Motion Capture tricks and workflows in Maya - MOCAP tricks and tips to work easier

hi amedeo beretta here and in this video we are going to see how to manage motion capture animation after it has been retargeted to our character rig i haven't been doing much on youtube lately because of a short movie i was finishing with some of my students but now i'm back we will see how to manage arms animation in a flexible and non-destructive way how to manage contact positions and feed animation how to add acting beats to existing motion capture animation how to animate fingers when you do not possess finger motion capture to begin with and we will go through a general overview on how to keep the workflow flexible and non-destructive with the idea of sparing hours of work through the application of very simple workflows this video is an extract from my twitch streams which i run every thursday at 6 pm london time that is at 6 utc coordinated universal time this is part of the training i supported my students with when working together on a short movie if you are interested follow along i worked with motion capture on a couple of movies in visual effects and on some video games so i'm going to explain here a couple of the techniques that i think made my life easier and some common issues that i think you encounter usually when you work with motion capture now when you work with motion capture of course you want your keys to be on the controllers themselves so that when the character moves it moves through the controllers and now you can edit the controllers of course the main problem with motion capture is that there are so many keys every frame is a key with motion capture which makes things particularly complicated for the animator but if you know a couple of tricks you don't need to sweat it too much so there are some common issues with motion capture the first issue that you normally encounter with motion capture is noise so very every now and then depending on the suit you're using and on the animation you're animating you may get noise in the controls in this case for this motion capture i don't think noise is much of a problem but in theory if you open up the graph editor in maya you see that you can see all the curse of the motion capture don't be afraid of looking at them if you think that animation is very noisy one thing that you could do is you could go under curves and there's something called butterworth filter if you go in there and you execute it you see that it tends to smooth down the curves so this is the curve as they were before i ran this the script and you see that this way i sort of even out the curves so the butterworth filter or any denoiser filter that you find in a 3d software are useful but you want to make sure that you don't indiscriminately apply them because maybe some motion needs to be noisy okay so in general it's a good tool in particular you always need to evaluate is this the tool i really need to use for this shot because very often that's not really needed you have to imagine that a lot of motion capture suits they really have already their own denoising system so the data we are seeing in maya right now comes from a accent suit and this accent suit has its own software that already does denoise the curves so if you just go around and run and indiscriminately denoise this animation it's not necessarily an improvement when you apply the noise you always want to make a play blast or before and after and check if that the noise makes some sense so that's usually the first trick that we apply to animation how do we clean this animation so if there is too much noise and the style of the animation we are producing does not require that amount of noise and the denoiser doesn't help one of the tricks people used was to and it still is to a certain degree was to select the controls actually we got just the top controls let me just select a smaller range so that we don't waste too much time you can go edit and keys and bake simulation and in there you tell maya can you just keep every third key every third frame i have to select the channels i want to bake as i bake it is going to take a while because it needs to go through the timeline there are two things to notice one is that at the end of that operation you see that now the the data is a lot less dense the other thing is that anything that is beyond the timeline has been deleted so a bake operation by default gets rid of any key that is beyond the beginning and the end of the timeline so that's something that you need to be aware of if you run a bake simulation because if you run it on a very small section of your animation you're actually deleting anything else that happens now the other problem that you will encounter is that if an object is rotating check out the left hand in here if an object is rotating you see what's going on there every now and then these crazy rotations that weren't there earlier on and they almost always happen in the interpolation not on the key actually the key are working if you go between keys using period and comma you see that the keys are working they work just fine but if we go in the interpolation we have a lot of issues and that's because if you hold down e and left mouse button and go gimbal then you will be able to show the actual axis that the animation is using to be evaluated in the 3d software in here you see that we are in a gimbal lock gimbal lock occurs when you lose the ability to rotate on one axis typically the average user operate object axis so the illusion is that you have total control over the shape but the point here is that the values you see changing in the channel box up here these guys in here are actually calculated in gimbal axes so these guys and if you find yourself in a situation like this one then very often the interpolation in maya goes a bit crazy now how do you solve that you go back to your friend the graph editor you select any curve it doesn't matter which one and then you run what's called an euler filter you go curves and you go euler or i guess if your german euler filter and you click on it and maya recomputes the rotation there it will try it will try it will try to always rotate following the shorter path to the next pose and very often it nails it it actually works this is something that in mockup happens all the time to the point that one of the things i typically used to do when i was starting with a mock-up clip was to grab all controls grab the graph editor and kneeler filter the whole thing i don't think nowadays you need to do it anymore because i think a lot of the mock-up software already unwrapped the rotation in a decent way i found that it helped me in the past so if you find yourself in a situation where you get crazy rotation when the leak keys then euler filter is your best friend in that case those are a couple of common issues that you encounter with motion capture if you are a targeting motion capture to ik hands ik hands are wonderful and when i animate i use mostly ik hands anyway depending on the scene but in general very often i end up doing a lot of stuff with viking hands if your actor in this case jake who is in on this call he was wearing the suit if your actor was keeping the arm straight and you're retargeting to ik ik and then the director of the movie or yourself tell you or you tell yourself look i need this character to be leaning a bit more towards the left hand side of the camera you might as well grab all of the controls in there put them on a layer and you could rotate it if you're not familiar with animation layers please check the link to my animation layers video in the description of this video i would really like to create an overlay card to this video so that you just click on it and get to the tutorial but in practice youtube won't let me do it until i get to a thousand subscribers so hurry up tell your grandma to subscribe to my channel now what happens is this right since i am rotating the the chest and the hand is not following and it's in okay i'm bending the hand and i'm bending the hand for the whole duration of the animation what i would like to have as a as a behavior is rather a hand an arm that keeps the shape but moves down with the chest and that can be done if the ik controller is either following the chest or if you're using fk so in general i prefer to clean the arms in fk when i clean mockup it's not a big problem if you ever targeted your animation to ik the important thing is that you have a way to get that fk going if you need it and in our particular production the short movie you're working on i wrote a little bit of a script in here that if i execute it it's a work in progress guys so now i'm running it and i don't know if the computer will explode or not but if i execute this script on an advanced skeleton rig say i grab an ik control from an arm and i execute the script so it's going to throw me an error because i first need to load the picker from advanced skeleton which i forgot to load so this needs to be open for advanced skeleton and once that's open you grab any control for and for one arm only one arm it doesn't work with multiple arms you have to do one arm at a time then with the picker open and you run the script and maya is going to run through its routine well the script rather and maya is going to follow along give it a couple of seconds or actually more probably at the end of this process the arm will do or should do exactly the same motion but in fk the key word in here is should do but you see it does really when you ask yourself should i use ak or fk it's in modern animation it's almost a silly question because you use whatever is useful for that portion of the animation and then you convert it for the next part of the animation and at a certain point there are some very cool tools that can convert and keep a minimum amount of keys but if you're converting between ik and fk in practice you almost always end up with one key every frame but you shouldn't really be worried about that the important thing is to keep cool your pros you have everything under control now the beauty of it is that if i rotate this thing you see that now the arm stays straight and if the arm goes behind the buttock like it does it shouldn't be a big deal because i have two options in here one is i could create another layer there and just rotate the arm out and now the arm will stay out for the whole duration for instance that's one solution the other solution could be to have the arm in global for instance the problem with global is that when you turn global on on a rig that's what happens usually right it goes to another pose so you need a converter so before you even start animating you have to ask yourself i mean wait is it easier to clean that or that and you know do i need to have fk or ik i i would always recommend to clean the hands in fk if possible when you're dealing with mock-up and as at least as a first pass and then only later go into ik to convert it to global without spending 10 minutes doing it convert it to global and then on a layer just unwrap the rotation manually it's not a super great way of doing it but at least now i should have it in global and if i now change the chest rotation it stays in global it keeps the rotation ratio between the elbow and the shoulder there that's another way another trick you can play although if you are at a stage in which you have to create a layer just to make an fk arm global then you might as well make it global before converting the animation from ik to fk so for instance let's start with the arm in ik you see the right arm works just fine then if i set the arm to fk there you will see that the fk arm doesn't quite work there are no keys in there now i can grab an fk arm controller set the global to tens now the arm will won't be working but at least it will be global when you rotate the chest you will notice it's in global now that that controller is set to global i can go back to ik so to the old animation and now i can use my script or any script you will find in production i mean an animation studio should have it to convert animation from ik to fk that will give you an fk arm which is set to global and has the same animation of your mocap now we convert animation from ik to fk and once you've done it you will find yourself with the arming global the ability to control the spine without affecting the internal economy of the arm which is a great feature to have and now everything will be much easier say that your animation was retargeted to a local fk arm like in this case for instance where the arm is in local and when you rotate the spine you find yourself changing the animation of the arm considerably so what could you do then well you could do as demonstrated earlier on where i just put the arm on the layer and set it to global but you could also convert first animation back to ik again you need to have access to a script to do that or you need to write your own an fk2ik script converter is usually a good idea anyway it makes spare so many hours now the animation is on to ik and just like i did earlier on i can go back to fk set the arm to global and perform the conversion so just like i did earlier on except we went from fk to ik to set the arm to global and then back to fk this makes you spare hours and hours of work you see that now we have full control over the arm and it took us only a few minutes to have control over the arm so that's a bunch of things that you probably want to consider to begin with let's say that we decide to clean this arm in ik to do that i will open up another file it's not really mock-up but it's structured that if as if it were i created a problem on purpose and here we have two arms one is ik the other one is fk and when i press play you see they both perform the same operation they both go up that way that's good now let's say that this motion on the way up was a bit noisy and they told us clean it i could run a baking operation but what happens let's say if i delete everything between the last key and the first key so what happens is that the end and the gimpose are the same right but if you check the interpolation of these arms you will find something very interesting you see that the fk arm still works pretty nicely right so it does the that's what it needs to do but if you are in ik the ik is going to linearly interpolate between the first pose and the up pose which are on the same vertical line so it's simply speaking going to translate up that way because ik doesn't know about arcs so you see that sometimes it's just much better to create an fk arm if you want to get nice arcs from motion capture than it is to clean an ikea arm so these are things that you really need to consider and that's why i wrote that script that converts the animation from ifk to ik because as an animator yeah you certainly can do your job but if you have a tool that make your job easier to begin with you should definitely employ it there are just tools that are useful in some situations a lot of people for instance they are a bit wary of advanced escapement because of the fact that it's an old tool but at the same time it gives you a fast rig it works out of the box cannot really complain with too much and it's for free and can you really complain i don't think so it even gives you a facial animation slap it on a face and it gives you a facial rigging and not only that but if you're going to the into the biped picker you can retarget mocap through that window if you want now we have seen that it's a good idea to clean the arms in fk if you need nice arcs and that it's a good idea to have a way to convert the animation between fk and ik if you can have a converter use it in companies usually you have a converter although i was surprised in some big companies where i worked the converter wasn't there and it was an animator who wrote it and it was the same animator who taught me how to script by the way it was long ago and i think nowadays whichever company you go in there will be a converter for you waiting now let's have a look at something that you have to very often fix in mocap and one thing that you often have to clean in mockup is contact for the feed whenever a foot is on the floor in mock-up you will find out that the foot is quite never solidly on the floor so let's find an area where the foot is problematic so in here for instance see that it's on the floor but it's not on the floor it moves and it keeps moving around so feet movement in mock-up is something that needs cleaning also depending on the mock-up system you have you might have the animation already that retargeted to the toes and you might have very precise toe motion there or you might have really really bad toe motion my suggestion is when you can retarget toe motion to the roll of your rig do that if you can that is it because if you retarget the toe motion to this guy in here now you will find yourself having to counter animate this controller to keep the tip on the floor so it's not probably a good idea let's think about the the position of the foot i look at this and i think the foot is just too close to the other foot so the right foot in there is just too close so what can i do in here i could go and move this key right and position it there but if i do that what happens to the immediately available key after and before they jump right because this edit is just for the single key so that's when i really need to have layers so i will create a new layer in there and i will on the new layer i will call it side move side offset as i do so i have my control on the layer i can move it out this way and as i press s now the offset is there for the whole animation see that the character is walking with the legs a bit apart so for instance i worked on a movie it was a disney movie from 2012 it was john carter plenty of these dudes they were the background the crowds were all mock up four arms four why four in this case a good approach would be to clean the primary arms first then duplicate the animation to the secondary arms and offset that animation by a few frames and then with animation layers you'd go back and you just added offsets so that the arms wouldn't look exactly the same so that's a case scenario and certainly the first thing that i did on on every shot that i encounter in motion capture not just for this movie but overall is to first fix the posture of the character so before even fixing the motion i want if i mean say that the motion capture comes from a very well trained athlete who is done in the suit but your character needs to be a guy who's really unfriendly and really not very very well evolved you don't want your character to look with to have a posture like this one because that's i mean that's way too refined this dude is a serious person we want our character to look a bit nastier so i would put the spine on the on a layer i would have the arms in fk so maybe what i can do in here is i could convert the arms to fk just to show you one arm oh i need to open up the picker i always forget that there you go i will only do one arm because i don't want you guys to stay here and watch me converting animation for i don't know for two arms i mean once you see it running you get the picture now i have my animation in there and with those controls that i have on that layer i want this guy as i said to look a bit more uninvolved so i will grab the spine and i will rotate the spine forward i will rotate the head the head controllers a bit more backward something is going on yeah it's me being stupid i guess let's see there you go there you go and then maybe i can even put the root on the layer on that layer so i can move the root a bit to the back set a key move the spine a little bit forward and the neck a little bit backward so now you have a character obviously i will have to in this case since the army is not in global i will have to manually counter animate its position so now the whole the whole loop of animation is going to look a bit less evolved right and this guy now suddenly looks like a caveman when the actual mock-up really was of a much more evolved individual so the very first thing i do with mocap is first nail the posture what is my character thinking which kind of character is this dude and what's the emotion is this going through at this stage what's the shot about and in our short movie for instance we have a scene in which there is a bunch of there there's a bunch of characters and they are working an entire way some of them anyway i mean i could have used the the known tire the mock-up clip and just change the posture to give me that storytelling device that i needed say i didn't have a mock-up clip for the other animation so this is really the first thing i do to mock-up before even thinking of anything else i first set up the rig of course that it's easy to work with so the arms will be in global the arms will be in fk probably and then i change the posture to what i need right now i don't need it we were talking about feed earlier on so now let's say that we have successfully moved the food to the side but now we're looking at it we cannot not notice we cannot not notice right that the food is sort of sliding you see it's moving around and then even here you see it's moving that's a bummer so you i could go in here i will just zoom in on the timeline i could go in here and i could just you guessed it i could just duplicate 761 over to say let's say let's find a place where this guy lifts off so i will go to a bit later off i need to find another piece of animation let's do it here there you go so let's say i could duplicate the the the frame of the foot when the foot is on the ground so at 736 i have a key then all these keys maybe i don't need and then i could duplicate 736 to 746 now the foot stays planted solidly there and then it starts moving but you see what the problem is now it starts moving but it glitches forward right because earlier on this animation was happening more than one frame now it glitches forward and then of course i could go in there and i could say you know what i will just delete the keys it was going to be all right and now things start to go downhill but i mean i'm i'm a pro and i'm saying yeah i know this kind of stuff i've been around for so long now i know what an euler filter is you can't win over me just this way there you go either filter take this maya but then i'm thinking wow but this pose really is not what i wanted the pose was this way but now i'm thinking ah but now the the tip goes under the floor so i have to move it up and before you know it you're spending 15 minutes on a lift off that was working and now it doesn't work anymore so what you want to do instead is you want to be non-destructive in your approach to animation you want to try and keep the motion coming out of the foot but just plant the feet on the floor so let's try that i will disable the side offset for a second because i want to do i want to try and play a trick so i know that a tool i have installed on my machine called red nine which is a free tool and you can pay for it if you want if you want the advanced tools but in practice it's otherwise free with the basic functionalities you can download it for free from the web the installation is very easy and on my youtube channel there is a link on how to install it there is a video how to install it but and in the comments there is someone who installed it in a much faster way than i did so you should probably go to the video don't watch the video and read the comments instead so now let's have a look at this this uh step off and let's see how we fix it so we know i was saying that in red 9 there is a tool called animation toolkit i know because i made a youtube video about that that there is a tool named track or stabilized in there the tracker stabilize does this let's let's have a look and see what it does if i select i don't know these keys and i go time range i select the time range on the track and stabilize and i can say process forward maya is going to process from the first key i selected forward and you see it's planted on the floor i don't even need to copy the keys it's planting it for me and then i will still have the glitch you see i still have the glitch so i'm thinking okay so that that stabilizes it yes so i have it now but the the kickoff is still still sucks i i still didn't fix it so how can i and i'm thinking maybe maybe and i say maybe i could put this foot on a layer stabilize it on a layer and then zero out the layer progressively as the foot lifts off i will i think i will try that because maybe it will work i have no guarantee will it will of course so i will first of all select the control add the control to a layer and this is going to be my step and i will do just one step of course so i will go to where i need this step to to be settled so let's say that the contact is i don't know a 691 i'm making it up i select between 691 and i don't know i can even select a few frames after the kickoff i don't care i feel i feel careless today leaving the dangerous way now with this selection on i can say time range is on i am on to the step layer please notice i i disable the side offset i i don't really need that oh i'm stupid let me reselect there you go and then i'm going to go so i'm on the step layer i have time range on and i go process forward so from 691 forward and i'm going to click on it and red 9 should and i say should be able to stabilize you see the foot is stabilized now the the geometry is moving because the root up there is pulling okay but the control is perfectly stabilized now the problem is that this guy is lifting off but he's leaving lifting off late right if i go and disable the step the lift off actually happens here you see at around 744 so i can go onto the step layer and say oh i got it wrong actually you know what delete all these keys i don't really need them so now as i lift off i lift off from the offset where i was at so the liftoff is exactly the same as it was right then i go find the next contact and i say that's when i want animation to look exactly the same way so i go to zero that's it and the offset that i introduced by planting the food down is going to be diluted you see a wonderful interpolation there it's going to be diluted before between seven four three and seven five six but the most attentive of you guys will have noticed that there is a bit of a strange interpolation there it's not very easy to spot but i think if we look very closely we can see that there is a problem there but hey we said it more many many times now we are pros so i will open up the graph editor make sure i am on the step layer grab any rotation key one will be enough you grab one and it will it's going to either filter all of all of them okay not just one curve i go and go i go and curves your filter and i'm not sure i'm very lucky tonight i think i will try again usually it works but of course why should it work when i am live so let's go euler and there you go it worked actually now that i selected the three curves it worked i don't know why usually if you select one it works for any way but hey that goes to let's say you have to select the three of them okay let's cut it short just to be sure and now i have the interpolation working perfectly well and with one silver bullet i fixed the step i fixed the sniding i fixed the step now let's say that i want to have some foot roll in there right that would they would that would look okay i think some foot roll can we maybe yeah so maybe i can do i'm thinking maybe i could i can remember this pose and i can maybe say to red nine hey you know what i changed my mind just stabilize the foot in there and then i go to 741 on that layer and i am going to check the roll in there and i don't want any key on the roll in there so i will sync with the timeline display so when i you see i'm when i select a channel i'm only seeing the key on that channel but you see that there are keys on translation rotation but really the role doesn't have any so maybe between between seven four one and whichever key was because i don't remember it say this guy i can roll up well i don't know how much i should be rolling let's say i roll up that way so there you go now i'm rolling and then i'm moving forward and then as i move forward i can zero out the roll when i feel it makes sense to do that there you go and now i also introduce the role with layers and with the right tools you actually can do a lot so as an animator the only thing you don't want to do is to just animate with the basic tools of maya you have to imagine yourself as your animate you have to imagine yourself in a shed full of tools and based on the tool you need you just drop the tool and use it you're making it in practice you're making very complicated furniture so you need the tool that does that gives you that shape that works that wood in the right way i say that because i i made the furniture in my house so i know something about the pain of furniture making and the lack of tools so the tools are really making a difference the most successful animators that i animated with were the people who had a lot of tools and they were totally agnostic if they had to to do a particular kind of animation they first found the tool that made it easier and then they did the animation they didn't go head-on i was much younger and i would tend to dive head first into a wall and then after a few of those bumps in the head i was like maybe i could use a tool oh wavy and dizzy so now we have seen how to fix the feed controller but the beauty of it all is that if i now and enable again the side offset this whole thing is going to work with the side offset as well total control i mean i don't have a gif with the cat of james bond but if i could i would probably put it on right now so now we can just remember that we have the side offset in there another thing for which these layers are very useful is when you have a character you needed to to step in a different position so let's say that the director says beautiful animation in english-speaking country the feedback always starts with great fantastic animation guys can you just change it so the first part of the feedback is always amazing and then the second part is but change it let's say the director says i want this step here to happen a bit more on camera right okay i can grab the controllers the root and the let's say the left foot i can put them on a layer and then i can say you know what at the contact i want these guys to move to camera right and it seems to me that even the hand needs to be on that layer so i will put that hand on the layer as well i will use world access because if you use all object now they will all move in different directions it's not really useful so we'll use world and i will move them this guy to the side in there and now as the dude is walking one before he just leaves the floor with the foot i will zero out and now as the guy is walking there you go i can make him land a bit more camera right where the director wants it and it's going to stay there for the next for the rest of the animation anyway layers are super powerful super powerful should really use them to be honest a lot of the tools i use in maya i noticed that they are already built in in blender for instance that's why i think blender has something going for it because a lot of the animation tools that i would normally have to manually install in maya they're already in blender animation layers are still not there you have you have a paid for plug-in i think if you want to use animation layers in blender but i'm pretty sure this is going to change soon and there are some jobs now more and more being done in blender so it's a good idea to keep an eye on blender because i think it's a very cool tool for animators it's a different philosophy than maya a very different way of working in many ways but i think it's just as valid now we have learned a bit about the intricacies of layers we have seen how to fix feed contacts and sliding if you want to add say a character looking around in mockup guys it often happens that you have an animation of dude walking and the director was there when the animation was recorded the animator the director was the one who said cut and he said great that's final we have it the director is also the same person that will tell you to change that animation i'm not bad mouthing directors the problem is that once you are into a shot you realize that that animation that you had on a green screen or an empty set is not really the animation you wanted which is why now modern filmmaking and visual effects they have all sorts of tools to make sure that the actors and the directors have a clear idea what happens on screen because otherwise they go back to the visual effects facility and they just ask you to change stuff because they really had a different idea when they were on the set so let's say that the director is happy about the walk now and but he's telling you he needs the guy to look around as he walks he wants the guy to just observe and observe that's when as an animator you would shoot some references to begin with to understand how quickly the turn is going to work for the head and then as an animator you will also create a layer with the head and a bit of the chest i would say on it as well the chest controller and then you will go in there you will say okay let's say that at the end of the first step the dude is going to look to one side so i'm going to create a key and then about five six frames later i'm going to rotate everything a tiny bit you see how i do it i select all controls and actually i rotate all of them then i deselect the root control and i rotate all of them a bit more then i deselect the root control and rotate them all all of them a bit more and then i rotate the head this way the action of rotating is something that happens for the whole body so we did the rotation of the character looking to one side and then once we're ready to walk forward the director says he needs to look forward well that's that's easy what i can do is i can just zero out the layer and now the character is walking looks to one side and then decides to move on he's not interested in that stuff he's seen seen better things in his life what i was saying is when you work with mocap and you have that density of data you do not want to craft an animation that is already final because 99 of the time the client the director or yourself will want to change that animation so you would rather block it out this way very very roughly and see what the effect is in the shot and ask for direction and say go to the client and say hey what do you think do you think it works and the client will say something along the lines of yeah that's exactly what i wanted but the way turns is a bit too harsh and that's okay because you tell him yeah that's rough that's a rough change we just wanted to know if the beats we put into it were what you wanted so that's how the exchange would work with a client or a director you almost never want to go to a client with a finished piece of animation because the time it will take you to finish that piece it will be very long and maybe you're not even doing what the client wants or what the movie needs so rough it up a little bit and then once you know in the shot that's what you want then you refine it okay don't refine it any earlier it's pointless there's there are always going to be changes i mean maybe you work one two weeks in a shot or four weeks the editor and the director sit down sit down and they say actually we don't need this sequence anymore the movie works much better without and your animation goes just like that the very first time it happens you tend to be a bit sad but then you learn that that's not your movie so you're paid to animate on it so if they decide that that sequence doesn't have to be there well then it doesn't have to be there and you have to take it professionally so you just cry yourself to sleep but outside the company never inside okay inside you're stone-faced you're the pro there outside you can cry and and hug trees and poles in the street when the when the rain drizzles on you especially if you're working on such a sad scene but you have to get used to it anyway i think one of the first rules that i read on a book about animation was that you shouldn't get emotionally attached to your work and that's really true sometimes you want to do a particularly piece on a particular piece of animation because you think it's cool but that's not what the movie wants and so you have to rip your heart out and redo the animation so get ready for that as well if you want to work with animation now we have done also a way to tweak the animation and similarly i could say you know what maybe this dude could as he looks to the side he could lift his arm so i will put the arm and the pull vector on a layer and he could say wait a second he could say i'm a bit worried now so i will lift my arm and protect myself a little bit with that arm when you use ik the most important thing is to make sure it doesn't look like you're manipulating a puppet always keep the forearm and the wrist in a certain relationship to one another so they don't look too broken so now as the guy stops and looks he's like what's going on there and then as he starts walking you can go back to zero so i have another layer for the arm in there i can go down and start working again there you go so now let's say that you're quite happy about the result and the supervisor is everybody's super happy the whole family of the director is happy i mean the world couldn't be a better place probably so now i think it's time for us to merge down the animation so i will go and select all layers and i will go merge layers and i will just merge them down with a smart bake you will have to be patient because if you have a slow computer an old computer and you have many many keys the smart bake will take a while and you certainly don't want to click in maya as the smart bake is in progress maya doesn't take it very lightly when people are clicking and he's thinking why it doesn't do multitask i think i mean it does in technical terms but in this case if you start clicking in the viewport i mean there's that's the best way to piss the software off so we in general before you merge your animation you always want to save it because what if the merge does not does not succeed what in my if maya crashes i mean there are so many uses in this animation that i mean your head your head is going to spin if you start counting them so just save before and save after with another name so that you can go back if you need ninety-nine percent of the time layers work in such a flawless way that you do you wouldn't even believe you're working in maya but there's always that one percent that is going to spoil your day so in here now that we have our animation we we want to have a look at it again and we have our nice animation there it's mockup and it does exactly what we need it to do look at that even the stuff we added feels like mockup because it is based on that mock-up noise we didn't have to recreate the animation let's say we want to reduce some of the noise the noise that i have here for instance on the arm you see there's a bit of noise in there i'm a bit careful here because i have two ways i could use a butterworth filter in there to smooth down the animation or i could bake the animation on first some of you might have watched a movie called monster house this guy here so monster house but for the time i think it was quite a good movie and i think more than anything the story was entertaining i watched it and i thought the story was was nice i thought wow that's actually quite a good story the mock-up in there i think it's it was one of the first feature films with mocha the mock-up in there is at times a bit rough but you see it's not very noisy and it looks as if the way was done i mean that's my opinion of it anyway is by baking the animation so they would just go on to bake simulation and bake at referred and that will clean the animation of the noise the problem with doing this thing so if i now bake the animation on first for this hand there you go now what happens is that in the poses the hand will work well we have the usual i should probably make a shortcut to the other filter on my shelf because we mock up you keep using it all the time so now you see that the animation kind of works but there are times in which the arc doesn't work for instance and there are there will be also times in which since your spine is moving not on thirds anymore you will have this kind of effect you will have the spine moving and the harm the arm bending and the hands staying there if your attempt at cleaning this motion is to bake every two or every three fair enough but if you're saying if you're cleaning the ik hand then try to clean any control that has an effect on the ik hand so that that relationship within the arm and the body is always kept the same every time you're baking a key on the arm you're picking a key on any control that is controlling the arm so the relative pain of the arm will always stay the same by the way when you open up the curves of your mock-up and you see this kind of jumps so a one-frame jump and then frames close to one another that's almost always a gimbal lock in fact now if i run a new euler filter check it out they go away so we see that it's almost a guarantee that it's gimbaling somehow i don't think gimbaling is a verb by the way but since we are into new languages let's do it let's invent new words so now press play and you see that the animation now is pretty clean there's a bit of noise in the left arm somewhere there that would be an approach to cleaning mock-up now i just baked every two and i think it worked there is a bit of noise when i go up here you see that the knee the elbow there is a bit uncertain it's like it doesn't know what what you want him to do if you don't need that my suggestion is just get rid of it there you go see that clean so try to first be non-destructive when you deal with mock-up so set the rig so that it's easy to work be non-destructive when you tweak things like contact posture so that kind of stuff start with the posture always the posture first after you set up your rig make sure the character posture is reflecting what your movie needs then i would say even before tweaking the feet my suggestion would probably be to to add those acting beats that the animation needs to have now that the director didn't spot at the beginning and that you really want to have and only once you have that whole thing approved you go and fix the sliding feed only then because you never know maybe you spend two hours fixing the feet and they are they look like they were made by michelangelo and designed by raphael but then the director goes in and says actually now i want him to jump that's when you that's when you flip the table right but if you jotted down the poses first and you kept the mock-up non-destructive then now all of a sudden even if the director tells you make him jump you're like yeah how how i i mean you don't care because at that stage it took you just a few minutes to fix the animation so try to do first the things that are requirements of the scene and only last you go in there and you micromanage the controls now fingers and motion capture a love story so you will have to go in there and do it manually now some manufacturers so if you're using accents or rococo as a manufacturer this is a pretty cheap in terms of i mean cheap in terms of cost not intense of of a result a motion capture suit from switzerland i tried it it's actually quite good the the the main issue i had with with it is that in the building where i was trying was trying it there were a lot of underground cables and steel beams and they would interfere with the suit but if you try it in a friendlier environment it actually works very well and it comes with smart gloves if you pay a premium that will give you finger motion i can guarantee you that you will still have to clean the fingers when do you have to clean the fingers so if the if the camera is this one then you probably don't need to clean the fingers but if the camera starts to be something like this then you probably need to clean the fingers so it depends on how close to the camera same thing for the feet if your camera is like this then the feet need to look perfect but if the camera is like this then the feet need not slide too much so it's all relative to what we see in the camera now fingers at the end of the day i mean if if you're doing you have to think of it in practical terms if you're doing very realistic animation and you have the tool to get that motion from the actor why would you really i mean unless you particularly enjoy pain for the sake of pain and you want to spend your time in the graph editor cleaning that stuff you might as well use what the what the mocap gives you and just make it look nicer when it doesn't look convincing at call it a day there will be other projects in which you will be able to do stylized animation if you have picked the company that does that kind of work the only thing you need to be aware of is that very often if you work in a visual effects facility and there are humans involved and they are digital well motion capture will be there but to be honest guys i watched once i i found a video online of barack obama visiting dreamworks they showed him how they had a mock-up kit ready for how to train your dragon i would imagine that's just my imagination like the song says but i think i would imagine that they would have used it at least for previous purposes i mean at the end of the day if you need the character to walk from point a to point b in previous are you going to spend 10 hours doing it or are you going to spend one minute done in the suit and putting it there to know that is on set and if you do visual production like you would want to do it's better to use mockup he gives you quicker feedback so i think mockup is a good tool even for stylized animation you don't have to use the mockup data you record the mockup and then at least you know at which timing things are happening you can keep it there as a reference for instance so there are so many things mock-up could be used for in stylized animation too that i think makes sense to keep an eye on it so at a certain point i even considered purchasing a rococo suit for that reason for myself for my own pleasure i wanted to record mockup but it's still a bit steep for me i mean i need to have a business case to spend that much money for for myself maybe instead of buying a motorbike when i will get to 45 years old i will buy a mock-up suit huh and then i will invite my date and see look at this amazing stuff i can record look at that and then you see the skeleton in maya wait where are you going they don't get it we have no motion capture data with these fingers unfortunately so we will have to do our best to animate them now i still want you to remember john carter of mars four hands okay so that means three phalanx per each finger five fingers 15 controls by four 60 controls okay so that was 60 controls so the way you would animate um you would fix motion capture fingers if you are in a rush and you're almost always in a rush when you do motion capture anyway because you have to produce volume is by starting by creating a rest pose for the finger so first of all you want to have a selection set for your fingers so that you have that that selection set always there and you can easily select them and key them when you need them that's the first thing you always want to do and then you want to add a library of poses at the beginning of a production you will only you will have to make a lot of poses if nobody thought of it but nowadays organized animation production comes with poses so you might be hired in a company and they might have a library of poses already for the fingers so you only call them in when you need them you can use for post libraries you can use studio library it's an excellent pose library system if it opens up there you go it's here so that's that's very useful red nine also has a post manager in the animation toolkit since i'm in a russia that want to use either of those i want to use the post to chef tool which is a very old-fashioned tool that stores stuff in the shelf the chef is not the best place to store stuff in but if you are in a rush so now what i want to do is first of all a rest pose the rest pose is usually done by rotating all the fingers that way and then you tend to rotate the fingers which are approaching the pinky a little bit more than the other fingers so you see how i i rotate deselect rotate deselect rotate and deselect the other thing that happens is that usually if you really look at fingers you realize that fingers don't really rotate now i wish i could show you this side of the hand fingers don't really rotate the phalanxes don't really rotate all the same usually there is a corner there is bigger than other corners so if you just rotate all the fingers individually this way they will always be looking a bit cg like so what i tend to do is i tend to give a stronger corner somewhere so that now they look a bit more alive but you really need to look at references guys so there is no hard rule in there but the references or reference poses for hands that you can find online so if you google for instance references reference poses for hands you find so many hands poses and they're really they really are your best friends because i i can guarantee you if they if the movie you're working on requires a close-up of hands and those heads are 3d you're going to spend maybe 20 minutes posing one pose easily easily if not more okay because before a 3d model looks compelling appealing it's going to take you a while so there you go so now i have my nice pose in there sort of nice i think that thumb is broken one common issue with thumb guys is that in modeling for whichever reason the thumb the thumbnail is always at an angle but really should be that way that's how the thumb is made right in real life not this dude this dude not this dude this dude not this dude this dude okay and you will find out that when you receive a rig from production you very often have to to check the thumb and see if when you rotate the thumb on a single axis if it goes at the base towards the base of the pinky if it goes there on a single axis you're sort of fine because that's natural behavior in this case the original behavior wasn't that good but the rig is for free i'm not going to complain so i'm i'm selecting all the controls in there and i really want to in here probably you would also want to cut the to to move the fingers a bit closer to one another i mean you can spend ages on fingers so i will just do a basic pose in there and then what i will want to do is store this pose usually you will store it in a in a manager but now i will use these post to shelf there and then i will do maybe a fist so we'll go in there and do a fist in there but you see it doesn't work too well so i would just do it this way when i rotate a part of a limb i always do so using several controls i very rarely move a single control he said while moving a single control so now i select all these fingers and i store them and call this a fist and i store this and now as i animate what i can do is i can go in there and maybe at the beginning i want to have a rest pose and then as i move forward i can have maybe a rest pose in there as well and then as the guy moves up i will make a rest and a fist that's why that's how you want to animate so let's say you're working on a short movie altogether on a movie you want some dude to sit down and do very appealing hand poses and that those end poses are stored with studio library somewhere on the server so the folders studio library is pointing to is on the server and then every animator will load their scene and they will start by saying oh you know what i think today i feel like a rest pose done i feel like i feel i feel like mirroring it you open to your library you mirror it that's how you animate this kind of stuff anyway and in big production say say you're working on a movie or on a disney movie i would imagine that the supervisors and the leads would do plenty of animation tests before the movie even starts officially and then they will store a bunch of poses that any junior can employ as a starting pose from their pauses so you would really want to do things that way so you start you jot down the poses in there and then as the character starts moving you maybe leave another pose in there then you relax again there you go and now you want to have a look at the animation there you want to see if that works and that sort of works in there once you have the animation working is when you think in terms of in terms of breakdowns so maybe in the transition is going to be linear for all fingers if i keep it this way but maybe one thing that i could do is i could grab say the thumb and the and the index and we know right we know that the thumb and the index when you make a fist are the last dudes who are closing right and that's because the the pinky tends to close earlier and the thumb needs to go on top of the index so the thumb will definitely be the last one so maybe i could call in an old acquaintance of mine the tweet machine and i could say you know what wait a little bit before if i were japanese i would say chatomate and i would probably exhaust my knowledge of japanese for tonight although who knows maybe one day one day so now as the hand closes you see that now it is not linearly translating between the two poses it's just it's just creating a breakdown and this breakdown you can either keep on the timeline but maybe and i say maybe maybe one thing that you could do is you could also store the breakdown on your post library so now your post library becomes bigger and bigger and when you animate you're just using the poses it's almost like editing a video at that stage now which other very repetitive task you could imagine could be done with a pose library in an animation movie if you think of it characters they tend to speak for a long time in animation right in general you would want to have mouth expressions saved as posed i suppose is somewhere and when you do lip sync you start with those and you tweak them based on your needs it spares you a lot of time i would definitely use that so as an animator i remember at the beginning i was a bit proud i would i would say no the hell with it i'm going to do every single pose manually with total diligence and discipline and while that certainly teaches you something at the same time you will soon hit a ceiling after which i mean there's just so much you can do as a human being so after you learned how to do the poses well use pre-made poses i mean the the beauty of cg is that you can reuse assets you should really that's the strength of using a computer to work so you should definitely use that strength to your advantage very often if you work in a very high-end movie you also have facial motion capture which is done with those fancy double cameras that you often saw in avatar when you when you watched avatar making offs and that gives you pretty good motion to be honest and for a shot which is maybe a medium shot you can just slap that stuff on and it works and i think that's it for this video i hope you have found this useful and if you did please like subscribe and hit that bell have fun [Music] my mother oh

Channel: Animation Pandemic

Views: 3,815

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: 3DAnimation, MOCAP, motion Capture, Xsense, Rokoko, learn Animation, maya Animation, learn 3d animation, animation tutorials, maya, autodesk Maya, learn To Animate, 3d animation tutorial, animation school, maya animation, 3d animation, animation layers in maya, animation layers, 3d animation layers, animate with animation layers, merge animation layers, smart bake

Id: 3EA5S2tmjjw

Length: 58min 28sec (3508 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021