How to Characterize Your Character in MotionBuilder

hello welcome to the next MotionBuilder tutorial in today's video we're gonna look at the most important part the MotionBuilder pipeline how to characterize your character in MotionBuilder so I'm going to break this process down into four simple steps. Number one is T posing this is the most important part of the process we have to align all the joints the character's limbs second one is character mapping this describes your character to MotionBuilder so it can understand which limbs are which third step is a characterization this is an easy bit as a tick box and how to create a character naming template that lets you skip step to whenever you've got characters that share the same joint names so to get started I'm gonna come up and file open our character this brings up our open options dialog window and here we're just going to right click and load all elements we don't want any animation in the scene when we're characterizing our character so we're gonna right click discard all animation you can right click and load all settings this file was actually saved without any animation in it so there are no takes showing up if the way you just want to make sure they're un-ticked and then we can deselect all the options down here click open once our character's open we can control W into the schematic view and 'a' to frame and we're just going to select the top joint in the character which is usually the hips and control 'w' back into the perspective view we can hit 't' for translate and then F6 to go into global mode and we're just going to set the X and the Z to zero (0) to make sure she's centered in the scene and we can hit 'r' and we're just going to make sure that she's aligned she wants to be facing down positive Z so if you look down here in the corner of the screen you can see the X Y Z axes so positive Z is actually screen right as we're looking at her the other way to check this is to ctrl+f into the front view your character should be looking straight at you if they're not you can come down here and then left click drag left and right or type in values and make sure they're aligned down the correct axes so now we've got our character correctly aligned in this scene we can start putting her in a T-pose I used Adobe fuse to generate this character mesh which actually builds a character in this T-pose so I actually rigged her in the same T-pose but these days it's more common for characters to be built and rigged with their arms down by this side and this kind of A-pose this just helps with skinning and defamation around the shoulders so for this tutorial I'm gonna pretend that she was actually built and rigged in this position so you can see the whole process you need to go through to align her into T-pose but because all the joints in the character are all FK you need to start T pose new character at the top of a joint chain and then work your way down so for the arms we're going to start with the clavicle if you zoom in if we look at the clavicle these are actually usually built and rigged in the correct pose so what you're looking for is this sort of neutral pose so when you rotate the arms down by the side you get this nice sort of natural pose for the shoulders what you don't want is something where the character looks like they're shrugging more like their shoulders are drooping so like I say this is in the correct position to start with so we can do now is ctrl+a to show the skeleton then I'm just going to use Alt+down on the keyboard to step down the hierarchy to start position in the arms what I usually do is align them in global space so if you switch to F6 and then down here we can type in our values to align the joints and then again we can use that Alt+down to go down to the elbow set this value and alt down again zero out the wrist now I know all the joints are aligned with the world axes the problem now is if you look at the top view because the characters are usually rigged with a slight bend in their arms like this when you actually go back and zero them out you get this sort of weird bulge which we don't really want so what we need to do is just rotate this arm backwards slightly so we'll put this back by three degrees then we can alt down to come to the elbow and this you want to change to the opposite so that will be minus three so what that does is if we look at this in a line now using the bottom of the screen so handy ruler you can see these joints are still in alignment so that's why I use the minus three plus three value on here whatever I rotate this back by I rotate this hand forward so that the shoulder and the wrist are always in line and if we just ctrl+a to hide the joints you can see now the arms actually looking a lot straighter we don't have that weird bend so now we know our arm is nice and straight and we can come down and check the hand so we're looking for here's palms nice and square and aligned with the world if we look at the knuckles in relation to this grid line on the floor you can see they're pretty straight so it's good from the top view but if we look in the front view you can see their hands tilted down like this what you actually want is a palm flat with the floor so we can step down the hierarchy again using the down arrow alt down and then we can just come in here and left-click drag to raise this up let's say 10 degrees so now we've got our arm nice and straight the palms flat to the floor we can start aligning the fingers so if we go into a top view ctrl+a to show all the joints you can select all these finger joints and careful not to select any of the others and then we can just align these globally so nice and easy if we look in the front view now we can see the fingers are nice and straight the way I usually align the thumb is starting with the base of the thumb I'll rotate this inwards until the joint of the thumb is in line with the palm of the hand so I'm looking for as I sort of tucked under shape from the thumb and then we'll go in the front view and we can rotate this up in Z just so it is aligned with the hand get that nice and straight and then again we can use it alt down to step down a hierarchy and we can set these to the correct values to make sure this is straight with the world what you want to be looking for when the thumb as well as that the thumbnail is actually facing towards you in the front view so there we have our left arm nice and straight now we can repeat this on the opposite side easiest way to do this is just look at the values on here and then copy them across but invert them so we can set this to minus 90 set this to zero set this to zero and then we know this is rotated backwards by three so on this side we want to change this to minus 3 because I've actually mirrored the behavior the joints so then this one's gonna be positive 3 if you look at the value on the wrist we need to bring the wrist up by minus 10 you can ctrl+a into x-ray mode select all the joints again and just zero these out then to align the thumb we can do exactly the same as we have with the hands and we can copy the values on this side put them in this side again making sure we use the inverse value so if it's a negative value we just take the minus '-' off and if it's a positive value we add the we had the minus '-' on and we can set that zero and then alt+down align the second joint of our thumb and alt down again just to make sure the bottom part of the thumb is straight so we have our character with our arms nicely T-posed next thing I'm gonna do is the legs you're going to ctl+a to bring up the skeleton before we start moving our legs what we want to do is store the positions of her feet so the easiest way to do that is to come down into elements left click grab a null and then dragging in onto the foot and we can alt left-click drag onto the foot again and then use 'Align' 'Rotation' that's going to align the rotation of these nulls which we can use later to realign the rotation of the feet if we actually move the legs you can just realign the feet with the nulls and get the foot back on the floor again so for the legs we're going to ctrl+r into a right view what you want to be looking for here is that there's a nice line where the characters standing on balance and there should be a slight bend backwards and then legs so what we can do is grab a plane bring that in I'm going to rotate it by 90 so you've got a nice straight line Center that in the scene so that's aligned to her hips so you want to be looking for their should be on line roughly from where her ear is gonna be which is somewhere around where the neck finishes here down through the hips behind the kneecap and then back through the center of the foot roughly where it is now so I'm going to bring this foot forward slightly so if we come into the perspective you can just grab the both legs go back into the right view we're gonna rotate these forwards slightly then we're going to use alt down to select both lower legs so then we can rotate our legs back slightly roughly to where they were before we can look at what check with the plane again now got a better alignment between the ear through the hips behind the kneecap and then through the middle of the foot so we can go into the front view we can delete our plane we don't need that anymore we just want to make sure these legs are straight down and that the feet are underneath the hips because sometimes characters legs are built sort of slightly further apart if they've been scanned especially they'll leave more space between the feet if that was the case we'd put in our values over here to align them to the world so now we know our legs are straight we can ctrl+e back into perspective view then realign our feet using the nulls that we put in earlier we're just gonna alt left-click drag onto each of the nulls and use 'Align' 'Rotation' and same thing with the other foot reason I'm dragging down here because it's just easier to hit these nulls down here than it is in the actual scene you can do align rotation and we can delete out our 2 nulls and that's our legs nice and straight now we can switch back into the right view we just want to check to make sure the characters standing up right and that they're looking straight ahead most of the time again the characters are usually built in this sort of upright position and facing straight ahead so now we've got our character aligned correctly in the T-pose you can move on to the next step which is 'Character Mapping' so for this we're gonna come down to 'Characters' and drag a 'Character' into the scene if you've used MotionBuilder's naming convention or you're using a 3DS Max 'Biped' you can just ctrl+a into x-ray mode select a joint and then you can come up here to 'Load Skeleton Definitions' and in here you can select the right template so 'HIK' is MotionBuilder naming convention and 'Biped' is the 3DS Max 'Biped' naming convention so if you've used a standard biped it should have all the correct naming so you can select your template and you can come in to 'Match all bones with prefix' if you've got a namespace for your character you can just use that or you can select all the joints that you want to actually use if we had the correct names we could use the prefix and then hit OK and MotionBuilder would actually complete their character naming template for you but for this tutorial I've used my own custom joint names so I can show you how you'd complete it if you weren't using the 'Human IK' or 'Biped' naming conventions so to get started I'm gonna select the hips and come up here and right click and assign selected then you can come back into the viewer and press down and use right click and assign selected go into our spine move down assign selected then we can just step through each part in a hierarchy and add it in to the character mapping as we go then we can come up to our neck joints the reason I like using the alt and stepping through the hierarchy is it's much easier to select the joints using this method than it is trying to grab them in the scene and before we start doing the arms and the legs just need to make sure this mirror matching tools on that's what this will do is when you fill in one side it'll actually use the joint naming to try and find the opposite bone on the other side so you can see it more clearly in the arms so if I select the shoulder and then right click and assign you can see it automatically fills in the right hand side what it's actually using here is the joint names so if you've got 'left' or 'L' token in the joint names it'll look for 'right' or 'r' in the other side and if it finds one it'll add it in this is really handy when you come to doing fingers the other reason I like to step through the hierarchy with the alt down method it's because there's a weird bug in here where if you double click on a joint and then select it in the viewer you can see these window flips across if you don't notice that it's flipped when you then go and put in the second joint you select in the left joint left thumb joint and then you'll be assignment to right thumb joint so this is why I prefer to use their step through the hierarchy method because then when you assign a bone it doesn't jump to the opposite hand we can just go through and do the rest of the joints in the same way you want to make sure that you've got end joins to your fingers as well MotionBuilder will actually use these to align the IK for the end of the fingers so if you don't have those it won't put the IK at the end of the fingers which will make doing fingertip contact quite difficult another good tip is if you're unsure how many joints you've got in your finger how they line up you can actually start with the joint it'll give you a red value at first and then use alt+up and step back down the hierarchy to make sure you get that end joint so sometimes if I can't always tell I'm not sure how many joints I've got in the fingers I'll start at the end and then work my way back down so just do the last of the finger joints you can come out on there I'm gonna do the legs then step down and step down again and just put in the toe base so that's nearly everything we just have to go back in and putting the roll joints so we've got upper roll joint and a forearm roll joint and then I just have the upper leg roll joint we don't have any roll joints in the lower leg and then the last one is a 'Reference' which I think I've called 'reference' so it picked it when I showed you earlier how to use the 'Load skeleton definition template' if it wasn't I could just ctrl W back into a schematic view and select 'reference' from there and assign that so that should be our character mapping complete to check that we can just come down here into 'Characters' if we double click our character you can go to the 'Character Definition' pane so this will show you where the joints have been mapped to them so we can see our reference so you've got the 'Base' these are minimum joints MotionBuilder requires to actually be able to Characterize and use the Control Rig now we know our character mappings complete we can just give one last check just to make sure everything's ok so we've got our character standing up nice and straight feet flat on the floor arms out in a T-pose looking straight ahead she's aligned down positive Z so she's looking straight out as in the front view so now we can characterize our character so you can either tick this 'Characterize' setting down here or you can come up here and hit 'lock' we've already checked that our characters in the correct stance and that she's facing down positive Z so we can hit 'Biped' so there we have our character Characterized ready to start using couple of final things we're just going to do and that's align these foot floor contacts as a rule I don't usually use these but it is handy to have them set up in your scene you're just positioning these under the toes and then one under the ball of the foot and then the last one under the heel and the final thing you're going to do just so we don't have to do that whole characterization process again if we've got another character that's using the same skeleton joint naming convention we're going to save out the character mapping we're going to select a joint in our character go up to definitions then in here we're going to click 'Save Skeleton Definitions' this brings up our 'Save Skeleton Definition' window we're going to give it a name so I'm gonna use 'Jess' because that's the character but if you've got say it was a crowd agent or a NPC non-player character something like that and they all use the same skeleton you could put the name of the skeleton in there rather than each individual character it gives you an example bone name so it's 'jess:reference' prefix we've got a namespace on this so that's 'Jess' and then you can specify where the path is so defaults are the path where all the other files are saved so we're going to keep ours in there as well and click OK so what this allows us to do now is if we have another character we'll exactly the same joint naming conventions rather than having to manually fill in the character mapping again we can do it all automatically using templates so if I turn off this characterization and just delete our character you can come in here drag a brand new character in we know she's already in a T-pose so you can select a joint then come up here and load our template 'Match all bones with the prefix' 'Jess' for the namespace and click OK and that automatically fills in all our joint mapping and then we can just 'Characterize' 'Biped' and just before we save our character you can come back down here and we're gonna rename our character to a character name and then we're also going to add it to the same namespace so you can right click 'Add/Remove Namespace' select 'Jess' 'Apply to branch' click OK all that remains now is just to 'File'>'Save as...' we can change from the MotionBuilder set up to 'CHARACTERIZED' and then save that and then in this file I'm going to 'Save all elements' we're not going to save any animation I just like to keep the file nice and clean so if I open it up I know there's an animation on it so I can if I need to change the characterization or apply any constraints or things like that and no there's no animation in there going to affect any of those things I'm going to 'Save all settings' and we're going to turn off takes so it doesn't save any animation in the file then hit save thanks for watching I hope you found this video useful it's giving you a couple of new ideas to try if it did then let me know in the comment section below and give that like button a quick click and don't forget to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: mocappys

Views: 6,503

Keywords: MotionBuilder, motionbuilder 2019, motionbuilder tutorial, mobu, MoBu, motion capture, mocap, autodesk motionBuilder, animation, characterize, mocappys, motionbuilder animation tutorial, motionbuilder characterize, how to characterize character motionbuilder, motionbuilder define skeleton, motionbuilder t-pose, t-pose, character mapping, skeleton definition, character naming template, HIK, mirror matching, character definition, foot floor contact

Id: lr6PziOY88U

Length: 22min 27sec (1347 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2019