Copy Mocap from Motionbuilder to Maya's Advanced Skeleton

hello and welcome to the tutorial about transferring motion capture from zemeckis onto your advanced skeleton rigs now the process for transferring this actually utilizes the advanced skeleton icons so you're going to need to have this installed on your system before you can use it the actual one that we're going to be using of these four shelf icons for advanced skeleton we're going to use the the furthest one to the right which is this sort of blue mane and when it comes up it is called the picker and we'll be using the drop-down menu from Anam to come in and use the mocap matcher however I've noticed that it kind of throws me an error if I don't first bring up this advanced skeleton menu for building the rigs I've gotten a little bit of some complaints from the mocap matcher saying can't find this can't find that and I found that it was a bit of an eccentricity where I first needed to bring up the advanced skeleton menu and then this would be read in with no errors down here in Maya so if it's just to make sure that that doesn't happen always have the advanced skeleton menu up first and then you can bring up the picker and then from the picker you can use the drop-down Anam to the mocap matcher now it uses the motion capture only if the motion capture is a reference it actually needs the prefix that only comes from using a reference so I'll bring up the outliner here you'll notice that the motion capture is within a group but it has a prefix prefixed mocap which I gave it when I read it in so the original file and this is one that I've sort of simulated from I got actually from zemeckis if I open up the original FBX file it will come in and it will look like it's just fine I think it's about a hundred frames or so it's a very fairly short animation and some kind of doing this little sort of cha-cha dance so the other thing to note is this menu we'll be using is tracking aligning each skeleton from the mocap to a constraint in the advanced skeleton setup and you need to have each of these that aligns and you need to make sure that these each exist and I was getting an error in the original setup for the mocap matcher setup from motion builder and I want to show you how to get past that because it is kind of the little details that Maya tends to get stuck up on and I'll show you way around that so the first thing we need to do is we need to sort of clean things up so that it's an easy transfer and if you bring up your outliner and only through your outliner can you investigate the prefix name for your skeleton in this case it's Steven skeleton and it runs throughout the entire hierarchy and I'm not able to track anything other than the word hips spine left up leg because you see that's exactly what aligns here so I need this reduced down to just the word hips so it's gonna look for the word hips and look at the word spine one and it's not going to find it if there's a prefix because that's not the exact name that it's looking for so again this is a great way to be aware of and on top of how a Maya thinks so the first thing we need to do is get rid of the prefix of this you can come up to modify and you can come down to search and replace names and if you type in the prefix if I don't want to type it in I can actually just sort of double click left mouse double click on it and do a ctrl C copy and then do a double click down here control V paste if I say I want to replace this with I think anything arbitrary replace it actually just gets rid of the prefix now this is a weird eccentricity for those of you that have noticed that I actually replaced it with a semicolon and it did not write in a semicolon I found that well this is an FBX you could pretty much put anything in here or you could put a blank in there and it will get rid of the prefix so try a couple of things just to get rid of the prefixes and make sure you have it on all or hierarchy so it goes down the entire skeleton and you should be able to wipe it clean so that everything on here is the exact name that is being looked for on the right hand side here inside the mocap matcher so now this is cleaned up and it looks like we're ready to save this as an as the new FBX but you don't actually want this as an FBX now that we've read it in and we've cleaned it up it should be actually saved as a Maya file and the reason that we're saving it as a Maya file and I'll actually give this a better name the reason that we're going to be using this as a Maya file is because when we read this in we actually want it to read in as a reference because remember we need to give it a prefix because it needs to be it needs to have a prefix now that we've cleaned it up you scroll down here to the bottom it's going to look for a prefix basically saying that I'm only going to be able to grab this if it isn't reference so now that we've saved it as a Maya file you can verify that it's going to come in clean by coming inside to create reference and make sure that you haven't used namespaces on and come here to this option used select a namespace as parent you have the new namespace string this is a place where you can actually type in the name of the prefix and when you bring it in as a reference now and remember to read in the Maya file not the FBX file the reason being that I have had trouble actually reading in a referenced FBX file it for some reason constantly gets rid of the prefix in fact I'll try it right now if I read in test FBX and I reference that it's gonna come in okay it came and find that time but I've had in fact this is not cleaned up so we can't use it but I've had some problems sometimes getting the FBX to read in the prefix and the way that I've gotten round that is actually to just say that as a maya file and having a chance to clean it up so in the reference editor if you want to get rid of a reference you read it in the reference editor left click on the name right click and then pop down to this menu that pops up reference and then go down to remove reference middle ask are you sure you say absolutely so at this point I would like to read in the tuna rig which is what we're going to be using so I've got that right here and this is the one downloaded from the advanced skeleton site and your rig should have pretty much the same name for all of the constraints as this one so you can actually read in the rig or you can let's reference the rig we either either one is fine I like to reference the rig because remember if you read in the rig then you can't have any improvements in the future but if you do have a reference and will default and will it will improve if you give any improvements to that rig to character automatically so let's just read this in as a reference and keep things clean so I'm going to create a reference first one I'm going to read in is the motion capture I reference them both so I've got mocap dance it's going to come in and it's going to have the names cleaned up nice so everything says hips spine wonderful good and I need this - their spine ones going - great so what I need to have is another reference of the two narake so I'm going to go back in to create reference and I'm going to type in rig and this time I'm going to reference in the rig that I'm going to be using tuna Ric so here we are you may have a size discrepancy and if you do that's okay I'll show you - how to get round that so here's the tuna rig much smaller and this is not not rare when I've been doing this the mo cats been coming in by a factor of about scaled up by a factor of about ten so with that in mind let's come in here and grab the skeleton go all the way to the top mo cap hips and just control G or group it and now you have a scale factor that sits here on the floor and you can just scale that character down or better yet just come in here and I've found that point one is a pretty good height so scale it down by a factor of 0.1 if that works your scales may vary the size with which you rigged your character may be different all I'm doing is I'm grouping the mocap and scaling that group so it's down kind of at the same size now we are copying the motion capture onto the FK so it actually doesn't matter the size because we're not going to be copying this over on to the I K we're gonna be copying on the FK and regardless of the size of this mocap character the rotations will always be the same it's the scaling we've changed the rotation values of this arm are never going to change and that's really all we want it's not even gonna copy the translation it's just gonna copy the rotation so it doesn't matter the size the rotations are always going to be the same so let's set this up to continue setting this up I've already got this out but remember I mentioned earlier that each of these has to be matched and here's where advanced skeleton can throw you kind of a curveball I've tried to set this up in the past and it doesn't work and it was very frustrating and I was saying well it is MotionBuilder look you've got several different dropdowns that you can use you've got a mix mo or Koko etc and this is a MotionBuilder capture so it should work well here's the problem it actually needs the each of these names and if you'll notice this fingers and thumb it doesn't exist this character has no motion capture for the hands and what happened is advanced skeleton expected that got to it didn't find it and just quit and really wasn't very descriptive or helpful as to why it was quitting so what we want to do is actually modify this and delete all of these and save a new setting for for our mocap matcher now how do we do that well this is a drop-down I don't know where it is but this export button will let us know where it's saving all the configurations so press the export button and look what you get here you get the exact location where all the others are residing and so you want to come up here to double-click and ctrl C copy and then go into some open window you have somewhere and control V paste boom you're gonna go right to where it's got all the text files including this one for MotionBuilder we want to make our own now we can come in here and delete by hand all of these what I find awfully messy about this setup is although I delete it it just kind of still stays there so this is kind of a trick to get us to a cleaner version of the file and that is where we come in and grab the MotionBuilder text file ctrl-c ctrl-v we've made a copy and what we're gonna do now is I'm going to first of all rename it and I'm going to rename it to advance skeleton AAS underscore let's say mocap better yet temeka s-- which is where it's from so I'm gonna come in here now that I've changed the name and I'm going to edit this and this can be done in notepad it can be done in Microsoft Word can be done I prefer notepad plus plus any text editor because it's really simple text and once it comes up I'm just gonna grab everything that we don't have on our motion capture all this finger stuff and delete it get rid of the gap and save it and you sure you want to save absolutely and just to be double plus sure I'm going to double click it so that it pops up in the shows that it is indeed gone wonderful so what I can do now is you think you'd be able to select it from the drop-down in mocap matching but it hasn't quite got its head around it this doesn't update in real time so it's time to bring it up one more time I'm going to bring up the advanced skeleton menu first then the picker then an EM mocap matcher it comes up and now I can select my a s is a mecca's modified file and watch what happens all those fingers are gone so this is good now we have pretty much everything we want to set this up and the next steps are we bring this over just a little bit more so we have we're actually looking at everything we need so the next steps are that we want to make sure that we tell this mocap matcher the base names from these being references now this has been grouped this did not inherit the reference prefix but open it up and you've got mocap which is what we typed in for the prefix for this motion capture here when you click on it make sure you know what you're doing here this is the advanced skeleton column this needs to be all the names of the advanced skeleton parts as well as the prefix that you gave it for your reference which in my case is rigged and this is the motion capture list and the prefix is mocap I can type it or you can just grab one of the bones that has that prefix and it will detect it from selected so right there it kind of puts it in so at this point you want to go to maybe frame 0 and go down this series these last series of buttons because this is the ultimate validation that everything is ready to go so here we go scan mocap skeleton and scanned it zero out the mocap joints right there it's kind of zeroed everything out it's a little wonky right there it's not completely zeroed out so I have to watch that I might have to kind of put that I'm gonna watch that see if it's if anything is sort of off there we go that's a little off there we are you can always fix it by hand and the next button is set rig - all FK remember I mentioned that we're gonna be copying rotation to rotation so these rik feet we want the rig to be set all the way down to FK and this is the button that does it so watch what happens these FK controllers will disappear sorry the ika controllers will disappear and it'll turn just FK that's further validation things are going just fine down here Maya's not complaining about anything good and now we're set to connect mocap skeleton press the button and watch the additions that pop up here in the outliner further validation that things are fine connect there you go mocap constraints and if I come here to frame 0 boom it pops into the motion I'm allowed to play it and our character goes into a very cool funky dance so that's how you set things up in Maya and get it running but for those of you that actually want to bake this onto the skeleton first of all you can bring up the referee senator and simply uncheck the mocap it'll make it disappear but it won't get rid of it and you can check whether or not the baking has actually happened on your rig and if it hasn't that's fine you can bring the mocap back no harm no foul you're gonna want to come down here to mocap matcher and click on bake and now it's actually going to be baking the influence from the mocap onto the FK controllers so once that's done you can turn off the mocap dance and see if this character moves by themselves and they do so this should give you the freedom and the surety to come up and actually get rid of the mocap in this scene you don't need it anymore so you can right-click on it and you can save these scenes with the reference in it and just not used that's fine it's up to you now you want to work but I want to show you how to make a very clean file and here you come into reference and then remove reference and say fine I'll remove the reference so now the only reference I have is this tuna rig which is kind of cool for those of you that actually want to go a step further you can come in and make sure that you're baking things onto the FK this is really kind of cool for you if you have an animator that wants to add to the animation that is on here if they're like well you know what I actually could add a little bit of spice to maybe that foot going up it's currently all on the FK which is fine if your animator knows how to knows how to work with a FK but in case they want to do AI K instead you may want to be able to go from FK to I K for things like the leg left and right and it basically bakes it so that the animation curves are will now be on the FK my machine is so slow it crashes when you do that and I can try a bit just to show you what it looks like but I've run this on a faster machine ones at school are just fine and it's it's worked ok I'll try my luck here okay so it's it's baking the animation to the ika foot there so this is a little easier to animate for for an animator that wants things to be placed exactly where he or she puts them and because the FK is very hard to animate when the item is stuck onto something in this case the foot against the floor when there's a collision and it stops moving it's kind of hard to animate that using just FK so this should allow you to bake it onto the FK best done with no mocap reference there you are and this should allow you to give this to an animator if they want so that they can animate just the I kale egg and I've done this to just the leg left I would then do it to the leg right I do not recommend doing it the spine or the arms it's it's not to me it doesn't I mean this is my personal preference as an animator the only thing I really need FK on is the feet this may change depending on what it is you want your rig to do but it's a very nice way of finishing out the animation when you want your and when you want your animations to be completely done consider the possibility that you actually use this option which is animation controls to bake skeleton and what this does is it actually bakes the the whole skeleton so that well this is done when you have the the rig still there you can bake it so that it just makes all the way down to a simple skeleton that you can export so that's that's kind of cool anyway this is working and the motion capture was successfully transferred so if you have any questions let me know otherwise good luck

Channel: Scott Easley

Views: 9,320

Keywords: advanced skeleton, maya, mocap, motionbuilder

Id: GCkYRHuu1OY

Length: 21min 40sec (1300 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 20 2019