[Blender] Retargeting to Rigify using Rokoko (Free & Easy!)

in this video I'll show you the simplest way to retarget a motion capture animation to a rigify human rig using the Rococo add-on I already have a detailed guide to retargeting using Rococo and in it I try to answer pretty much all basic questions that you may have about retargeting including how to retarget to rigify however the technique that I used was complex that technique is still valid and you'll probably get an extra five percent of Fidelity in your final retargeting but most of the time that is simply not necessary and not worth the effort so let's jump right into it here I have a character rigged with rigify I just use the um basic human and you can also use the complex human if you want to the process will be the same so if I select the rig and go to pose mode you'll see that it's a regular human meta rig so it is in ik by default and I can also go here to the rig main properties and switch to FK as well and so this will be somewhat important as I'm going to show you how to retarget to both FK and ik for now I'll set it back to ik and now the main issue when retargeting to rigify is how the spine is set up we have this control which controls the lower body and the chest control which controls the upper body but we are not retargeting to these big controllers we are retargeting to the individual spine controllers and so the first spine control controls uh the butt of the character and the second spine control also controls the lower body so this is where the problem occurs by the way for this mock-up I have a little dancing animation and you'll see that in the mock-up the spine is a simple FK chain which means that each spine bone controls the hierarchy above it and that was the reason why I created that complex solution from my previous video using an additional rig because if you retarget this bone to this bone it will start affecting the lower body instead of the upper body as it should and the solution is insanely simple we are just going to ignore this bone so this bone won't be retargeted but it doesn't contribute to the motion that much so it won't be a huge problem so let's go to the Rococo Tab and set it up so first I need to sign up with Rococo I'll just press sign in and it will take me to the Rococo website and I'll have to log in and once I'm logged in I'll just go back to blender and I'll be logged in here in the blender interface as well next I'll go to retargeting and set my source rig which in this case is the Armature called Armature and my target is my rig called rig which is the default name that rigify gives to all of its rigs you can of course rename these Rigs and it will still work next I'm going to press build bone list and our goco we'll try to set up the bone pairs but it does a poor job with regify so I'll just press this x button and set up everything manually so for the hips you want to use this control here which controls the whole torso don't use the first spine bone because it just moves the butt of the character so here I can press f2 press Ctrl C to copy this name and just paste it in here the second spine bone as I said will just ignore it so I'll just leave this blank then spine one I'll simply retarget to this control and spine two to this one so this is spine fk002 I'm going to paste it in here and another way to fill out these fields is to click into the field and start typing so I'll type spline and choose spine fk003 next we have the neck and I'll just choose the ringify neck head is the rigify head left shoulder I'll start typing shoulder and choose shoulder.l and now we come to the arm the arms and legs in redify can be in ik mode or FK mode and here I'm going to show you how you can retarget both and that will give you the greatest flexibility if you want to tweak and improve your retargeted animation later on for the legs we almost always need ik controls but for the arms sometimes FK can be better but we can have both so let's have both so in the default fields that Rococo gives me I'm going to set up the FK arm and then later I'm going to add additional entries by pressing this button here and by the way if you don't see this button scroll down to the updater and check for updates and make sure that you're using at least version 1.4.0 you can even install a beta version if you want to okay and you should see this button so let's set up the entries for the left arm so left arm is the upper arm FK dot l in redify forearm is also called forearm FK dot l and the hand is hand fk.l now next we have the fingers so three thumbs index and so on my character here is simple and doesn't have them so I'll just skip these entries but if your character has the fingers you just have to set them up the finger names are clear so it shouldn't be a problem okay then we come to the right side of the rig right shoulder is shoulder.r then upper arm FK dot r forearm FK dot r and FK dot r then again I'll skip the fingers until I see the legs so again here I'm going to set up the FK legs and later we'll set up the ik as well so the upper leg is called thigh thigh FK dot l l thigh fk.l then we have Shin FK dot l food toe and then the right leg same thing and that's it we set up all of the default entries now to set up the ik for arms and legs I'm going to need eight additional custom entries so you can just press this button eight times so this is another big simplification compared to my previous tutorial in the previous tutorial I showed you how to switch to the full Targets in rigify and retarget to the pole targets but that is not necessary because by default rigify uses this widget here to control the upper arm in ik mode and same for the for the leg here okay this will Orient your knee correctly so the entries that we need is the let's see arm left arm and then left hand to set up the left arm in ik mode there is no control for the forearm so we don't need this entry so let's also add right arm and right hand a plague so left up leg and foot so left foot in um I realized that I made a mistake in recent versions of blender and rigify there is an additional toe control which is only available in ik mode so I'm going to add two more custom entries so we need 10 in total so now I'm going to search for toe and choose the left toe base not the end one right this is a special bone and you should ignore it and then I'm going to add entries for the right leg in the same way okay I'm going to expand this so that you can see the exact entries and then I'm going to set up the corresponding ik bones so first upper arm ik ik dot l then and ik.l then the right arm make sure that you're selecting the ik controls within the left leg I need thigh ik dot l food ik.l and so ik.l and same on the right side okay looks like I made a little mistake this should be hand ik.r not L cool and that should be it now all of the bone pairs are set up and now I'm almost ready to retarget if I select the source animation and put it in rest pose you'll see that there is an actual T pose whereas in my character the arms are slightly sloping down so let's go to post position pause mode select all bones and go to pose clear transform all and then go to the front view select this arm and make it lean down a little bit and same on the other side and now to make use of these changes instead of rest I should tell Rococo to use the current pose then go to object mode and press alt G to move the rig in the center of the world another important setting is auto scale which I explained in detail in my previous video I already tested this character and it will work fine with auto scale so all that is left is that I press retarget animation okay so I got this python error and after doing some research I found out that the Rococo addon is not yet compatible with blender 3.4 this is very common in the blender world the blender developers tend to always make big API changes in each blender version and some add-ons may be broken after the initial release but you can expect the compatibility to be fixed within a couple of weeks so for now I'll just save my file and open it in blender 3.3 here I have the exact same setup in 3.3 and now if I just press the retarget animation button the process will finish without any errors here I have my redirected animation and this is actually playing on the ik controls because my whole rig was in ik mode so if I go to pose mode and switch the arms to FK mode you'll see that we have almost the same result um the position of the arm is slightly different in each mode that is to be expected but in either case we have reasonable looking retargeting results Great base for further tweaking these actions combining them in the nla into more intricate animations and so on I am still planning to update and expand my mockup and retargeting series here on YouTube the retargeting process itself is covered well by now so what is still missing is good information on cleaning up tweaking and combining animations I want to cover a good solution to the root offset problem where the character May teleport to a different location when you try to combine two actions this should happen sometime in 2023 so subscribe with notifications because that way you will get notified when I release new videos thank you and have a nice day

Channel: CGDive

Views: 18,587

Keywords: blender3d, b3d, rigging

Id: 5nHgYO8vzf4

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2023