Cleanup Motion Capture Data In Maya

okay real quick we're going to start from MotionBuilder and one of the things that we're doing is kind of thinking that some of the things that we've done inside a motion builder from Vikon Blade are set enough to where we can take them if we do not like them and fix them inside of Maya so one of the things I'll do is I do set my interaction mode to Maya and then I have this scene here and this is just the basic scene I already cleaned it up so I got rid of the marker data and the camera data and one thing that we can do is that the information is here so I did have to characterize this and once the characterization process is done and we lock the character and define it as a biped then we can come up to our character section and when the character is loaded that is this character we could have given it a name I got a emphasize that down here I could change the character's name to whatever just by right-clicking going to renaming and you might want to rename it the name of your take and that might make things a little bit more simple this thing has keyframes on it this version right here but when it comes in a lot of times your data this is just the Vikon Blade data the Vikon blade skeleton is going to be there with all the emotion on it so it already has keys if we were to select these those two many keys to edit so what I'll be doing here is with the character loaded and I double clicked out here because it's kind of funky when you make a selection one click doesn't always be select as perfectly so sometimes a double-click and I'm going to come up here and with the character loaded whatever I do under the menu set here is going to happen to that character so there's a few things I can do I can say that I want to bake this out and that's the initial thing that I do want to do inside of Maya to be able to take the keyframes and then simplify the curves and/or resample the curves or something like that in order to clean up the data on the twitchy foot just to show you I will kind of drag through here and that foot has a bit of twitch right there and a section I'll just focus on that right now because you would be doing the same thing to any of these joints on the leg or whatever because the other foot does that little twitchy thingie that's the thing that we want to remedy so I will take this and I can either bake it out inside of motion or I could bake it outside of Maya after characterizing it one of the more simple things to do just by by noting or than you guys know right now is keying it or baking it into key frames right here inside a motion builder and it's so simple that you can do the character by having a loaded here and drop this down go down to bake or plot and you're going to bake plot to skeleton okay once you run that process it's going to make keyframes and then it's as simple as taking the file and sending it to Maya so send to Maya send as Nissin if that does not go through you just save it as a version and I would give it a different name just in case you don't want to mess with your data that hasn't been baked to keyframes yet I would give it a name underscore baked so that I know that I bake that into keyframes or something that makes sense to you I'll send it as a new scene and what happens is it opens up in Maya if whatever reason it does not open up in Maya then when you save out a version here the FBX you can import that version into Maya and then that one will be keyframed okay so inside of Maya we have this going on right here and the system note when I sent it here that little system node which is just a locator is going to be separate from the root and all I did was drag the root on top of this so it will look like this for the most part so the root will be outside of the system okay and and they might be set up like that when you have it come into Maya and what I did is I just middle mouse click and drag that on to here which is the same thing as parenting it to the system node and system node is going to be vital for us to have because again that's how we made our characterization inside of Maya when it came down to it for our Clips or the tracks editor okay this is just focusing on cleaning up so the system here is is set but then here's all my skeletal system below here but I could select them here and you can see that I have keyframes and this is much too much keyframes for us to have to deal with so one of the things that we can do to clean this up we set up our scene and I'm going to make a panel for you guys and you guys could do the same thing if you like but real quickly I'll just go to panels and I'll go down to layout and I would say three panes split-top okay I can close the outliner because the nice thing about this is that I can tell this perspective view to be a type of panel and I can tell to be the outliner so panels panel outliner and now it is the outliner and I could drag this this way something pretty sweet okay and this one is the X slide and I will go to panels down to perspective and I'll tell this to be the perspective camera okay and I can focus in on the foot right down here folks on the right foot we have some crazy spikes this is already the graph editor if it doesn't become the graph editor right away all you have to do is panels panel graph editor pretty simple and it's a nice little setup kind of reminiscent what we're doing inside of motion builder or vikon blade so in here this is where I can focus on trying to fix these things so if I look at my joint that I have selected this is the foot to which I will just kind of focus in on maybe a few frames here let's see so there's the funkiness right so we have some crazy funkiness going on here sex just focusing maybe on this portion here and I'll just drag that down to 232 so I'll just take this 232 right enter I know this is 1310 so I could leave that or I could just cut the whole thing down I'm just going to zoom in here and focus in on this section okay now what happens is you see that I have some crazy spikes already so if I focus on the rotate X and I jump to where that spike is somewhere around here yeah it looks like it's on 189 and I had this crazy foot it's broken and that could be dizzy AXI so I can select the disease here and I could zoom in on the keyframes right there in a section you see that I have a ton of different keyframes if this is too wild for you to see you could use your different graph types so right now this is them as they are with the the side here showing the values but I could tell it to normalize and that'll kind of bring it down to whatever I'm working with and if I had all the graphs showing some of them are going to be higher than others because they'll have higher values this will kind of keep them within this area the same area so if I did show all of them and there's that normalized you can see how radical two can be some wild and I'll take this and I'll go to the regular version and then if I try to come in here you'll see how different it can be and how a little bit harder it is to focus okay so I'll just focus on the z axes because I do believe that I select this keyframe here and I hit F I can focus in on that keyframe and that's pretty good I can see what this thing is doing so if I select the keyframe there and I hit W on my keyboard to get my my move tool hold down shift down here in the graph editor hold down my middle mouse button and remember I can lock this by going either right or left to change the time or up and down to change the value and I'm going to go up and down so okay so that's the x-axis so it's not the x-axis as soon as breaking in if I want to test it I could click on see maybe the y-axis nope it's the x-axis look at that so my foot supposed to be like this okay so I'll undo that now focus on the x-axis and you see that wicked spike there okay I can pick that keyframe and delete it or I can move it down okay another thing that I can do is I can see that the average is supposed to be around here so if I were to clean this up I could delete key frames that I feel that I do not need in other words if I take sections like this whole portion here this looks about close to that end value so if I look down the right side left the value of this I can delete these and then now I have a curve going from here to there and then I could delete this section here and see if I scrub through there what I'm getting okay and that's not too bad all right the other twitches are coming from the other other angles now to show you another thing here I could take this and select the curve by selecting part of the curve that has no keyframes on it whatsoever and usually it selects all the keyframes so I'm not sure exactly what's going on here okay well what I'll do is I think what this singled out it should probably run the process on here but I can do curves and go down to resample curve option box and I can leave it at the entire time range so everything or I could do is start an end if I like I'm going to leave it to 2000 and the time step like say every ten frames maybe put a key or something like that maybe every five frames for the key you'll see that what I do is when I resample this I'd apply it tries to match the animation as nicely as possible every fifth frame so you'll see that there's a keyframe every five frames when it comes down to it if I reach ample to the ten that might be too much I might get some weird rotations but again you're just going to try the values to see if that's going to work for you so that's one way of simplifying this if I did it to another one like I'll select the the Y rotate Y and just kind of zoom in on here and you see all these keyframes okay and this is I want to resample that every fifth I'll hit apply there you go so it's a simplified version of that curve and just going to want to see what the motions okay you're going to want to see the parts that need to maybe step or pivot correctly to make sure that those are working right and either take the keyframe and adjust it where it needs to be or just change the samples in your curve if you need to be kind of quick about things again and some of these you can say well I don't need certain keyframes if I select this whole section and hit delete and then scrub through the animation is it going to look correct and that's where you kind of evaluate it okay so you're going to use this as a an animation artist and if you study the movements of the characters and the type of characters and all that stuff that you are trying to emulate in this some end of scene then that's going to give you a better idea of how you're going to clean up this graph okay there's a lot of other things that I could show you inside of here so if you have any questions feel free that free to ask me because this is not really an animation 101 class this is just let's clean up some motion capture data and make it better although we can do that inside a blade if we had a really good version of blade and such but if you have different options that you can't really clean this up too well maybe it's easier to take it to Maya and this is the whole idea of this tutorial so sorry sampling is one thing I couldn't take the Z and resample it and you'll see that that that works in a certain way okay and I'll go ahead and close this and sometimes we sampling a curve will clean things up better to where it's not breaking so easily if you have things that are going kind of crazy like this rotation here is moving upward that's actually a lot more smooth than it was okay the thing that's really bothering me and sticking out is this guy right here and so funky that if I come over here and I could select a section kind of like that is just to frame it that gave me a better idea of what I'm looking at and it looks pretty crazy right so we have these sporadic areas like this and let me show you I'll just kind of come up to there and that's where that broken part is I could take this keyframe and hit W on my keyboard all it's doing is W is my my move tool okay so it evokes my move tool hold down shift to lock it hold down the middle mouse button and drag it down and now I'm fixing that part so it's not twisting all broken like okay and now my Z is from here down to here it's pretty wild let me see what's going on here so we've got this crazy jump so in this this case I would say well maybe I just want to deal with these guys right here and I'll just delete that and now I have this movement and this one I could either adjust or I can move it or I can add a keyframe in here to say well right here to the lowest point maybe that needs to be up a little bit so I can insert a keyframe and I have tools for that let me see here keys insert key tool right and I could just hit a middle mouse button or actually my left mouse button is in my left might be modifier key does not want to do it odd well I could just come over here right click and get I'll do that for now and I'll kind of play with this and see if my buttons maybe on my tablet aren't set correctly anyway just set a key there and there are many ways to do it so we're not worried I'm going to take this and I would adjust it however I need to be adjusted so W on the keyboard to evoke my move tool hold down shift middle mouse button it'll drag that to where I want it to be kind of like that so it looks like it's stepping on the ground there and then I'll come back this way and yeah I mean that's okay if I need more movement than in-between here I'll play with either the handles or the keys themselves okay so you're seeing that that movement might be a little bit too too smooth for the step because maybe the toes will go up and down a little more quickly again your going to have to analyze your your footage and see what you have going on here okay another thing to look for are some of these faradic just wild jumps and sometimes those are the the crazy data that just showed themselves for you which make life makes life a lot easier so if I go over there I'm gonna see this crazy jump so boom that might be okay depending on the movement of this this person or character or whatever and you really could if you want to take some of these keyframes delete those to have a little more control over that and then kind of see what that movement is going to be like alright or if that didn't belong there I mean obviously you could delete that or you could just move it up okay and you just go between different sections like if you decide you don't need all this because they're pretty close to each other except for that little dude right there you delete it okay so again that's just cleaning up your curves and such resampling all that good stuff if you have a whole section don't forget if you want to do keyframes to work with for instance like all this stuff here and I'll just scrub through it real quick to see what's going on there but goes up than that and if I want to fix the whole section I could use my other tools and I might as well just throw this in for you like my scalpel I can he are on my keyboard to evoke it or just come click here and I can scale these so with my scale tool evoked and this selected I can hold down my middle mouse button start dragging downward and I'm scaling these all towards each other and then I get kind of a flattened out section I get W to move these and then I'll hold down shift and adjust them where I want them to be okay and that's a way that I could take a little section and work with them I do the same thing with retiming this so I can go this way with it and space them away from each other and really you're not seeing what's happening but they're kind of spacing outward away from each other if I do this sorry I was in there I was just moving it the mill mouse button drag them away and they're facing away from each other or I could space that whole movement in closer together okay so that's a really useful way of working with this and then I could decide hey maybe I don't really need all this and all this and just delete them okay and you could do that all day and then you have fewer keyframes to work with and then you can actually adjust the movement and get the exact movement that you want okay and that would be for an arm if an arm is way off or another appendages then just feel free to use the same workflow okay so if you have any questions let me know I hope this helps out and have fun with it

Channel: Jared Rodriguez

Views: 13,758

Keywords: Motion Capture, Maya, MoCap, Motion Capture Cleanup, Emerging Technology, Vicon Blade, Motion Builder, Maya to MotionBuilder, Motion Capture Cleanup in Maya, Export from MotionBuilder to Maya, Graph Editor, Graph Editor Maya, Maya Graph Editor

Id: zNaUKWVHHfg

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2017