Free AI-mocap for Blender! - Rokoko

hello everyone and welcome to yet another video today we are going to talk about Rococo's recently announced competition love at first move this is an amazing opportunity not only to win insane prizes but also to try Rococo's new AI mocap technology which they Showcase in this context it's completely free to join and use the software so what can you do with such software let me show you my submission for the challenge so this was my hopefully fun little submission for the challenge let me show you my workflow for a scene like this first we have to go to the Rococo website where we have to go and find the Rococo video if I go over some things fairly quickly in this video you can always check out their website because there are plenty of tutorials and great educational videos to get you started when you have signed into your free account you will be sent to this page where you can create a new scene I will call mine challenge with Coco then you get the option to either record a video directly with your webcam or use footage you have on your computer since I don't have a webcam I usually use something pre-recorded this is a video of me standing in my living room looking stupid I cut the bit out of the video that I like and then I just click on the button turn to animation and then I'll let broco do the magic it takes a few minutes to process the video but when it's done it sends the data directly over to Rococo Studio but wait what I don't have Rococo Studio well fear not just go to the website and download broco Studio it's that easy oh me you ask I'm just downloading Rococo Studio because it's easy because it's fast and because I needed to continue this video once you have downloaded and are signed into Rococo Studio you get to their main page then you have to go on the projects and as you can see my challenge broco scene is already set up for me I double click on the project and on the new recording one to see my mocap data and as you can see this looks amazing this is actually a pretty bad example since I am really happy with my data as it is I will therefore not be changing anything about the animation here in Rococo Studio but if you watch their intro videos for Rococo Studio you will find out that there is a lot you can do to save a bad mocap recording but there are already super good videos on YouTube that explains this very well so I will simply export my mocap data as it is I right click on my recording and say add to export list I've already done this and then I press export Clips if you press on open folder you can see where your fbx is located it's that easy I then open blender with both my character Rick and my mocap data I found that I get the best results if my character is in t pose so I simply rig my character using miximo which is a free online software that allows you to easily rig any character on the left I have my mocap data which I now want to retarget to my main character luckily Rococo have their own plugin for blender which you can go download on their website you simply install it like any other plugin as you can see in the add-on tab to the left we have a category called retargeting we get the option to choose the source and the target amateurs The Source Armature is the one with the animation that we want to retarget and the target is the Armature that we want to receive the animation it's that easy then we want to press build bone list then the Rococo plugin tries to match the Bones from our source Armature with a Target amateur usually it does a pretty okay job but sometimes you have to adjust the bones then we're gonna press on retarget animation and let's see the result I'm pretty happy with the result this is very good and very clean animation and what do I mean by Clean animation well sometimes when you use mocap data you get these small Jitters in the bones and it just looks bad because it looks like the mocap data hasn't been processed at all we have now made a perfect retarget of our animation so what can we do now well by using miximo's own free plugin for blender we can simply just tap on the normal rig of our character and turn it into an ik rig which makes it much easier to change the animation going forward the next step is quite time consuming you can either keep the animation as it is that is also great but if you want to improve your animation even more or maybe change it then you can do as follows this is a new scene with the same animation what you want to do is scrub through your timeline and then look for the most important keyframes this is the keyframes with the most change in the animation then you want to delete the rest and this goes for all the bones so select all of the bones and only keep the most important keyframes this takes a little while to do but when you're done and if you set the interpolation mode of all the keyframes to constant then you get what is called a blocking which is a great start for a good animation even though this process takes a bit of time still way faster than creative blogging from scratch if we change the interpolation mode back to base year you get this smooth animation it's not perfect at all so now it's time to change it so let's set some new keyframes and quickly change this animation to make it look better I like the general animation that my mocap data provides so I'm just going to exaggerate some of the movements it only took around 10 minutes to do the exaggerated movements and let's see the result the new animation is on the left and the old animation is on the right I think the new animation looks way more organic and there's a lot more going on with the feed and the shift of weight which gives it a more realistic feel I really hope you have enjoyed this video and learned something from my workflow you should definitely try out Rococo's new AI mocap software it's amazing I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Animatable

Views: 71,823

Keywords: Blender, Rokoko, Ai, mocap, 3D, tutorial, free, easy, animation, character, challenge, love at first move

Id: mcWHlU5bPKI

Length: 5min 33sec (333 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 25 2023