Copy and Paste MOTION from VIDEO to 3D Characters ! | Daz to Blender MOCAP Retargeting

before we start today guys I do want to mention we're having a 30 off sale from today until after Christmas so if you're looking for any editing tools presets plugins assets check out my website link down below [Music] animating a 3D character can be hard either spend countless hours rigging and animating by hand or you spend thousands of dollars on motion capture suits well this video is going to give you a free alternative that'll allow you to breathe life into your 3D characters in minutes this guide will show you from start to finish how to extract motion capture data from real footage and successfully retarget it onto your 3D characters so let's hop in and talk about how to do it alright guys so let's get started we're going to be using Rococo's New Motion capture free AI video to motion capture that they just released super cool link is going to be down below everything we're doing in this video is free you can click to create a new scene so let's name this tutorial and then you can either record using your device's camera or you can select a local video file we can either pull some royalty-free clips or maybe you guys are working on a music video you want to pull some clips in from there or you guys can use your web camera or set up your own live camera into here so I'm just going to go ahead and go to pexels.com I also downloaded this clip here from Lord heck just so I can try out some more complex movements and just see how well the AI really can capture that I'm not expecting everything to be perfect but for my testing so far we've gotten some pretty great results so let's drag this in here you guys can trim the part you want so as you see this is a pretty complex movement a lot going on things moving pretty fast let's see how well these results turn out let's just click turn into animation all right so once this is processed you'll see animation clip has been created and you can view that by going into Rococo studio so click the second link down below and you guys will be able to download Rococo studio for free and you can see your download links right here so go ahead and fire that up and then if it prompts you to go ahead and sign in with that account you made and let's go over to our projects so here's the tutorial project we created just double click in there and now over on the left you'll see these are the animation clips that we uploaded so we can just double click on this new recording one to actually see it and let's see how well this turned out a little stiff you guys can come over to this filters button and sometimes if there's a lot of Jumpy movements you may want to turn off this Locomotion your character May sink into the ground a little bit but the animation will look a lot more fluid so this actually looks pretty good for how complex again the movement was I'm sure if you guys are just doing Simple movements it'll look a lot better but I think this looks really good and I think it's just a testament to how powerful these AI tools are becoming and how we can really use these to speed up our workflows so let's go ahead and Export this we're going to bring this into blender and we'll show you how to retarget this motion onto any 3D character so in our export settings here just click over to this export tab if you need to I'm going to export it as an fbx and for your skeleton preset here it really depends on what you're trying to retarget to so if you're planning on bringing this into Unreal Engine obviously choose the Unreal Engine tab I'm going to go and select the miximo skeleton preset and I'll show you in a bit why so make sure this is binary and we can keep everything else the same so this is where it's going to export you can click here click and just copy this path if you need to and let's click export Clips alright so we can close this down and now we need our 3D character so there's a ton of different ways you guys can get 3D characters I've made a bunch of videos on it in the past if you want to follow along and choose the process that works the best for you I really love using Daz Studio I've talked a bunch about that about bridging it from Daz into blender so on and so forth again Daz is a free software they also have a marketplace where you guys can download free or paid assets so things like clothing Hair Etc makes it pretty easy and again you can bridge this into every creative software you guys can imagine so let's just fire up des and get ourselves an easy 3d character but either way in smart content we can just go to figures Genesis 8 starter mail figures and load in our basic Genesis 8 mail so let's go to wardrobe here and we'll just give them some clothing and this will be fine for our testing but let's go and send this into blender you guys need either go to file export export the fbx or if you want everything to be a lot more smooth export the maps together you guys can download the daz to blender Bridge or Dash to whatever software you're using Bridge you guys don't have to use blender or Daz again I'm just showing you my method this works with all methods since I've already installed the daz to blender bridge I go up to file send to Daz to blender and then we can click accept and this will package everything up for me so if you guys follow the guide to install that Das the blender Bridge we can just click up here go up to dash to blender and import our Genesis figure now we have our Daz character in blender so you have your 3D character in your 3D software of choice this is going to come with the daz rig that's already enabled now I found that you get a lot better results with a different type of rig so I'll show you my method I think it works a lot better if you do it this way so what I like to do is get rid of all this fluff that imports from Daz into blender so I'm going to create a new collection and I'll name this collection tutorial and I'll put in this collection everything that I actually need so what we need is here's your rig and inside this rig is the actual mesh parts of our character this is all we really need so hold down shift and I'll drag that into this collection everything else can be deleted foreign stuff just delete all these parts so again we're left with just a character no rig no Skeleton on this guy we're gonna go ahead and add that in instead of rigging it from scratch if you guys want you can using rigafine blender or whatever I'm just going to use miximo and to do that I can just select the parts of my character go up to file export fbx and I can name this Tut character to miximo and we'll go ahead and Export that then we'll hop over to miximo and this is what I've used previously to add in motion capture data because they have this library of motion but we're not going to touch any of this we're just going to use their free rigging tool so click upload character and then select that character that we exported from blender so Tut character to miximo all right and then we click next and you can select here the parts it wants you to select very easy and then it's going to go through and set up a skeletal rig for us all right very easy again this is my method you guys can use any rig the retargeting should work the same so if you guys want to you could also put them in a t-pose if that's useful for you for animating down the road just search t-pose here and then we'll click download so we'll save this and then we'll bring this back into blender so file import fbx and here we go now first off you're going to say what happened to all my textures well the good thing is we have all our textures on this version so all you would really need to do is open up this Armature here's the exact same Parts go to your material properties and you can see exactly what it is you're trying to do so say for example you want to copy the shirts just click here material properties and you just select the T-shirt so it's easy just to copy them back and forth everything's still named the same so don't worry about that now we can hide this for now again this will be our textures if we wanted to copy them over this is what we want so now let's bring in our motion capture that we got from that AI Rococo software so we'll go up to file import fbx and then I saved the path earlier so I can just click in here and click control V and then we'll select the one we want and this is very important make sure you scroll down here on the right open up Armature and make sure you click on automatic bone orientation if you guys don't do this it's going to import it's going to import it in all weird so import it in like that and here's our skeleton so we can scroll forward and here's where we want it to start around 139 if you want to you can set your duration like this so how to copy this onto this character now to do that I'm going to use this this Rococo Studio live blender plugin again free and it has this retargeting tool right here which is super useful so I'll leave the link down below to get this into blender you just need to download the zip from GitHub and then go up to edit preferences add-ons install and select that zip file that you installed from the link below so once you've done that you guys want to take your source and click on this Armature here you want to take your targets and click on this Armature here and then we can click build bone list it's going to try its best to align everything correctly if some things mess up like for example if we click retarget animation you're getting an error saying duplicate targets you see it says spine one spine two and it puts spine two again just remove that I'm pretty sure that's the only thing you have to remove if anything else isn't targeting correctly just go through here and manually assign the bones now if I was to just click retarget you see the legs are targeted correctly but for some reason there's an issue with the arms so let me show you how to fix that let's click Ctrl Z and get to the point where we haven't retargeted what you want to do is go to the first frame where your animation starts you want to click over into pose mode and then with this selected if it's not selected just click a to select all you go to this pose tab you go to clear transformation all so it's just going to be in a nice simple T pose now this looks the exact same but this T pose for our first Armature isn't actually in rest position so if we go to object mode select here on this character Armature we go down to our object data properties you'll see this is our post position but our rest position is still the default apos from Das so if your character is by default in a t-pose it should work fine but if you're working with Daz characters like myself then you may have it look like this again the T pose is from miximo but this is still a rest position so to fix that arm issue what you guys want to do one on my numpad just to go to that front forward view I'll grab this Rococo Armature and I'll click G and just line this up let's click and go back into pose mode and then let's take these arms and just click R and rotate them so that they're the same angle as our a pose like this you can even do it with the legs if you want so doing this should fix our issue here now make sure you guys do this you guys want to go over to use posts instead of rest you want to go current now we can click retarget animation and just like that everything working a lot better now I do want to take a pause and say that I learned that tip that life-saving tip from CG dive Channel he has a full guide talking all about using this plug-in for retargeting with different types of rigs so if you guys are working with a rig that's different from mine maybe you don't want to use Daz characters and you have a different type of rig and a different type of pose he is a guide covering every single type of rig that you can imagine and tips and tricks for retargeting so if you're still running into any issue I'll link that video down below highly recommend you guys subscribe like because it's a great video we have some cleanup left to do so for example right here you can see our arm it's going through our chest you guys can go back into pose mode and first of all let's actually see this Armature in front so I'll select the Armature we'll go over to our object data properties viewport display and check on in front a lot better now let's select the part that's going through so maybe like our forearm and you can't select individually because we're in object mode we need to go to pose mode now we can select here and then let's change this timeline view to our graph editor and with the selected you see this is the exact bone we have we can open that up these are the different rotation values that we can change for that bone and if you guys scroll and adjust this you can actually see click a here if you don't have this selected and select so let's click this W rotation and we can click G and then if you just move it up and down you can see we can adjust the rotation a slight bit and you can do that with any bone so we'll select here and you can try with different angles as well so give it a little bit of space it's like different values to control different parts and there you go pretty simple so we made our adjustments so that nothing is bending and going through and making things look weird it's pretty amazing what AI is allowing us to do and a huge shout out to Rococo this isn't a sponsored video they didn't ask me to make this I just love making tutorials that I see value in and that I think can help people that plus this retargeting part of the tutorial I've used this plugin before but I can never figure out that arm issue I thought that that information was gold there's not enough information out there about retargeting with blender so I hope that helps you guys out another bonus I'm going to leave below a giant library of free motion capture data which was recorded by some college studies and they put it out to the public for free use so if you're looking for things like walk Cycles or just simple or just simple movements you guys can download that giant zip folder and you'll have a bunch of different motions which you can use this retargeting tool to apply to your character you don't want to go through and use the AI motion could be a pretty useful download and that's about it guys thank you guys so much for watching if you did enjoy consider leaving a like to help with the YouTube algorithm comment down below anything you'd like to see from me I hope you guys have a happy holidays and new year I'm excited for all the things we're going to talk about in this coming year it's going to be fun as always guys thank you so much for watching thank you so much for supporting and I'll see you guys [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Max Novak

Views: 59,217

Keywords: blender, animation, motion capture, mocap, how to, mixamo, animate, character, 3D character, daz, rokoko, create, 3d, characters, humans, faces, free, c4d, facegen, max novak, blenderguru, pwnisher, metahuman, facebuilder, addon, plugin, preset, pack, reallusion, character creator, cc3, iclone, nft, adobe, premiere, after effects, how to make an nft, sculpt, zbrush, projection mapping, transition, animations, vfx

Id: Y0k4yRdsros

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2022