Blender Pipeline #2 - Animating Characters in Blender with iClone - by Markom3D

hello it's marco matosovich here with re-illusion and in this video we're going to be using character creator 3 exporting the character into iclone applying some of the motion capture data and then exporting it into blender so here we've already got our character he is looking fantastic so this is using character creator 3.3 now if i want to send this character to icoin all i have to do is go file export send character to iclone and just like that the character begins to import and here we have him in our scene he is looking fantastic let me just make that window a little bit bigger and he just looks stunning so let's now go over into content and we'll click on motion up the top and i'm going to come down to this cc mix move mail from here i'm going to go down to let's just go a walk so let me just find our walk cycle here we go so we got walk start now to apply this motion let's make our cursor all the way at frame one i'm going to click and drag and place it on the character and we can see as we scrub through he begins walking so that's pretty cool now the one thing as well to keep in mind that he actually moves off his origins so the character's actually all the way back here so normally what would happen is if we scrub to the end which is about here-ish let me just zoom in with holding alt so we put the cursor on our last frame and then we click and drag walk end and put it over the top there now what should happen is that this walk cycle should start back from the origin but iclone have got it set up so that it continues on its path now i'll show you what i mean by this when we come into blender what i'll do is i'll export both animations by themselves and then we'll combine them together but for now we've got this walk cycle where he starts walking walks to the end and then has a stop that's pretty cool now let me just show you what we'll do is we'll go to the end frame so this is our end frame current frame is 985 so now we're going to export this animation so let's go file export fbx with the presets i will normally select blender because we're using blender i would go 30 frames a second let's go range we know that it goes from range from frame 1 to frame 985 now embedded textures i normally untick this because i don't like the fbx to have all the textures within the model i like to have them separately from here i'm going to leave everything else as is and then i'm going to press export let's just save it in place this would be full walk and i'm going to click save and there we have it now that's been exported let's jump over into blender so here we are in blender 2.9 now the first things to notice if we come over into the render settings sorry into the output properties we can see our frame rate is 24 frames a second now we exported that character at 30 frames a second if i now go file import fbx all i'm going to do is just double click on the character and we should see that the frames per second will update and there we go we've updated to 30 frames a second and we've got our character in so if i just delete the default cube and then press play we can see that we've got a walk cycle that cools that very quickly very simply now this is what i was talking about earlier is our origin point is still all the way here our root bone so if i just increase this to a thousand frames and we'll make the timeline a little bit bigger and we scrub through we can see that it walks all the way to the end now what i'm going to do is we're going to go back into iclone and what i'm going to do is now export these individual mocap files so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to delete this end walk or so walk end let's go delete on that one let's export this one so i'm going to file export fbx current frame is one and the end frame i know is 511 so i'm going to press export let's just put it under start walk and save from here what i'm going to do is i'm going to delete our walk cycle and we should see that it pops all the way back and then from here what i'm going to do is apply our walk end and we can see that he starts all the way back here now if you remember he was actually the end cycle starting here so let's now export this let's find that end frame probably about 474 file export fbx range 474 export and we will call this end walk save now let's jump back into blender i'm going to leave this character in here just an example but what i might do is just move him over a smidgen there we go and so we still got him over there now i need to import two fbxes so let's go file import fbx we've got our end walk and we've got start walk so let's now sorry import them both and here we've got our two characters so if we go back to the start we can see that one's walking and then we'll stop and then the other one keeps walking and then that walk cycle finishes now we only need one character however to make life easier we're going to update the name of the action so from here i'm going to select the animation tab and let's go into object mode so i'm going to come up here and select the editor type and go into the non-linear animation i really like having this view here so what i can do here is select the drop down and push the actions down so we've got individual actions and i'm going to select this character here now what is his walk so he's go he's probably the start walk all right so from here let's change the dope sheet to the action editor so let's just select the armature there we go that's the one we want we know that it's going to be armature002 here we go and so if i come in here select our line and press tab we can go into edit mode and i'm going to rename this action to start walk actually probably walk start and then if i press tab unfortunately this one doesn't update but what i can do now is i'm just going to delete it and then i'm also going to select this character here by right clicking select hierarchy so it selects everything under the armature and delete so what remains is this guy just walking and then coming to an end up here in the nla editor let's rename this action as well while we're here so i'm just going to select our bone tab to go into edit mode and we'll call this walk end just to make our life a little bit easier so from here i'm going to delete that action and i'm going to select our track let's go shift a to add in a new track i'm going to type in walk and start so now we've kind of got him walking and so this is kind of our action so if we go back to iclone it's the exact same thing down here we're just working with timelines now if i want to add in another action i can go shift a again and we'll type in walk and select end and then i can push it back whoops and then i can select our end and push it all the way to the end there so they meet up and now this is what i was talking about so he walks and then we'll snap back now how do we fix this this is the next thing i'm going to go from the very last frame here let's go tab into edit mode and let's zoom all the way in on the action so we're on our last frame i'm going to come up here into pose mode and what i want to find is the hip bone so the relationship goes root bone and then hip bone now if i actually want to see the whole armature i can come over here into the armature settings viewport display and we select in front there we go so now i can see the whole bone structure i want to just find the hip bone which i think might be this one here that's waist that's pelvis ah i was clicking in the wrong spot the hips all the way down here so what i want to do now is i want to copy that information there so what i'm going to do here is on the dope sheet i'm just going to press ctrl c to copy that location let's press tab to go back into the to turn off edit mode i'm going to select walk end and then press tab again from here what i'm going to do is i've still got the hip bone selected i'm just going to press ctrl v and that's going to move the character to its location however if i move it to the next frame he'll pop back so to understand this i'm going to go up here to the editor type and change that to the graph editor still with the hip bone selected this is all the information on our hip bone now what i will do is we can see that this orange line let's have a look what is the orange line well we don't need to view the rotation or the scale we just care about the location at the moment so we can see that the red line here is our x-axis so we can see that this is where it starts sorry this is where we can see that this point here on this frame was where the last animation ended so we need to bring everything else up what i'm going to do from here is hide our y location and our z location i'm going to select everything i'm going to press b for box select and then middle mouse to deselect that vertice or sorry that keyframe what i'm going to do now is press g to move and then i'm going to press a y to move it up now let's just scroll in and we're going to use a bit of guesstimation here g or y and we can see that we kind of have this line that goes up so we're going to kind of try and match that curve and so now if i were to move from here that's the x-axis so he's no longer moving left and right well he'll sorry he'll be in line with left and right but the y value is more what we're concerned about so let's go into y location of the hip let's select everything like we did with a b to box select and then middle mouse to deselect and let's align this one up as well so i think that's quite nice there and we'll see that it didn't change much because it's not the y-axis even though we've got our green line and we've got this all green graph here so now he's going to have that consistent of x and y movement now obviously the character is set up for z-axis to be forward my mistake but if i go if i turn off y and go zen and we zoom out whoa we can see how far out we've got to go so let's press the period key on the numpad so let's select everything with a and then press the period key on the numpad and we can see that this is our kind of movement so this is how he moves forward but we can see that the first frame which is the last frame from the previous walk cycle is all the way up here so let's now move everything b to box select middle mouse button to deselect let's go gy you can see that he's already moved up and then i'm going to kind of guestimate the flow gy something like that and then we have him walking now let's change the graph editor back to the non-linear animation let's press tab to close this and now what we're going to have is if we scroll through we have him walking so this is why i really recommend doing all this within iclone because it just gets rid of all that shenanigans

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 33,173

Keywords: 3D character creator, create your own character, physically based rendering, game character, royalty free 3D characters, Character Base, rigged 3D character, character generator, AR, VR, game, video game development, Make 3D characters, Generate 3D characters, Make easy 3D characters, video, reallusion, blender, auto rig pro, markom3d, blenderguru, darrinlile, blender 101, character creator, iclone, character rig

Id: x1XEicb9GH8

Length: 11min 52sec (712 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020