Making clips and cleaning mocap

okay in this tutorial we're going to take the animation that the character has we're going to cut it up into small clips and then we're going to clean each clip there's obviously no point in cleaning the entire sequence if you're not going to use it all so let me take out the bits which interesting so first of all let's have a look through the animation so I think what we'll do is we will do its twelve movement as a clip so from here we want to start and finish spinning around a bit to start and finish with a fairly neutral pose I'll have a bit of leading and lead out to each movement that we record so starting somewhere about here having the twirl and then allowing both feet to come back together probably about there so from here I'm gonna do from 365 so over here I'm going to put in 365 and then from there up to four four five okay so that now fully defines the clip that we're going to do watch that so if come back to the beginning now there's three types of clean up that you'll normally want to do on mocap data one is kind of body adjustment so you can see at the moment she's leaning a bit forwards one of the feet is turned up and most importantly if I just go to models only you can see that her hands are inside her body now that was probably due to a bad calibration pose when we did the mocap but the the better the mocap session the less clean up you should have to do but it's a good example for us because it shows us how we can do the first kind of cleanup which is a posture adjustment so all the cleanup done in mocap is going to be done in layers animation layers so if you look at the hip bone that I selected there you can see the keyframe on every frame on the mocap data it's impossible to edit on its own so we create a new layer above that by clicking this button down here for new layer and we get a completely fresh timeline which is basically going to add on to the base animation so we can actually use this very simply to adjust character now I'm going to go into full body key mode 3 key mode to a full body body part and selection full body means that when I write when I set a key it's going to set a key for the entire body which is what we want to miss the particular scenario I'm just gonna rename this layer as well rename just so I'm gonna start with the feet I think we get it down so we can actually see the floor level and you can see that the feet are actually floating above the floor so first of all in order to set the feet up and get them right I'm actually going to lower her pelvis by quite a lot to allow us just to fiddle around with the feet and now lift her pelvis back up again and then pull that down to the ground so it's quite a lot of bending and it will enable us to move the feet around so let's just focus in on the feet again and choose each foot in turn and I'm going to pull it downwards until it's about a floor level I'm also going to rotate it now notice I'm pulling it downwards in the globe or Y direction because I is down but for other adjustments I'm going to switch from global to local and if I do the rotation now you can set up the angle at the foot so it's a little bit more natural it's good go back to move and go back to global so I can move it straight up and down I'm just make sure that it's on the floor and not part way through different all same on the other foot if you accidentally select something just double click off it into detail empty so you refer to floating a bit do some rotations on it that's okay they're back to move global and just lift up the pelvis until legs straighten up that's about as far as I can go so one leg is straight on the other leg is bent but that's actually fine other adjustments while I'm at the pelvis you can see she's leaning forward slightly so I'm going to do move but in the local direction there just so I can move her backwards to make a slightly more upright than what I would be trying to do on this if it was if I was doing this properly is I'd actually be comparing this to the video reference that I took when I did the motion capture to make sure that the posture I'm creating here is similar to the posture that she had when she actually recorded it I'm just going to move the legs a bit further apart I need to move the pelvis down again so things okay she's still leaning forward so I'm just gonna rotate her pelvis back a little bit even a more upright appearance so I also need to grab the shoulders and rotate them so the arms are not embedded in the thigh just a little gap between you to that there we go that forward very slightly now that is my interpretation of how she should be standing at that point I would say it should be based on video reference in an ideal situation you'd actually have a good neutral pose recorded into your mocap data so you can actually align the feet up and be confident they should both be facing forward make sure the heads facing forward and so on because at the moment I don't know if her head was meant to be facing forward of it was meant to be at an angle like is but that's fine so I've got that there just select any one part and because I'm in full body key mode I just clicked the key button here and it will lay down a keyframe on the whole thing so that's just going to model there anything watch this animation and if I do layout preview means I can get a full-screen version of the animation to watch and make a bit more make it to be easier to see what's going on and playing it through okay so the posture looks a little bit more natural now and that is posture adjustment so the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how to do a instantaneous clean up so if we go right to the end of this particular sequence it's a point just about here just off camera let me spin that around where her left arm goes through her hips just there so obviously we need to fix that as well but what we don't want to do is we don't want to fix the arm into a new position for the entire animation so we're just going to adjust it just for that moment as it goes through there and then we'll put it back to the normal no camp data I'm just going to add in a new layer here rename it and if you've got a long sequence you might have a layer in there which is one layer where you fix all of the arm intersections throughout the sequence so what I'm going to do now in order to make this work we go backwards and forwards through the mocap data and we're looking for the extreme poses of that arm so if I go back to the point where that arm is in an extreme pose probably about there maybe a bit closer about there would be nice okay I'm gonna put a keyframe here on this layer just to lock that position in if I set a key now or if I svet some parts of the object select the shoulder and I'm gonna go on to body part mode because I only want to set a key for the arm at this particular point and you can see what it's going to set keys on because if you look over here this bit here the whole arm has now got white outlines we're going to full body mode things got wiped out of minds so if I just go to arm you know it's gonna set the shoulder and although the hand positions as it goes through so setting a key there will lock that position in and what that's effectively doing is this key will just have a value of zero on this layer here I'm going to go through to the next extreme on the opposite side of the error which is actually the last frame and thinner particular sequence not going to put another key in there another zero key so neither of those key frames change the motion at all so what I can guarantee is that every point up to this key frame here it's going to be exactly the same as a motion-capture then when I get back to the end it's going to be exactly the same as the motion capture but in the middle I'm interested in let me go back to the point I'll just toggle through the clampy mode of control a just going to go to the point where the hand is at its worst intersection which i think is probably this one and then we just rearrange that particular arm pose to something that looks equally natural but is not intersecting so the obvious thing to do is just to rotate your shoulder a little bit it looks a little bit unnatural looks I'm just going to pull it around a bit like that okay so that's obviously now gonna bypass the hip so just put down a key for that very mind is only going to keyframe the arm so now as I go through that sequence let's just go back to models only again control they go back through that sequence you can see the mocap is exactly the same up to there there goes past missing the hip and then comes back into the position with the mocap later lifting a little bit of movement there as well so in fact I should go back to the keyframe here it's gonna take it up me funny set that key again just to make sure it's fine throughout the whole thing what you want to try and avoid doing is putting lots and lots of keyframes in so where I had another error there I didn't want to put another keyframe in right next to it I wanted to keep the keyframes as fast as possible and this is to keep it looking like motion capture data if you put in lots of keyframes all that's gonna happen is it's going to look like keyframe animation and that's obviously not the objective here so that's an instantaneous correction right so the next kind of cleanup that you need to look at is to stop feet skating so if I go through and we look at the feet while this character dances it's a few issues there for example where and where the foot set a funny angle but you can use an instantaneous adjustment there just to correct that foot back into the right position but there's a position here if we look here at the right foot as we go through this point here the mic foot actually slides along the floor before it takes off again so what we need to do is we need to fix that so that it stays firmly planted on the floor and this is how you correct foot skating so let's get the rig back up control lay again and select foot bone here and I'm going to go on to the F curves for that object we're talking about movement and we're talking about the X and the zared movement but let's just select all of the translation ones here already zoomed in on the area that's in question here and you can see the I mean the whites and it a bit up and down E but that's okay doesn't matter too much if you get a little bit of bounce in the foot every now and again and so let's just turn the Y off control there so I'm just going to go through the X in his head directions and we can see that from the moment of foot plants which is about there which is a frame at four one five all the way through to the point where the foot leaves which is four to five you can see that little section there isn't horizontal it's climbing up and down here it's climbing down so the value is actually changing for X and say in those two positions so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to delete what are the key frames from the motion caption date capture data between four one five and four to five like so just press Delete and now I've got what is more like a straight line now it's still on a slope but the point is I've taken out any little sort of wobbly parts to the movement and you can see that it still moves but now it moves in a very smooth manner from one side to the next okay now this is fairly easy to fix what we need to do is we need to create a new layer we're going to use the layer to cancel out that bit of a movement there before I do I'm just gonna select those keyframes at the beginning in the end I have set the tangents to linear and that just ensures that that is a nice straight line in between those two keyframes there so go to a new layer and this layer I'm going to call foot skating and then I'm going to put a keyframe at this point nothing to keyframe there on body part keyframe on that point and then I'm going to go to frame 45 and I'm going to move it back I think the weights on Hale so I'm actually looking to try and get the heel in the same place you can see that straightaways are not better I'm just going to put these two two linear as well so they exactly cancel out the ones on the other there and see what that looks like and that's how you create foot skating now you'll notice it's still not perfect none of these adjustments are ever perfect but you want to be careful not to over clean and spend too much time fixing things which the viewer is never going to see so I can see this now and I could spend hours perfecting that getting a position exactly right all this kind of stuff but when you watch it from the camera view point at the correct speed going to preview models only play it through and you can see that it's barely noticeable but most people are going to be looking at her head anyway because that's where people are drawn to so you need to clean it but you don't need to clean it to perfection so the only thing remaining now is to plot the animation from a control rig back onto the skeleton and then we'll delete the control rig and that will make this a clip completely ready to go into story mode we need to do this for each clip that we're going to use in our sequence so let's go down here choose dancer character we go on to character settings we're going to plot character to the skeleton which was 25 fps again there big lot so now the animation is on skeleton now this is just one layer now it's baked it out so you've got the base animation layer there let's look at the F curves so then you have curves if I go on to the other layers they are completely empty so we've plotted it onto the skeleton we need to delete the control rig now we just go into control rigs click dancer and delete and then we do file save as and we call it dancer 12 cleaned and once you've created a bunch of Clips like this the next stage is to bring them into the story window to blend them together to create a new sequence and that's what we'll be doing in the next tutorial

Channel: Ken Pitts

Views: 22,710

Keywords: MotionBuilder, Motion Capture, Mocap, Tutorial, BVH, Story Window, Story mode, Animation Layers, Foot skating

Id: bFOK408J-Ic

Length: 21min 43sec (1303 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2016