MOCAP to ANY RIG! - Retargeting motion capture in Blender using ROKOKO

[Music] i've been trying to add a motion capture to a rigged animation character for a while now and i just wasn't sure how but i'm persistent and i finally figured it out and sharing is caring so here we go this video is sponsored by rococo and with that they're offering 10 off for my subscribers that is you guys if you use the code on screen right now you get about 250 off of their smart suits now i know a couple of you guys have been asking for this asking for these codes i'm waiting for them so this is for you but enough about rococo we'll talk about them a little bit later for now let's hop into blender to add mocap to your animation rig you first need mocap so for this we're gonna be using rococo studio i'm gonna go ahead and go to their motion capture section where we have several options so rococo has some free options they also have some paid ones but the paid ones are usually around three dollars some go for six dollars so you won't break bank when you're trying to purchase these but there are also some free options and some other options as well like miximo where you can download your motion capture but for the sake of this video we're going to be using the rococo motion library so let's see if we can find something that we like alright so i think this one here looks pretty good um yeah i'm a fan of that okay so let's go ahead and double click on this and go ahead and add it to cart and confirm purchase order all right purchase successful library and here's the list of other stuff that i've had previously but this is what we just downloaded so okay i'm going to import this to let's say my sample project and then once we go back to our dashboard we go to sample project okay so let's right click on this export make sure it's on fbx we don't really want face because we don't have face animation we don't need body mesh we just need a skeleton because we already have our own rig let's leave this on binary fbx and i'm going to leave this on human ik maya human ik we'll see if that works if not we can adjust it later but let's export it for now let's choose where okay we got our target press export all right so now we're opening up blender i'm gonna go to file import open fbx and here's the fbx file we exported and as you guys can see it looks a little weird because all the joints are pointing upwards and that's not really what we want so i'm going to go ahead and undo this we're going to go to file again import fbx this time in armature i'm going to make sure that automatic bone orientation is checked so now i'm going to reimport this and there we go all the joints are in place where they're supposed to be i'm going to go ahead and move this bad boy over just so we make room because this is just step one so for step two we need an animation rig we need a character that's rigged to be animated and for this we're gonna be using max max is one of the characters currently being rigged for our upcoming blender animation course to animate poor guy still doesn't have a facial rig but since we don't have facial animation it works great for this case alright so let's go ahead and go into pose mode let's make sure everything's working correctly all right um so key thing here is that we want the character's arms to be an fk because our animation is an fk the animation in the mocap that we got and same with the feet so right now the feet on max are in ik we don't want that so let's go ahead and switch this i'm going to go to max's ui make sure that the bar is all the way at fk same for this foot the bar is all the way at fk and i i'm going to turn on fk legs turn off ik legs and and give it a spin see if it's working yep and our new controller yep looks good everything's in fk all right next step i am going to let's go to object mode select this reference character and so he's a little bit underground let's bring him up a little bit and match it best we can okay and i'm actually gonna scale him up a bit just so he matches um max's height and i think that's okay now so here's here's the animation that we have right now and for us to re-target this animation onto max we have to use a tool we can't just magically do it there is some paint tools i think auto rid the auto rig add-on which i'll have on screen right now probably i know that this does the job but in our case we're going to be using the rococo plug-in for blender now this thing's awesome because it does what auto rig does with retargeting and it's made to work perfectly with rococo and it's actually faster it like applies the animation much faster but let me go ahead and log in so once you're logged into your rokuko account you have access to all this stuff but we don't need studio live we don't need this one what we need is the retargeting so let's go ahead and select the source which is our animation then let's go ahead and select the target which is our rig our new rig so max break and then our reference next step is to build a bone list so this is this is where it gets a little nitty gritty um what you have to do is make sure that all the joints of your skeleton of your mocap match up with max's controllers so you can do this you have to do this manually pretty much because um what it gave you isn't very good there is maybe three controllers that correctly retarget it but the tool is there for you to manually retarget it and it doesn't take more than like five minutes you can check for example so let's go to pose mode you can check that this is the left arm on our mocap and then we can come to max and see where the left arm is so the left arm for max sorry the left arm for max is actually called upper arm fk left and then we can check one by one let's go here for this character this is called the left forearm and on max that same controller is called forearm underscore fk so i'm gonna go ahead and quickly replace these so again so if it's left up leg i'm gonna look up what max's uh left leg is called and replace it with that i'll give you an example and then i'll do it really quickly so left up leg for max is called thigh fk left easy as that i went ahead and retargeted everything um i did skip out on the fingers just because the motion capture we have doesn't actually have finger animation so there's no need to do that um i'm going to go ahead and make sure that auto scale is on and let's have it at the current pose since they're both in a t-pose you want it to be in the exact same pose so we have it at current and we i have the option to save this now so i don't have to redo this the next time i import an animation so i'm going to go ahead and press save let's press retarget animation and pray and hope that it doesn't blow up and let's see what that looks like okay so we have something like this okay it's it's pretty good you know you see some flaws like the shoulders being like all the way up like this but again i'll show you guys how to fix this but i couldn't get those results like two months ago i really wanted to do this and this i'm so happy right now i am so happy this is great now let's let's show you guys how to actually fix this up i'm going to go ahead and go back to our frame one which is our t-pose at this point we can really delete the reference because the animation is actually baked onto our controllers so we can control this with our controllers and we don't have to go in and touch the bone and whatnot we have the animation controllers right there it's keyed it's baked on top of those um so to fix this we're actually gonna use the animation layers this is something i covered in my last video it's a new add-on that we found out about so i'm going to turn on animation layers and we have we're in pose mode for macs so we can press add animation layer and right away we have a base layer where our base animation is in and then we have a new layer where we can add new animation and there's no keys anywhere so let's go ahead and again on this new layer let's go ahead and bring oh we don't have auto key let's make sure auto key is on so we're gonna go ahead and bring these down to a normal level and i'm gonna go ahead and go to here make sure everything's zeroed out make sure rotation is zeroed out same with this zero out rotation zeroed out as you guys can see okay i'm not gonna make the same mistake again as you guys can see there we go uh there's a single key here there isn't like a line of keys because we're on this new layer we're on the animation layer and when we play this we keep that so the shoulders aren't going up into his face anymore and this is where we can add any sort of additional animation without having to deal with this atrocity you know without having to go like adjust these you can actually go to this new layer and let's say oh the arm is a little wonky here so let me select the arm controller and move this back and bring this rotate it this way a little bit and bring the arm a little bit more this way because it's breaking and boom that's so cool i love it i love it so let's say we want the character to be looking forward we can go ahead and the single key have the character looking more forward there we go i love it i love it's so cool to me so this is a beautiful way to actually implement mocap and character animation so i hope this helped i hope you're still watching if you did you're gonna enjoy some bloopers at the end make sure to check out two animate if you're interested in the blender animation course we won't be using mocap for that we'll be actually animating the characters and learning actual proper animation uh make sure to check out to animate i want to give a huge thank you to my beautiful patrons thank you guys so much for your continuous support on this channel remember the code on the screen right now if you want 10 off of mocap a motion capture suit it's the most affordable motion capture suit on the market i say affordable but it's 2 500 but when you compare it to the competitors that are 10 000 15 20 30 000. it's affordable anyways with all that out of the way happy animating and i'll see you guys in the next video but i'm persistent like a middle-aged woman who ordered medium rare steak but got mediums that is terrible are you done [Music] oh

Channel: BrianKouhi

Views: 30,050

Keywords: smartsuit pro, retargeting animation blender, how to add mocap to a rig, how to use mocap on a rig, rokoko smartsuit pro, mocap in blender

Id: lbv1q8Onkmg

Length: 12min 10sec (730 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 24 2021