Fast Rigging and Animation: AccuRig, Mixamo & Quick Rig (Blender workflow)

recently I released a video about accurig which is a free auto rigging application from octa-core and I suggested that accurig may actually be better than mix Samo and many people disagreed with me in the comments saying no no mix Samo is still better and I think their main argument is that mitsamo has a lot of free animations octa-core also has animation assets they are actually very easy to use but most of them are paid so that's a good point but what if you could use Maximo animations or really any motion capture data and apply them on a character rigged with accurig well you can do that and I'm going to show you two ways to do it one is using Auto Rick Pro and quick rig which are paid blender add-ons and the other workflow will be completely free using the Character Creator blender tools and Rococo for retargeting in this first video I'm going to show the Auto rig Pro workflow I'm making this video first because the process with auto Rick Pro is a little bit more streamlined you'll see that for the most part I'll just be using a couple of presets and everything just falls into place the free workflow with CC tools and Rococo is not as smooth but I'm working on some presets that I'm going to share with you and that's why it's taking a little bit longer but in a couple of days I'm going to release that video as well and share all of the resources with you okay that was the longest intro uh so let's get going so for this workflow you're going to need the following tools first you're going to need a copy of Auto Rick Pro and also you're going to need quick rig and it's important to understand that quick rig is an extension of autoraid pro as it says at the very top of the product description that means that quick rig does not work by itself it needs Auto Rick Pro to be installed as well another tool that is optional is the CC blender tools I'm going to share the link to this GitHub page and then you have to go to the latest release and download this source code file and the final resource that I'm using in this video is this 3D model from sketchfab by this artist here the model is a cc attribution license so you can download it freely as long as you credit the Creator I'll share all links with you and here is my model inside blender and I'm also going to share a link to this edited blend file because when you import sketchfab files directly into blender they tend to be a little bit messed up so you can get my cleanup file if you prefer Okay so I have Pottery Pro and Quick Creek already installed I'm just going to activate them and I also have the CC tools and I'm going to activate that as well and just in case you don't know how to install add-ons you just click install and you'll find the add-ons that you downloaded 99 of the time they're a zip file so for example here is the CC blender tools that I have and if I wanted to install this I would highlight it and click install Arrow and after you install it don't forget to place a check mark next to the add-on cool okay next I want to rig this female model with accurig so first I need to export it out of blender I'll go to file export fbx and I'm going to call this um girl from Belinda so that I know that this is the export from blender and just click export then I'm going to start accurig to use accurac you need to be logged in and I explained all of this in the previous videos so please watch that for more detailed explanation about accurate itself I'm going to go through the accurate rigging process a little bit faster here so here I have the fbx file that I just exported I'm going to drag and drop it into accurig and wait for the model to load um Center Line is fine I'm going to click on rig buddy and wait for accurate to calculate the articulation points of the model here they are this model is symmetrical so enable Symmetry and maybe move this knee marker a bit and I'll keep aligning the points okay looking good I'm going to move on to the hand now okay I'm going to do just a tiny bit of tweaking here and move on to the left hand in here I'm just going to click on the mirror to left hand button and because this character is symmetrical it's going to be almost done just a tiny bit of tweaking and I'm going to try to finalize the character and here is our character I think usually accurate does a almost perfect job um one area that often needs some tweaking are the shoulders so if your shoulders are looking weird you can go back to the body rig here and tweak the clavicle and shoulder points but here I'm happy with the results um so I'm going to go ahead and Export the model as fbx Target application blender and just click export and here I'm going to name this girl from accurate okay now I can go back to blender and here is why I installed the CC blender tools here I have the original unrigged model I'm going to move it out of the way and now I could go to file import fbx and just import my girl from accurig and this is going to be fine except that um the materials are not applied correctly so I have to manually go ahead and reapply the correct material and if it's a complex model it may be a little bit time consuming so I'm going to undo okay this was the state before we imported them all and now instead of going through the regular fbx I'm going to go to the CC pipeline Tab and click import character and here choose girl from accurac and import so by importing through this button the add-on understands the important Model A little bit better and now I can go to rigging and animation and I don't want to create a rigify rig here we will be working with auto Rick Pro what I want is this much existing materials I have no idea why this button is on the rigging and animation I think it should be on their material parameters but anyway it is what it is so I'm just going to press this button and it will reapply the original materials for me so now I can just select and delete this unrigged model because I have the rigged one if I enable x-ray I have the rigged one with the correct materials and textures cool so now we have this accurig Armature which we can manipulate for sure but it is a simple FK Armature so not very practical for animation and so on so here is where autorick Pro and quick rig come in into play okay I'll go to object mode and now all I have to do is with this ring selected I'm going to go to this drop down menu next to import and choose the Character Creator accurate preset and by the way if you don't have the accurig entrade that means that you don't have the latest version of quick rig because it was updated basically today on October 20th 2022 so go get the latest version so there is character creator character creator plus and the accurate presets they are very similar the main difference between Character Creator and plus is that plus will also rig the fingers of the character which is a very nice and quick way to set things up and this accurate preset is almost identical to the Character Creator plus one the main difference is that for some reason uh octa-core must have changed something in the rig hierarchy or rig naming and one of the spine bones wasn't matching correctly and also there is a slight difference in the way twist bones are set up but the easiest way to set up a quick rig for accurig is to just select this preset click ok and then just click Quick Trick and ok and that will give you a fully functioning Auto Rick Pro compliant control rig just based on the accurate Armature and so for example here I can move the hips let's work just as they should and twisting of the arms should look good yeah um no candy wrapper effect everything looks good and that is thanks to how these twist bones are set up some of the controls are very small that is because quick rig creates these controls based on the size of the bone which happens to be very small so it is very easy to fix this just go to auto Rick Pro select the control that you want to edit click edit shape enable x-ray if you want to see through the mesh select all vertices and just s to scale this control and make it as big as you want and click apply shape then go to the next one edit shape make it bigger apply shape next one edit shape make it bigger apply shape okay this one you may want to make smaller actually apply shape okay cool so this is how you can edit any of the control shapes if you need to okay and now we come to applying the miximo animations so I'm going to go to miximo.com and for the character I like to choose this ninja model some of the other miximo characters have a different bone structure and different bone names so that can influence the process but with the ninja I know that it will work exactly as I expect so let's apply a quick animation uh everyone's favorite capoeira for example click on download and download without skin the model itself is not important at all and download it okay now I'm going to go to file import fbx and import the capoeira fbx just like that with the default settings and actually let's go back to miximo and apply another animation foreign this one for example and click on download and download with the same settings and I'm going to import this one as well okay that imported the action that I wanted so I can delete this Armature right away and move this one out of the way okay next we're going to transfer this maximum animation onto our water rig Pro quick rig so I'm going to go to remap select my source Armature and use the eyedropper and then select the auto Rick Pro Armature and use the eyedropper to set it as a Target Armature now I'm going to click on this multiple source and name button enable multiple animation retargeting and then select the Maximo animations I could have named them better but I know that these are the ones that I want and press ok now I'm going to Auto scale build bone list and then from the mapping preset I'm going to choose miximo FK arms ik legs or you can choose any of the other maximum presets depending on what mode you like for the legs and arms so legs you most likely want in ik for the arms you may want FK or ik depending on your preferences so I'm going to go with this one and now everything is basically set up all I need to do is retarget so I'll press the retarget button and press ok and here we go um I have the dense animation applied already and it's looking good and if I go to dope sheet action editor let's rename this to dance remapped then stream map and I'm going to select the other remapped animation and that will be the coupler and again it's looking good okay so that was the process of rigging a character with accurate Pro converting the rig to Auto rig Pro using quick rig and finally retargeting a Maximo animation to it and by the way the motion capture data does not need to be maximal it can be anything and autorick pro has a bunch of presets for Rococo Unity characters unreal characters and so on um and if there is no preset then you can set things up manually which I have a detailed tutorial about and one quick note um if I go to a rest position for my main rig and also rest position for the for the motion capture data you'll see that they're both in the T pose and that made the retargeting work out of the box now if my character had a Naples for example so the arms pointing down like this what I would have to do is select the motion capture Armature go to redefine race pose click ok and point the arms down like this and when I'm happy with the post I'm going to click apply here but here this is not necessary so I'm going to cancel so if you retarget your animations and they kind of look like this the arms clipping into the body like this this is a clear sign that the response is not matched and you'll need to redefine the rest pose okay I hope this has been useful I hope you can see how easy it is to apply maximum animations to a character rigged with accurate and if you want to learn the rigify workflow as well then subscribe and turn on the notification Bell because this video will be released very soon and if you really like what I do here you may also consider supporting me on patreon or gumroad

Channel: CGDive (Blender Rigging Tuts)

Views: 44,372

Keywords: blender3d, b3d, rigging

Id: Wiwvs_QywMA

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2022