Easiest workflow for editing mocap in Blender - Rokoko Guide

[Music] hey what's up everyone in this video we'll be going over the easiest and best way that we've found to tweak your mocap animations in blender so we're going to start with an animation that maybe needs a little bit of work we're going to take it into blender and then using animation layers we will tweak the animation to give us exactly what we're looking for let's do it i found this keyframe animation from this amazing animator dave hahn on instagram and i thought for the purposes of this tutorial we will try to recreate this shot from dave han in particular you can see that this where the sword intersects with the forearm we need that to be very precise and if our mocap isn't exactly right we're going to have to tweak it to make it so that the sword is scraping along that forearm there so we're in rococo studio and i ended up recording a few versions of this and the third take was pretty good right off the bat so this probably wouldn't need really that much tweaking in blender to get the result we wanted so let's actually go with the second take i'll cue it up here and here you can see that we're going to have a couple things that we will want to tweak in blender to get our animation looking right so in particular you can see that we have some clipping between the left hand and the right forearm right so we're going to have to fix that so we will use this animation with the express purpose of knowing that we're going to have to tweak this arm to make it look correct so i will export this animation let's take two i will go to export i'm going to export an fbx that is binary i'm going to use the human uh my human ik skeleton because i find that's the most reliable and my fps will be 30 so i'll hit export and at this point we can jump over to blender okay so i'm in blender i'm going to delete my cube and i'm going to go import my character i'm going to be using this robot character i'm importing an fbx i always make sure to hit automatic bone orientation especially if it's an actual character hit import here we go here's our robot and now let's go grab that mocap from rococo studio take two and i'll always check that automatic bone orientation is turned on and here we go if we expand out the timeline a little bit and hit play here we have our animation so in order to retarget this mocap animation to our character i'm going to use the rococo plugin so i'll come over here open up our rococo plugin panel if you want more information on how to install the plugin or you want to go more in depth on how to do retargeting we've put a link to our main retargeting blender tutorial in the description below so you can check that out we are more interested in the tweaking process for this video so to retarget i'm going to open up the retargeting panel for source i'll select my mocap for target i will select my armature i'll hit build bone list here we go everything is generated automatically except i need to fill in this spine one and spine two that has not populated so i'll go grab those spine ones fine two and now because my character is already in a t-pose i don't need to do any adjustments and i can just click current retarget animation after a little thinking if we hit play we can see that we have our animation so at this point we can delete our actual mocap because we don't need it anymore and if we take a look at this animation you can see that especially here we have some odd clipping between the forearm and the hand and this is something that we're going to need to tweak this mocap um in order to get rid of but before we get to that we're going to import our katana because we want to know exactly how to angle this hand and this forearm when the katana is actually there so i will go grab my katana model import fbx here's my katana i'm going to add a child of constraint target will be the armature and the bone is going to be the right hand there we go and so i can adjust this katana so it is in the proper orientation for our hand and you turn it around there we go that looks pretty good and so if we play through you can see that the hand is holding our katana and so this error here with the clipping is even more pronounced right we're really going to need to do something so that we don't have a sword going through our forearm so how do we tweak this mocap so we don't destroy the entire animation but we can still make subtle changes to the positioning of the limbs so it's actually pretty easy to do this as i said and what we're going to do is open up another panel here i'm going to open the non-linear animation panel and you can see here is our animation our mocap animation and if we hit this little toggle right here we'll get a new strip it's called but really what this is is an animation layer and so this will allow us to make tweaks to our bones that won't affect the actual original animation and the last thing we're going to do is there's this little toggle right here and we will change the blending mode to combine because we don't want to replace the original mocap we just want to add little tweaks to the bones so the first thing that we will address is this clipping right here so i'm going to select my armature go into pose mode and then i'm going to shift click on my pose skeleton to open up my entire bone list here i will get rid of our retargeting panel and then i'll open up our bone list a little bit so we can see what's going on i'm also going to turn off the katana just for right now make things a little bit less confusing and so now we're going to go and tweak our bones a little bit and so the first thing that i'll do actually is i'm going to set a keyframe right here for all of our bones because this is the point at which we're going to start deviating from what we have already so i'm going to select all the bones and then if i just hit s i just added a lot of keyframes here but every bone you can see now has a keyframe in our dope sheet and this should be on our dope sheet so we can see now we will go to our first pose here and this is where we're going to start making a couple adjustments so i will go find my left upper arm and we're going to start there and basically what we want to do is right when we rest here we're going to rotate our bone so it's a little bit further down maybe and whenever we make a change we're going to add a keyframe so we just adjusted the upper arm but now i actually want to go in and adjust the forearm and move this back a little bit make this a little bit steeper i'll hit s add another keyframe and now we will go in and we can adjust our right arm so i will go find my right arm and at this point the actual right arm is looking good but the forearm we want to make sure that we're not clipping that other arm so i will adjust it hit s and now it's just kind of a matter of you know going forward in the timeline and maybe we want at this point to have the left arm move slightly down so i'll go find that left arm move it down a little bit add a keyframe and then we will work more on this right forearm here add a keyframe and essentially i mean this looks pretty good so we'll adjust the head to make sure we get rid of this clipping that we've now created with the arm and we can do that by just going to the head maybe right at this point we want the head to just be moved up a little bit and remember we set a keyframe for all the bones at the beginning of this move so that we can make new changes and we will keep the position that we had beforehand so basically anytime you see there's an intersection i can just move this up a little bit more right and then add a keyframe here when i see this intersection i'm going to move the head up and basically we can just keep going through and making adjustments until we have what we're looking for and if i go back to timeline we can play through this and see how it's looking so far and now if we turn the katana back on we can make sure we can adjust the hand so that we get that cool scraping across right and this actually looks pretty cool with the katana so what we're going to actually go in and do is adjust this arm a little bit more this left arm so this looks pretty good now we can go and tweak the actual scaling of the of the sword to kind of have it animate in if we exit pose mode we'll go grab the katana drag this guy back up and then we can between this movement right here this the katana will be at full scale so we'll add a keyframe right here and however when we go back we'll add another keyframe and i'm just hitting s as i hover over it and now that katana grows right there and there we go now we are a lot closer to that animation we've gotten rid of some of that clipping and basically i can just keep going in here and adding keyframes and tweaking all the bones uh without actually damaging that original mocap right the whole goal of all of this is to be able to keep our original mocap and just tweak the limbs here and there so that we can get a more precise positioning if we have some kind of more detailed animations that we need to get done so i can keep tweaking this until i get something that i like add in some lights and a little background and there we go we can add in a couple effects in after effects even too and and kind of get close to that original animation that we saw that we were trying to you know recreate so hopefully this video was helpful i have been using this tweaking animation layer workflow a lot since i figured it out and it's just really easy to go in and get a much more precise look on your animation you know and fix any of those clipping errors that you might see or anything else so please put any questions in the comments below and we will definitely get to them and until next time keep having fun mocapping out there see everyone you

Channel: Rokoko

Views: 27,994

Keywords: mocap, motion capture, smartsuit pro, motion library, 3d animation, 3d character, vfx, unity dev, game dev, unreal dev, unity3d, unreal 4, motion, film animation, review, demo, handson, blender, maya, autodesk, cinema4d, maxon, behindthescenes, education, student, studentwork, analysis, tracking, capture, mograph, motiondesign, learning, treadmill, drift, fix, magnetic, interference, xsens, noitom, perceptionneuron, awinda, vive, htc, ikinema, nansense, inertial, sensors, ik, locomotion, loop, loopable

Id: nB5qhTItryU

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021