Blending clips in the Story Window

so once we've got our cleaned mocap clips or indeed you could use mocap clips available on the internet which have usually been cleaned up already we're in a position to make a sequence of animation out of those clips and we're going to use the story window to do that so I'm gonna start from scratch now I'm going to bring back on the original character that we started the tutorial with just gonna quickly characterize it and renamed let's do the renaming first and then we're going to spend up the character launcher it's characterized by pad I'm gonna rename the character as well ready to go so now I've got a character in the scene we can go into the story window and I'm actually going to use some clips from the previous moves folder that ships with MotionBuilder there's some really good stuff in there just click on that one and I'm gonna choose some running animation here so I'm gonna start off with run a jump obstacle I just drag it onto the bottom window here it's important to use the bottom window for mixing your motion data the top window is for up things run right 90 degree turn then run straight Privett and run downstairs that's each one of those I'm just dragging onto the story window and these are all just FBX files all you need is an FBX file with an animated skeleton and the story window will work quite happening so this chef will eat along it well let's have a little look at the way the story window works so these clips of you can drag them and reposition them in time in different places if you want to position of accurately you can snap it it automatically snaps on to your current time marker which is quite handy and if you want to repeat let me just move this one up a little bit you want to repeat one of these you can just drag out and it repeats multiple copies of your clip likewise if you need to clip extra bits off you can do that and if you press this one this one toggles between the looping clips and scaling Clips you toggle it on to skating clips that you can stretch them so they actually take a bit longer I don't if you want to do that nicely time you don't so let's have a look at these clips and remove them bit closer to each other just set my time line to 234 there which is the farthest extent of these clips you can see the markers there on each clip tell you the start and end in and out times for the clip and also the 0 to 45 frames all over the clip so let's just run through that so the first one we have is run and jump over an obstacle next one we have is run and do a 90 degree turn and then we have run straight and then we have run downstairs and we're going to blend these together you'll notice they're all in completely different positions in the 3d space that we're working in but that's not a problem that's the kind of thing we can overcome quite easily let's just expand this up a little bit now what we're gonna do is we're gonna actually blend between these so if I you just come to the end of this clip and make sure that we can see what we're doing we're going to blend one of those last strides into one of the first strides of this particular one here so what we need to do is we need to choose a moment where both of them look pretty much the same and we can use that moment to blend now in a lot of moves that you'll be doing you actually try to match up the position of a foot so that when you do the blend the one foot is locked to the floor and the blend looks quite natural because we're doing a run I'm actually going to blend based on the pelvis and I'm going to do it when the character is in mid-flight so it'll take off from one foot on this clip and by the time they land on the other foot they'll be on this clip so let's come towards the end of this clip here and we can see that the last step she takes is she takes off from her right foot and lands on her left foot so what I'm going to do is I'm going to get to the end there that's quite a good ending point actually because she's on her left foot and we've got a passing point where the other neck is just about to pass so she lands on her left foot so looking at this run then her first stride is actually to land on her right foot so we don't want that so what I'm going to do is I'm going to get it to about the passing point here it's just a minute ya better get it to the point where she's on her right foot to the passing point there I'm just going to trim the clip back to that point during that time from the time where she's on right foot and her left with his passing sorry on this side so a bit me ran out of easier pivot sir from the time here where she's on her right foot with the left foot passing to here where she's on her left foot with her right foot passing that is going to be the duration of the blend that's what I need to do is I need to drag these together so they overlap by about that distance no it looks a bit odd at the moment because she runs along in this position on the screen and energy go through the blend she drags back to this other run here so it's quite difficult to judge if we've got the timing right at this particular moment so we're going to do an initial match on this to try and get this to work so I'm going to move the timeline to pretty much the middle of the clip which in theory is where she's in midair on both strides and I'm going to select the hip with the hip selected I never choose match now what match will do is it will take the two hip bones and it will try and line them up at a particular moment during that transition to the best of its ability to make your animation of this smooth as possible so let's look at the various options I have the second clip selected so I'm going to match it to the previous clip which makes sense match it at the current time which is why I've put the time marker right in the middle there during that particular moment notice you can also do it at the start of the selected clip in other words the beginning of the transition or the end of the previous clip which is the end of the transition or you can do it between the two which is reflective Roux where I am at the moment then how do you do the matching well you can either match the x y&z coordinates or you can match the X and set coordinates and try and make the level stay on the ground which is what the default one is there I want to match the X and Y and Zed coordinates here because she's in midair I don't want her to try and suck her down onto the ground and the other thing is that you can do the rotation as well the rotation can cause a few problems when you're doing matching because particularly for matching a foot or something like that because if the foot is on the heel on one clip and on the toe on the other clip it will match the entire animation around so the angle at the feet is the same and your character was running along nicely on the floor now it starts to run down through the floor to a 45 degree angle like that so you have to be a bit careful with rotation now I'm going to actually put it on XY and said to match up the rotation and then I'm going to try and fix that later on if the rotation is is too far out so I just okay that and then what we should be able to see is a transition as she goes through the transition she keeps running which is worked quite nicely in fact I'm just going to do ctrl a to toggle through the viewport modes searches models only and then take off from one foot land on the other foot and already started to slow down just play that through in real time yeah pretty seamless now a good little tip here if I go back into x-ray mode I've got her hip selected what I can do is I can turn on the trajectories and that enables me to look at her hip positions now you can see looking at that from above actually the line that she was running along already this yellow line around the outside follows pretty accurately and then she does a turn so I'm quite happy with that result so the next thing here is now she's run over to there we're going to do a bit more running straight so she's run around the corner that she's gonna go to here and she's gonna run straight okay yeah depending on how far you wanted to run straight you could shorten or lengthen this so maybe just an extra step or something but it's exactly the same procedure she's focus was round so the next clip here she's starting on her left leg and landing on her right leg so this clip here I can see them both this clip here she's taking up from her right and landing on her left this one she's taking off from her left and landing on her right so actually need to go on to the next step to do the transition properly so I'll go to about there I'm just gonna show him that clip to that point so now she's at the passing point she takes off from my right leg and hands on her left leg on this one here from the passing point she takes off from her right leg lands on and left leg so it's the same step for both so let's do the overlapping again but this time rather than using the match tool to match her I'm going to use ghosting to match us so if I turn on the ghosting here using this little show/hide ghost button we can see as seeing it's quite complicated we've got a whole variety of Clips I've run through the timeline you can see she runs along here that's one ghost and then she needs that Ghost behind and she runs around the corner that's another ghost then she needs that ghost behind over here and then she moves onto this one here which is the green ghost so what I want to do is I want to move the green ghost to line up with the yellow ghost over here so I'll click the green one I just move tool I move the green ghost over to here I rotate it I mean it again so the kind of lineup oh yeah we need to not line up with the yellow line the yellow line just is just joining the start and finished points of course the character she runs out round here to get to the finish so although our start position is is okay there we just need to rotate that round so she's running off in the same kind of direction okay so there you can see that now she runs along and catches up with the other ghost and so on more we're here we're just gonna bring the running downstairs one over to the same position as well to make the next one of the easier to view in the viewport rotate that one to there so that's close enough we're still going to use the the match tool for the stairs and so on in a minute so now we've got our transition here you can see I'm still quite a way out so let's move that back here maybe my character cost to match the ghost so that's okay and then we're just gonna zoom in a little bit here it's gonna zoom in here to see what the actual transition is like well the timings pretty good but the positions still all run a bit higher as well no that's because the matching on the previous one made her go down into the ground so the rotation didn't work quite smooth is I wanted so I can actually rotate that one do it in the local axis and global - you know not better in this particular case and just rotate that up a little bit like that so the two still meet and she still runs along the ground so that works quite well and you can see that for something that's quite a simple brand like this run that actually lining up by eye and using the ghosts works quite well so for the final one here we have to blend into her running downstairs so the same procedure is going to be which which foot does she take off and land from so our last one here is where she takes off from her right foot and lands on her left and then we get to a Parsi point I'm just gonna clip that that's the passing point and then on this one here she's actually starting on her right foot and landing on her left so what I'm gonna do it's here where she lands on her right foot and comes onto her left there when her right foot hits the ground I'm going to treat that as if it's the right foot landing at the beginning of this animation here so what I need to do is get it to the point where the right foot is just hitting the ground there I'm gonna shorten this a little bit so there and I'm just going to drag this along to line up and to snap on to that point so that the because at the beginning of the run downstairs the right foot is already planted so I've got the right foot planted here as well so let's choose the right foot trajectories for a moment I'm gonna choose the clip here and then use the match tool so I'm going to match the right foot to the previous clip at the current time while if current time is a stylist directing clip are no choose start a selected clip anyway I'm going to match the position in x y&z because what I want to do is I'm gonna make sure that the Zed height is the same I'm going to turn off rotation completely and do that by eye so okay that one let's just turn off everything apart from the models and see what it looks like foot lands she starts going downstairs in terms of connecting the feet and making the transition happen at the right time and in the right place that's worked really well however if I just get in a bit closer to the character here and we play that through hopefully you'll see that it's a little bit unnatural looking because she suddenly snaps into down the stairs is no there's no kind of natural transition between the two I just fix the time line so we're on 155 now so I can shorten the whole thing and I'm actually just going to go to this point here jouso 134 classy enough I go to the start of the transition here just so I can loop at the old section three and we can watch it a few times so although the timing of the feet is good you can see there's still a sudden transition visually - from one move to the next and that's what we're going to fix in the next tutorial

Channel: Ken Pitts

Views: 14,997

Keywords: MotionBuilder, Tutorial, Story Window, motion capture, mocap, blending mocap

Id: WNSdWtn2zCU

Length: 19min 27sec (1167 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2016