Easy Rigging and Animation using AccuRig & Mixamo

this is another video about using blender accurig and miximo together so in this video I'm going to show you how to rig a character with accurig and apply miximo animations to it and that will be done using only three tools I did another almost identical video using Auto Rick Pro and quick rig which are paid add-ons so if you like to work with auto Rick Pro then check out that video but if you want to know this workflow then let's move on so what you'll need to follow along is of course accurig and also the CC blender tools add-on I'm going to share a link to this GitHub page and then you go to the latest release and download The Source zip and also for this presentation I'll be using this Soldier model which is a cc attribution model and I'm going to share a link to it as well so here I have the model in blender I did change it a little bit but it won't affect the workflow okay so now the first step is of course to rig this character with accurate so I need to export it out of blender I'll go to file export fbx and save it as soldier from blender in that way I know that this is the file exported from blender then I'll start accurig and just drag and drop this fbx file into accurate give it a second and here it is it is a symmetrical model so the symmetry line looks good I'll rig the body or rather allow or accurac to calculate the points automatically I'll enable Symmetry and do some slight modifications to these points and if you want more detail about this process please watch the previous video which goes into more detail about placing these points okay looking good I'm going to rig the hand now the positioning is almost perfect I'm going to do some slight changes okay looking good I'm going to move on to the left hand and because the character is symmetrical all I need to do is use the mirror to left hand button and the points will be aligned correctly and then I'll finalize the character okay um and things are looking good I explained this a couple of times already in different videos but if the shoulder area is looking weird then you may want to go back to body rig and readjust the collarbone and shoulder points but this is looking good to me I'm going to test some poses and then go ahead and Export the character as fbx I'll set my target application as blender and export so this is my soldier from accurate I'm going to save it go back to blender and I'll move the unwritten character out of the way and here I could go to file import fbx and import the file from accurig but that creates a problem with the materials which we can fix manually but what is more important is that if I do it like this I won't be able to create a rigify Armature from this character so I'm going to cancel this and go to the CC pipeline tab so if you don't have this it means that you haven't installed the add-on yet so you have to go to edit preferences click on install and go to the folder where you downloaded the CC blender tools add-on find it select it and press install add-on now since I already have it it's over here and I also have the check mark next to it so make sure that it is installed and enabled and then you'll have the tab so here you can press the import character button and select your character from acuric and click import and blender crushed um that's unusual so let's try this again import character and this time it did work I'm not sure why it crashed but it doesn't seem to be a permanent problem so here I have the rigged character if I go to pose mode for this Armature I can manipulate it but the textures are missing so this is very easy to fix with this add-on I just have to go to object mode and go to the rigging and animation subpanel and here you'll find the much existing materials button I'm not sure why this button is here on the rigging and animation makes no sense but it is so this is how you can reapply your materials so now I can delete the android model okay and the next step in the process is also in reading an animation I'm just going to press the redify button okay and that gave me a fully functioning readify rig so I already showed this in the previous accurate video so that's not that interesting the point of this video is to show you how to apply miximo animation to this regified rig okay so now we want to grab some Maximum animations I recommend that you use the ninja model because I know for sure that it has a certain type of maximal Armature that is going to be easy to use some of the other characters may have a slightly different bone hierarchy and Bone names but for this workflow you may actually want to import your own character into miximo and also rig it with the Maximo tools so that you get a skeleton with the exact proportions of your character and that will help us in the retargeting process that isn't absolutely necessary but if your character's proportions are not that of the average human then you may want to create a maximum Armature for it but anyway I'm going to work with the ninja here and just apply a random animation to it maybe this one and just download it without skin okay back to blender I'm going to go to file import fbx and import my walk animation and there are other animations that I've downloaded before so let's just select all of them and import them at once okay so I'm going to select the two additional amateurs and delete them I just need one amateur and all of the actions are in the blend file if I go to dope sheet action editor I'll find the maximal actions and I can rename them so they make more sense cool and I'll switch to the walk okay so now let's talk about retargeting or transferring this motion capture data to our rigged character so the CC plugin has a special feature for retargeting animations and it works great but it only works with animation assets from octa-core I tried to make it work with other assets such as miximo but it didn't work and it almost felt like I'm trying to crack the system which I don't want to do so we'll leave these tools alone and will work with another retargeting solution for blender that is the Rococo Arrow so Rococo is a company that sells an affordable mock-up suit but even if you don't have the suit you can use their blender add-on and use it for retargeting so go to 3D software blender and from here download the blender plugin not Studio but the plugin okay now in blender again you're going to install it as any other atom edit preferences add-ons install find the add-on and install it and activate it okay then go to the Rococo Tab and you have to sign in with Rococo so when you press this button it will take you to the website and then you have to log in with your credentials or if you don't yet have an account you have to create one it's free it's straightforward and once you're logged in on the website it will automatically log you in here in blender so then you can go to the updater and check for updates and it seems like I'm up to date but this is a quick way to make sure that using the latest version and then we'll go to retargeting so now for my source I'm going to select the miximo Armature and for Target I'm going to pick the rigify rig and then I'll build bone list and you'll see that Rococo attempted to match the bones automatically but unfortunately it tries to use a lot of the def bones of regifi which are not meant to be animated so this is the part of the process that can be very time consuming and annoying you have to manually match the correct bone pairs but I got you covered I created Rococo presets which can be imported here by just scrolling down and clicking on the import button and here I'll go to my Rococo presets which I'm going to share with you it's going to be free and for the first demonstration I'm going to use the mix Samo FK preset and import it so now I find this a little bit um unintuitive but after you import it nothing happens and what you need to do is press the rebuild boneless button again and now the bone list will be reset taking into account the preset that I just imported okay you'll see that there is still this def spine entry here I'm going to delete it we're going to leave this space here empty so if I go to pose mode for this rig and enable x-ray so that I can see the bones um here's the second spine bone and in rigify instead of controlling the body the upper body it kind of controls the lower body and that is why I want to avoid using this second spine bone this means that you'll lose a little bit of information from the mock-up data but it's going to be fine I don't think you'll notice it and all of the other entries should be correct and that also includes all of the fingers that is super annoying if you have to do it manually so I'm saving you so much time and now another step that we need to take before we can retarget is to select any of the arm widgets and go to item and switch the ikfk slider to one also for the other arm and for the legs so we are going to be retargeting this motion to the FK controls because that is the easiest that is the most straightforward but I'm also going to cover how you can work with ik so stay tuned so now I have to go to Rococo and I'm actually ready to retarget if I um if I go to object mode select this Armature and check its rest position you'll see that it's a t-post just like my actual character and so the poses are a perfect match so all I need to do is retarget now if my character was in say I enables with the arms like that then I would need to reset the position of this skeleton to the center of the world just press alt G and then I'll go to post position go to pause mode and clear all transforms and then I would align These Arms to be enables as well okay and then instead of using the response I would have to set it to use current but in this case that won't be necessary so I'll choose rest and it's going to work just fine so if you want to know all of these details about working with Rococo I have a detailed one hour guide to Rococo feel free to check it out okay so I'll go to pose mode and then go to Rococo make sure that I'm in post position for both armatures make sure that both armatures are in the center of the world and then click the big retarget animation button and there you go we have the walking animation okay so let's talk about ik now one way to get this animation to the ik controls is to use a dedicated readify tool so if I go to pose mode and select this ik widget I can go to item and here is a button that snaps the ik to the FK so if I use it it will just snap to the current position of the FK legs and if I want to bake the entire FK animation to the ik controls I can just use the action button and confirm and wait a while so this took about around 10 seconds and we need to do it for each individual control so once more for the other leg and then again for the left arm and finally for the right arm okay so that's great now we have um the ik following the FK I'm I'm still in FK mode but if I switch to ik here then the leg will be controlled by the ik which gives you a lot of freedom to edit these animations but the problem is that this feature that bakes ik to FK is very slow you saw that each part took like 15 seconds for just 40 frames of Animation so it's pretty slow uh and if it's just one action that's fine but if you have many then it becomes way too slow and so let's look at a way to retarget directly to the ik controls I'm going to undo in here my character is still not animated uh and if I go to pose mode I'm going to switch all of the controls back to ik okay and now I'll go back to Rococo press the import button again and this time I'll import the ik preset so after that again I have to press the rebuild bone button and now again let's get rid of this TF phone for the second spine hmm so I'm not sure why but I cannot get the ik preset to work I always get the FK bones assigned for some reason I'm going to try to make it work and again I'll share the preset with you but in the meantime we can tweak it manually so again I'm going to get rid of this def spine bone and then I'm going to change all of the arm and leg entries so for the left arm I want the upper upper arm ik.l the forearm I'm just going to get rid of it because in ik we do not control the forearm directly for the hand I want hand ik.l then scroll down and find the right arm so again I want the upper arm ik no for arm and hand ik dot r and here it should be dot r as well and then for the legs it's the same thing I want the thigh ik.l which I won't be using foot ik.l now for the toe I'm going to use the toe ik.l if you're using an older version of blender you may not have the ik tool and you should just use the FK tool let's do the same for the right leg okay so that's the process um now I have the bones matched I'm going to select this Source Armature and press alt G to move it in the center of the world rest position is fine in this case and here the auto scale option may actually cause problems but let's try to retarget and then we'll see what happens and so the animation was retargeted but you'll see that something is really off with the positioning so let's undo and disable auto scale and then click retarget okay so this is looking much better I'm going to undo again and then grab this Source amateur in object mode and scale it up a little bit in retarget again okay so here is um almost perfect but actually the legs over extend a little bit so I'm going to undo again and scale down just a tiny bit and retarget cool so that should do it and once you have the right size of the source Armature then you won't need to adjust it anymore and I can select another animation and retarget it again okay a little bit overextended after all so let's scale down a little bit so this is looking good so that is why I said that you may want to read your character again in inside miximo because that will give you the exact proportions that your actual character has and then this process may become a little bit more straightforward and also that is one of the main strengths and advantages of Auto Rick Pro compared to other retargeters like Rococo because autorick Pro can do automatic ik retargeting and it tends to do it correctly so we don't have to do this annoying resizing of the Armature and so on

Channel: CGDive

Views: 37,449

Keywords: blender3d, b3d, rigging

Id: sUBJIRdMOSI

Length: 19min 21sec (1161 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 26 2022