Motionbuilder Advanced Story Mode tips

all right okay so today i'm gonna show you a little bit of more more story mode uh techniques uh where you can mix and match different actions uh using weights and story track you can have different weights on each track and you can mix and match between those it's kind of uh useful sometimes because instead of keyframing from scratch so you have two clips that kind of do do what you want you can mix and match them together and get get something going to use in your previous so um i'm gonna use my first example i'm gonna show you how to mix two clips together and add the second clip as uh as an upper body upper body motion okay so i'm gonna open uh this guy no animation it's probably interposed i'll switch on the control rate because i want him to be antipose full body and i'm going to start with a simple walk okay walk forward watch straight okay oops did i do that oh yeah okay so i'll start with a simple walk uh just so you know by default the weight of the of the track this track has weight it's hidden so you have to uh put your mouse close to the end of the track and just expand it you'll see a couple more options here so this is the weight i'm talking about this is the actual weight of the track okay so if i uh if i just play this right now it's playing the walk cycle right so if i go in and put that to 50 percent what it's actually doing is it's taking 50 percent of this stake what's on this take and 50 of the walk okay so it's kind of blending uh it's kind of blending the the t-pose and the wok itself that's why he's walking shorter steps because uh it's kind of taking 50 percent of each if i put it to zero obviously it's gonna play a hundred percent of the take so zero means whatever is on the take and 100 is whatever is on the clip okay um so what what i want to do is i have something i'm like i want this this character to um to walk and wave okay so normally you would either keyframe it but if you have a wave a mocap which is this i'm going to drag it drop it here to see what it looks like so the wave is on spot okay but my previous i want this guy to walk and wave at the same time so i have two options either to keyframe it afterwards or you can take this clip and only use certain body parts of it on another track okay so how do we do this is we create another track assign it to oops assign it to the character the same character and drag and drop hello so what do we have now we have the full hello the walk has disappeared it's still there so if i mute the hello we can still see the walk the problem is the way uh the tracks work is it it works the the the bottom one is the priority so it's the reverse of the layer system we have here so the layer system the layer takes the visibility it's the top one but in story mode it's the opposite it's the bottom one that takes visibility so now i can i can just do this if i put it to 50 percent and what is it doing it's blending the 50 of the wave that's why his arm is lower and the walk is less because it's blending the idle the onspot idle with the walk but like i said you can you don't have you have the option to use what you want in terms of body parts from the wave and the way to do this is through this so if you click on if you click put the mouse on this icon called body parts uh and you click on it you have all the body parts available so right now it's playing full body so all i need to do is uncheck full body and just choose upper body okay so what is upper body is the spine the head and the two arms okay don't worry about props and extensions this is more if your character is set up for props and extensions it will use or not use those props but in this case we don't have any props so don't worry about it you can leave it on because it's not going to affect anything so i just told that track to only use spine and left arm and head so what does that look like right now it looks a little janky because it's using a hundred percent of uh this motion on top of the walk now the walk is very if you look at it the walk it has some spines you wanna so you want to keep that uh kind of motion in the spine you don't want it to leave so let's try something else so i'm gonna take off the upper body and just use the right arm okay so from the shoulder all the way down to the hand okay so let's see what that looks like it's not bad right it's really cool so i just took the wave and i blended it with the walk uh in a couple of minutes so i didn't have to keyframe the the beauty about this is you can offset it so let's say you want him to wave later let's say on this part of the walk you could just offset the wave in here okay so now and he goes back then uh so there's one thing here if you notice that the arm is super stiff so we lost we lost the motion on the walk right see all this all this motion is gone so what do we do now we can animate the weight of this track from 0 to 100 to keep to keep the motion of the arm on the walk okay so from here where is the wave let's see so he starts waving around here okay so what i want to do is just put that anything any value in motionbuilder that has a k beside it that means it's keyable okay so that means we can animate the weight of this track okay so at this frame i'm just going to put it to zero press key and then he's probably going to start waving around here so that's not bad and waves and then drops it right so i want it to finish as he's maybe around here at zero and then i want him to start to keep on waving uh sorry to keep on walking with the way when i i'm gonna loop this walk to see the effect of the the weight of the diet i just animated so now let's see what it looks like see oh it got short because of my timeline so 240 240 flush so um you can actually preview the the curve of the the weight if you let me see if it works like that no it doesn't work so unable to see the curve because see here you don't see any keys but if you go let me check if you go on properties of the track track option oh yeah wait okay so if you select if you select the track you go in property let's say you it's it's not selected yet let's say there's something else selected and you select the weight and the property of the of the track then you can see the keys so if you want to adjust it here you can adjust it so let's say it's it's moving up a little bit too fast and you want to give it a bit more a bit more uh time to go up you could adjust it here so see just give it a little bit again it is going down a little bit fast so you can adjust that as well i don't know why it's popping here maybe the first and last frame are not the same probably on the walk let's check if i go in first view and go for the first frame yeah they're not in the same spot that's why and it doesn't really matter i can bring it back here and undo the loop 167 yeah if you offset the clip it will offset obviously the the keys as well because the keys are linked to the track so any offsets that you do here will move the keys as well okay so that's a cool way sorry to mix and match uh clips so then what you what you could do is then let's say you're happy with this um with the result you just plot selected and then let's see if what's selected it does do it on the yes it does do it on the skeleton so now you can either save it like this as a as a clip and load it into your assembly scene you know that because i highly recommend if you want to do mix and match clips like this do it separately and another fbx save it and then bring in bring it in with the kind of the the previous uh that you're doing right so again it's the same process when we're doing first the mixamo stuff we were saving the clips separately and then in another file kind of the assembly file we're bringing in the mixamo the samples files from motionbuilder the clipart from the clipart folder everything bring it into a separate file it stays cleaner this way you don't have to worry about messing up your original animation keyframe or your mocap so everything stays separate and the assembly file will bring them all together okay [Music] that's one way to mix and match clips using the body part i want to show you how to be able to keyframe on top of this let's say you didn't find the wave hello it's not available or you need to do something else let's say he scratches his head or something like that okay so you can take a base animation like the walk and add on top of it some key poses okay again highly recommended to do it separately because then it doesn't confuse with the other clips with the uh with the stuff you're mixing and matching in your assembly file so if you have this clip the walk and you want to add a modification let's say on the arm uh what you would do you select the same track you right click on it and you go insert subtract okay here you have two options okay override what overwrite means it will override the current or sorry the it will override the walk completely okay so uh oh let's let's do an example and then you'll understand a little bit better let's go on okay so i want to make him uh scratch with the right hand as an example okay and now it's an override right that's the one we chose yeah it's an override um so in able to add keys in story mode and on that track uh you have to click on this button accept keys otherwise you cannot you cannot like see if i'm in body part and i press key there's nothing happening so if you press this one down then you'll be able to add keys on that track on that sub track actually it's right now it's a subtract of this it has to be a subtract because you're actually modifying on top of the walk so that's why it has to be okay so i'll go somewhere here in the middle and make my modification so let's say goes up as oh he's taking a salute that could work too i'll stick to the original thing he's scratching his head all right so press key so what's happening is it pops on one frame okay uh it's because again because of the weight actually no it's because it's only on one frame that it works a little bit differently the um the subtract overlay so now if you extend it just like the clips above it will play for longer the duration of the of the duration of the the clip itself okay uh so now what we can do is we can play with the weight so either animate the weight here or what you can do is take the uh the corners which is the kind of the blend of the clip and just uh do it like this so this is equivalent to animating the weight but it's more visual okay and what the difference is here it's the weight of the track but here it's the the blend duration of the clip okay as you will see here if i go in here and the properties in see if i modify that i'm looking at the wrong thing fade in fade in this one see it's the fade in fade out of the clip which is the blend in blend out this i'm using different terminology but it's the same means the same thing so now what happens is here it's at zero and here it's at a hundredth of the pose and then reverse on the way out and here it's like 50 right so this is an overlay okay so it completely it completely deletes what's underneath which is the walk which is above above underneath this when i say underneath it means that what's what the the motion that's underneath that layer so that's an overlay if you're looking for something like that that's how you do it unfortunately i cannot switch in real time to additive because it's gonna break yeah it will give you a warning so it will actually break the the rake so to show you the i'm gonna have to create another one from scratch insert subtract additive accept keys and then do the same thing i could have just copy pasted the pose so and press key and then extend it a little bit so now let's see what it looks like see the difference is the additive is it keeps the motion of the walk see the motion forward backward forward motion of the hand but it applies that new pose on top so that's why it's called additive it adds on top of the the the bottom the bottom layer which is the walk see that's the difference between overlay and and override a real-life example is an override is let's say an override we usually use it i worked on rainbow six uh riven shield a while ago uh it's a military shooter for those who don't know it the position on top with the gun or the different guns let's say you have an uzi or you have a handgun or a machine gun that layer for the spine and arms is what we call an override it actually overrides all the motion you know like the the swinging motion and the spine motion of the walk an additive layer in game terminology is something like uh a look at okay so you have your breathing animation like he's breathing and then we add a head rotation looking left or right but he continues he continues breathing he continues his motion up and down on the head with that rotation uh left or right so that's the difference an override just deletes everything at the bottom and additive it adds on top of the okay so uh that's another way to again you have to do the fade in fade out and you can put as many keys as you want obviously so let's say you don't like this pose here it's a little bit stiff uh if you're animating the uh the ease and ease out you might get some weirdness if you're keyframing on the 50 so you just make sure that you're at 100 when you're putting the keys to be able to see your result okay and then uh same thing once you're happy you bake you go in full body you plot right get out of story and then you will see your result always check your result before saving and then save it and load it into your assembly scene okay um that's it for story mode does anybody have any questions on this one you want me to go a little bit somebody's blocked in story mode or i can show you a couple of things or come back to previous things we did before now going once twice sold okay i'll stop the video

Channel: Motionbuilder Tutorials

Views: 854

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Id: r27d_e_tuHI

Length: 25min 28sec (1528 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021