in basic animation principles, even if you eventually want to work with mocap. Keyframing or even traditional drawn animation, are far better than mocap clean-up for giving you that foundation.
Hi Dan, i've sent you a few e-mails, not sure if you're getting them, so im writing here, in case they're getting lost somehow. I use the e-mail you had on the powerpoint slides from the gdc talk on adjustment blending.
Sitting with mocap right now and this tutorial is immensely helpful!
Super interesting. I've only ever worked with Facial MoCap before... The loops and curves of body motion seem SO much more agreeable!
Hi ! You really did a great job here and I have to thank you for it! I had an interview for a mocap cleaning job in a gamedev studio and I had never done mocap before, nor used Motionbuilder. They gave me a test (basically, looping a mocap of character running) and this tutorial was a great help to me. I can say that I got the job thanks to you!
Great tutorial. Gave me much more insight than most other tutorials on MoBu, including those done by professional tutors for professional sites. Thanks a lot for sharing. I'd love to see more of this kind!
that was a great tutorial and there were bunch of professional techniques and advices. Thanks man...
That is such a great tutorial for beginners that want to work with mocaps!
Awesome Insights and knowledge that's still relevant. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for making this very informative tutorial. Im a total noob with MoBu but this video demonstrates a lot of essential techniques i can tell. I hope you do more.
Awesome tutorial Dan! Thank you!
Thank you Dan, I've probably watched this 10 times by now, finally learned the final portion of adjusting the root's X value via constraints at the end. I'm going to use all these techniques in a Maya>Motionbuilder>Unity tutorial series on my own channel and will give credit/links to you in my videos.
Awesome! Glad you found it useful. :)
Thanks for doing this Dan! We are trying to get our animators up to speed on Mobu but of course we are also under deadlines doing film work. Great to find some examples by animators that folks can watch and follow.
Thank you, You helped me alot! Please make more tutorials, because that is quality content!
Hi Gideon. I can't reply directly to your comment because it's a linked comment on Google plus, but here's the answer to your question: You could do that, but you wouldn't want to. Degrees of Freedom, which is what I'm using to constrain the root marker in Y, tends to be a global rig setting, by which I mean that it would apply to every animation you're going to do with your rig.
While our walk cycle is set to zero in X, we don't want to constrain the X-axis for every animation we're ever going to do with this rig, because lots of our animations will have both X-axis and Z-axis movement on the root marker. We constrain the Root marker in Y because in 99.9% of animations we're never going to lift it off the ground.
Dan Lowe Hi Dan,
Thank you very much for the fast reply. If i hadn't checked back i would have missed your answer.
I have gotten something wrong in my question. I had the thing with the constraints wrong and i understand what you were doing.
I have been doing it the same way the last week now.
I thought it would eliminate hip movement on the x axis for some reason. Not sure why
i know how the game engines work with root motion so i know why the root should only move forward in a walk cycle.
I have another question now.
The root was originally stationary at the center of the coordinates. Why are there even any keys on the x and z axis?
It is only constrained on the y axis so it should be the only axis with keys on.
But i have to say that your tutorial is fantastic. Usually tutorials are made by people who also only more or less get what they are doing and you have to piece together what they are trying to do yourself, but your tutorial as absolutely amazing. You can really see that you know what you are doing and know how to express it.
I have built my own small mocap studio at home with ipisoft and 6 cameras now and this helped a lot.
Motion capture is something really interesting.
Thanks so much for making this. Has helped me understand the process better!
Thanks, Dan! It was very informative, hope to see some more tricks from you (:
Hehe i just posted my comment and thought.. Hmm.. Maybe on their site lol. So i will strongly consider a subscription just to hear you and Krisjans talks. Love your work! You should post more tuts though ;-)
Hi Dan. Awesome tutorial, helped me out quite a bit. I was wondering if you could touch a bit on all those other constraints you used on the character "to better represent how he looks in engine". I'd really be interested in how you set all those correctives? up. And PLEASE, if you have the time, go ahead and do more of those!
Thanks!
Thank you for this - really appreciated
Hey Dan, just wanted to say thanks for the great tutorial! I've just started getting into the Mocap side of things (I work in games too) and I've been going through this process in some form or another, so it's been super helpful to see some great tips regarding workflow from someone who's doing the same thing.
I'll be keeping an eye out for updates :)
Thanks again!
Amazing tutorial! Thank you very much for sharing it!
I wanted to ask if you maybe can recommend some good exercise to get used to MotionBuilder? Just in your opinion what could be useful to practice most?
at 57:25 couldn't you have flattened out that line by constraining the root in that axis additionally to the y axis. That way you would preserve hip motion in that axis and have the root stay on center?
Thanks Dan!
this is really good tutorial
Great video. I want to get back into mocap and it is hard to find good tutorials.
Thanks for sharing!
Very pro level. Thanks.
Fantastic, it's the first proffesional video i see of this tutorials, if only i can have one licence of that software... can i do this in some other free/open source software? Thanks for your video!
+chrisnieve There are other tools that are able to deal with motion capture, but they would likely have a very different workflow. You can get free 30 day trial versions of Autodesk's software (including Motionbuilder), on their website. Otherwise, a lot of people that are starting out with 3D software like to use Blender (www.blender.org/), although I personally have no experience with it and no idea if it deals with motion capture.
You'd think mocap would be a whole lot easier but then you have to clean it up makes you want to just do it step by step
That is such a great tutorial for beginners that want to work with mocaps!! Can you do more? You should even do commercial ones for CMVFX or something like that.
+Nicolas Fischöder Thanks Nicolas. Glad you enjoyed the tutorial. It's definitely my plan to do more, I'm just not sure when, as I'm often very busy. Hearing positive feedback from people like yourself is encouraging though. Hopefully I'll get time to do something new in the next few months. Thanks. :)
Hey Dan! Are there any places I can get mocap sessions online? so I can learn to clean them up and putting them in my locomotion system :) Amazing tutorial, really interesting! My dream is a job at ubisoft! You keep it up!
Hi Dan, i heard u did a talk on GDC 2016 about how to replicate yourself into a button hehe. Was that talk recorded somewhere? Obviously i'd love to hear what you said :)
Hi Jonas. Thanks for the interest. The talk is on the GDC Vault (slides are here: gdcvault.com/play/1023114/Animation-Bootcamp-The-Animate-Button). Unfortunately video of the talk is only accessible to vault subscribers. I'm not able to post the talk publicly because technically it's owned by GDC.
Hi Dan, First off great tutorial, please do more. I am just learning MotionBuilder so forgive me if this is really obvious. First how do you change Z to be the up axis. Maya makes it easy MotionBuilder not so much. Second I am trying to get MoCap data into UE4, I understand you are with Ubi so if you don't want to answer that's fine. :) For UE4 the character and Root never move from the Axis. The character runs or walks in place. How do I do that with MoCap data?
One thing I have found to help with this:
Keep in mind what you will need to be exported. For example, I need CryEngine, so the facing value is always needing to export in -Z axis. I dont change motion builder, I just make sure that with the root system in place, I rotate the animation starting/looping point to bake the animation in the direction I need it to be before I hit bake/plot to skel/control rig.
My problem currently, I cannot get my root to snap to the ground, it only snaps to the hips and not where I need it to be in the game engine.
Hi Dan, i was wondering... after following your tutorial and learning from the steps you go through, i initially got a looping animation working, which for me was quite an achievement :-) So the mocap data i was working on, is coming from a shoot i did in my backyard with ipisoft (markerless mocap) and as you probably know, it doesen't produce the most accurate results. So one of my knees were bending inwards at one step. So if i wanted to apply a corrective adjustment to that part, i would make that before i fix foot sliding right? Or what is the prefeered way to do this?
Finally this video is still one of my favorite motionbuilder videos which i keep returning to because you cover so many aspects of the mocap cleanup process in such a nice detail. I seriously hope you will do more. Anyway thanks for making this video! Great help :-)
+Jonas Mølgaard I would fix the bent knee and any other mocap reconstruction or retargetting issues before fixing foot sliding, yes. You can either do a correction on an additive layer, or if it's a really jittery data, it can be better to just delete any problematic/jittery keys for that effector (in the curve editor), on the base layer, and let it interpolate between the keys that are left.
And thanks for the kind words. :) I do want to do more tutorials, but unfortunately it can be hard to find the free time to do them.
Like it!
Hey dan,
I'm aiming to become an animator in Ubisoft Toronto and currently making a new portfolio piece. Question is, how much should I put my focus with animating and editing in MOBO as supposed to hand keyed anim in MAYA? What do you also look for in a mocap portfolio piece (length, content, actions)?
+Link The Love . Hi! I think regardless of keyframing or mocap, the most important thing to show is a good understanding and execution of core animation principles (like so: vimeo.com/93206523 ). That's the most difficult thing to achieve since it takes a lot of practice, and so it's what studios generally look for most. The 3D app that you use is less important. It's always nice to see on a resume when the applicant knows how to use the same software that you use in the studio, but it's not essential, and if you're a really good animator then most studios are willing to let you learn their software on the job.
The question of keyframed vs mocap for showreels is a tough one: In general, I'd say studios prefer to see keyframed animation, just because it's clear that it's all your work. The issue with mocap is that it's possible that the original data was already very clean and well retargetted before the animator even touched it, so maybe the animator actually did very little to the motion, and the credit should go to the mocap studio that did the retarget. That said, I sometimes think it's a little unfair that companies focus so heavily on keyframing when hiring, especially if the job is for a game where you'll be working exclusively on mocap clean-up. There's an art to cleaning up mocap and while it draws on a lot of the same fundamentals as keyframing, it also requires different skills and experience, and I think that should be respected when looking at applicant's reels.
Personally, I would do maybe 60-90 seconds of animation on your reel, with maybe 75% keyframing and 25% mocap. Show your animation as clearly as possible (no crazy camera movements, or effects). Also, if you can show your animations working as part of a system in a game engine, that's always super nice to see, but not essential. But remember, the main focus should be on good animation fundamentals, good body mechanics, and breathing life into the character.
Dan Lowe Hey Dan thanks, for the reply. I found everything you said incredible helpful. My 12 principles is a bit rusty, so I've got to work on that. I'll also keep in my the content for my reel. I'm currently animating combat take downs since I am inspired by the animations from Assassin's Creed and Splinter Cell. Once again thanks!
38:21 Story mode is still on, dude. It's still playing the animation clips in the Story tab and not the animation data in the take itself until it's turned off.
Yeah, this is an old video but any info helps.
Even though the Story button in the top left of the Story Tool is active, the Story _Track_ is muted, so it has no effect on the scene. Even if it _was_ active, the Story Track is a Character Track so it only affects the Control Rig, and not the Actor or c3d markers.
The issue here was that at 13:00 I moved the Story Clip to frame 0 and baked to the Control Rig, so the Control Rig has keys from 0 to 142 but the animation on the c3d markers is still left at frame 839562. So later when I switch back to the Actor, it's not showing any motion on the c3ds and Actor when I scrub, because the keys are all way off in the future, outside of the current timeline framing.
Thanks for Sharing Dan ;)
Thanks Clove! Hope things are good with you. :)
Thank you for sharing this very information tutorial. I have downloaded some free c3d data I would like to use those for my practice but only problem is those data don’t have the T pose at the beginning. Please help me on the question. How will I map the actor to c3d data if I don’t have the T pose for c3d data ? Any suggestion how to proceed in this situation ?
If you pose the Motionbuilder actor body so that it matches the C3D markers, and then assign those C3D markers to the actor in Marker Sets, I think it should still work. You don't need the T-pose exactly, it just makes it a lot easier and gives you better feedback, which will result in better quality. Just be aware that if the marker setup is different in every shot that you have, you'll have to do a new actor setup for each shot, which is very time consuming.
Check the Motionbuilder help files for more information on how to drive the actor body with C3D markers.
Dan Lowe thanks again. I really appreciate it :)
awesome. thanks for making this!! i just dont manage to get my workflow with xsi done. making the character in xsi, bring it to MB and characterize and drive in my mocap file and plot that to the skeleton, no problem.
but i dont manage to get the motion back onto the skeleton in xsi,
it should work with fbx merge, (add and update animation)
but what ever options i choose on importing the fbx, it either creates a second set of animated nulls/bones or it doesnt load anything at all. i never just loads the motion.
you dont happen to use xsi, or ?
Program (faceshift) Is it supports the movement of the entire objects
Or that the movement of the face only
Please, I have a question
Do you know why humanik calculates roll joints quite weird when working with mocap data? i have been trying to find a better solution :/ so far i drive the forearm twist using a aim constraint and some null objects, but not sure how to approach the shoulder for a better system.
there aren't many new MB tutorials... It's so important program in game dev but it seems no one is making new tutorials about it :/
Hi Dan, thanks for the great video. Is there any advantage using C3D files from Vicon instead of just exporting and FBX from Blade?
+fla3d Hi. The last time I had to do marker reconstruction was about 5 years ago (it's handled for us by the Ubisoft Mocap studio), so if I'm honest, I'm not super familiar with Blade.
Assuming that the FBX export that you mention is exporting a skeleton rather than marker data, then the advantage of exporting C3Ds is that you get to use Motionbuilder's Actor Body tools to do your retargetting. This gives you much more control over the retargetting result than a basic skeleton to character retarget, so you generally get much better results.
Again, I don't know exactly what Blade is capable of though, so maybe you're talking about different things.
+Dan Lowe Hi, thanks for the reply. I'm a teacher and we have here a Vicon capture system, I'm trying to build the best pipeline as possible. So I've been doing a lot of tests comparing the use of the C3D mapped to an actor against just the skeleton from Blade and all I've got was more labor with the C3D. After I characterize the skeleton from Blade I was able to use the same retargeting tools as when I use the actor. So maybe I am missing something, if you have some more information I'd be glad to hear. Best regards.
I'd be happy to provide feedback on your pipeline, but I'd need to know exactly what you're doing and how you're doing it. If you were willing to record your workflow and share it, then I'd have a better idea whether what you're doing seems right to me or not.
It's entirely possible that you're doing an approach that I don't know about, and it gives you better or faster results. Or it could be that you're outputting data that looks really good but isn't feasible for actual production (for example skeletons that are allowed to stretch give a really good retargetting result, but are often prohibitively difficult to implement in game engines). Alternatively it could be that you're satisfied with a level of quality that I wouldn't be, and so the subtle differences between the two approaches maybe aren't apparent to you. Also Mobu's actor tool isn't the easiest to work with and there's a lot of nuance to getting great results. It could be that you're getting comparable results with the skeleton because you're not hitting the ceiling of what the actor tool is capable of.
Again, without seeing the details of your actual workflow it's difficult to tell.
No worries. Thanks for watching! :)
man, how do you keep them walking in 1 spot WITHOUT moving. can this only be done with programming? I would like to make the default motion be stationary and have the game control speed/movement.
This depends on what you mean exactly. In Motionbuilder you can make a character move on the spot by creating a pose from the first frame of your cycle, and then pasting that pose to the start and end of the cycle on a layer.
However, whether you want to do this or not depends entirely on the game engine you're using. At Ubisoft I can integrate a cycle into our engine as "speed scale anim", which means that it can adjust the speed of the animation based on another parameter from code. That said, another company that I worked at had a physics driven animation system, so your animations had to match a specific speed because that was the speed the character's physics object would move at.
If you can give me more information, maybe I can provide more answers.
hi thanks for sharing this tutorial so i have a little problem in motion builder with some mocap,
when i import them they appear under plane,but in max they are OK i know i can fix it with animation layer but i want to know if there is a method to fix it automatically because there is a lot of mocap and if you can told me how i can clean up a mocap automatically without key frame animation especially the foot sliding
thank you in advance
Would you normally lock the animation on grid, or do you keep the movement translation when you export it into your engine?
It depends on the type of animation and the engine.
The root object (the 3 pronged object at the base of the character in my animation), usually needs to be constrained in some way or other to match requirements of the engine. So for example, on a walk cycle you'd usually zero all rotation and any X-axis translation because game engines usually expect movement cycles to be in a straight line. Usually you'd leave Z-axis translation as it is, including any forward or backwards drift, especially if the motion in your engine is animation driven. Sometimes engines require you to make your Z-axis translation linear though, so it depends.
The important thing to understand here is that I'm only talking about the root object (which is sometimes called the reference object, displacement object, or any number of other different names, depending on the developer). The pelvis should do whatever it was doing in the mocap, and is free to drift away or rotate away slightly from the root object. It shouldn't drift too much because the position and orientation of the pelvis relative to the root object needs to be consistent for when the game blends from one animation to another, but if you find that's the case and is causing blending issues, you probably shouldn't be fixing it in the animation as much as going back to the capture stage and recapturing.
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I'm learning animation in Maya. Now I see there is this "Motion Builder"
Am I wasting my time in Maya?
Not at all. Maya is a great program for learning animation.
Motionbuilder is a program that has lots of tools for dealing specifically with motion capture animation; tools that Maya doesn't have. That said, Maya is the industry standard for keyframe animation, and has other advantages that Motionbuilder lacks. Also, Autodesk is working right now on porting many of the Motionbuilder tools and functionality over to Maya, so in a few years mocap studios will likely move to Maya.
If you're learning to animate, I'd recommend starting with Maya and concentrating on keyframe animation. It's really important that you get a strong foundation in basic animation principles, even if you eventually want to work with mocap. Keyframing or even traditional drawn animation, are far better than mocap clean-up for giving you that foundation.
Thank you Dan. Hope everything went well during the Wuhan Virus.
Are project files included?
Sadly no. The mocap and rig are from a game I worked on, so I'm not able to give them away.
Hi Dan, i've sent you a few e-mails, not sure if you're getting them, so im writing here, in case they're getting lost somehow. I use the e-mail you had on the powerpoint slides from the gdc talk on adjustment blending.
Jonas Mølgaard Hi Jonas. If it's my Ubisoft email address then I'm no longer at Ubisoft, I'm now at Visceral games. You can email me at dalowe@ea.com.
Dan Lowe oh i see, i'll forward my email then. Anyway check out my channel for my progress on your adjustment blending technique
i used blade and it was a nightmare
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