Motionbuilder Mocap Clean-Up for Games

hello there and welcome to this MotionBuilder 2013 mocap cleanup tutorial what we're going to be doing today is that we're going to be taking some motion capture data and cleaning it up and preparing it for use in the game engine so just to tell you a little bit about yourself my name is Daniel oh I'm an animator for Ubisoft Montreal I worked on watchdogs and I'm far cry 3 and a bunch of other games before that I've been using motion builder for about seven years and what I wanted to do with this tutorial was basically to cover the usual process that a professional animator on motion capture clean up artists would go through in their day-to-day work there's a lot of information already out there about how motion builder works and what the buttons and features and all of that kind of like stuff does so I don't really but there's not a lot of information about about a process so the first thing that I would do is when I'm first starting with motion builder is to set up a good layout now normally because I'm recording how many with their one monitor here but normally I'd be spread across two monitors like this this is my normal layout so I have one big window open here and then I have all of my F curves and filters and the navigator resources story editor and all of this kind of stuff over here and this gives you a big window so it means that you can really see your animation well and then I'd save that as a layout up here create custom layout this is damn custom which is the layout that I just showed at the moment I'm on editing which is the default and I'm just going to switch here to recording which is a little bit closer to to us of one screen version of my usual layout now the reason I would set up custom layouts like this it's because in MotionBuilder is very easy to accidentally do that where you drag away part of your layout and then suddenly this is floating and then I know that I can't get this back because motional has new UI is a little bit difficult to rearrange sometimes so if ever that happens you can just click control shift and a number of us feel layout and it'll automatically reset the layout back to where it is so that's a kind of good tip for that so let's get to the actual kind of mocap cleanup stuff itself the first thing that I want to talk about is retargeting so this has a this mock-up data has already been retargeted to this character but this is the kind of first step in in cleanup and depending on where you get your mocap data from it may just be see 3d markers which are these blue things which is the raw mocap data or it may have already been retargeted like say for example you use an outsourcing studio like for your mocap they may have already retargeted this information for you I'm not really going to go over exactly how you do a step-by-step of retargeting but I just want to point out that it's really important when you first get this data even if it's already been retorted to validate the data that is you'll usually get a video that comes with this stuff of what the actual mocap actor is doing on the stage and it's usually from about 2 or 3 angles you know front sight and a 3/4 angle and it's really important to open those videos which unfortunately I have not got them for this for this particular shot but it's important to open those videos and to check the okay well on this frame he was doing that or on this frame he was doing that correctly with retargeting that'll always be disparities the whole point of retargeting is that say for example you might have an actor that is 6 foot 5 like the actor on your make up stage is 6 foot 5 and you've got a game character who's only six foot he's gonna have different proportions different arms and legs and you know the whole different height of his character so when he walks it's going to be slightly different when he reaches it's going to be slightly different and the idea of retargeting is how to kind of transfer that information from one character to another character with as little loss of detail as possible and there's a bit of an art to it it's a bit it's kind of difficult there are some people who just do this this is a job is to just retarget characters but like I say it's very important to just check against the video and make sure that the stuff that you got from the mocap studio is what what you're expecting you have to give them some leeway sometimes there's nothing that you know can be done about that like for example here the way that this neck works that's just the reality of the fact that your character here is an approximation of what a real human would do we've only got one bone for the neck or in reality that the neck is sort of curves up like this because there's multiple bones in there so in those kind of cases you just have to sort of live with it but for sure like if you're seeing a lot of problems with you make up data just get back in touch with whoever retargeted it you know say is there anything that we can do about this another good point about retargeting is if at all possible you get your characters to be roughly the same but like build your actual character models to be roughly the same as your mocap actor if that's an option for you you can do some resizing here like one thing that often people don't realize is that you can resize your entire C 3ds just by selecting the the route marker I'm just gonna undo that so you can actually compensate in some kind of ways for that also I've noticed in other tutorials and there's some other animators they'll just get the data they weren't validate and they'll immediately plot it to their control record star animator that's a really bad idea generally because if you do that if there's ever a problem with the reciting of those you know issues with the mocap there will be multiple instances of that problem so say for example that the character Adonai goes to reach for his nose or something like that and he doesn't touch his nose it's like every time it's hand goes towards there it's not going to contact if you fix it in the retargeting it fixes every instance of that going through that it faces all of the problems where those disparities throughout your entire mocap shoot whereas if you don't if you just plot directly to the control rig you're gonna have to fix every every little problem individually the way that what I mean by fixing that hair is that once this is kind of like you've got a general retargeting here you can actually select the active body this is the active body by the way this is the at-taurah skeleton if you got to here you can show and hide it probably normally used to seeing this which is motion bowlers actor body when you're making adjustments I tend to find that it's actually better to use the skeleton the body sometimes makes it difficult to see where you should actually be putting putting these things in because their volumes you kind of try and match it up it's it's volumes but it's also a skeleton at the same time so I'm just open this up and I can put a group here where I can turn off the character yeah so you might originally think like oh okay well I've good this doesn't look right this doesn't look like a human I need to you know position I need to move this back and position this more correctly so that these actually touch this that's not really how this kind of stuff works is more of a skeleton so usually what I find is best is to actually do a basic set up for this kind of stuff whenever restarting and then I would turn the actor body off use just the actor skeleton here and actually have my character already retarted it's doing export skin and then actually make adjustments buying in and sort of slightly moving this and you'd need to make an adjustment okay so and then you know check it all the way through here because that adjustment that you just made just affected everything and for example there might be a thing here where you might say okay I want that a little bit I or whatever so you have to adjust back and forth and and try and make it work also check across takes because and like I say any adjustments that you make here or global effect everything in issue so you want to get back here this is the walk that we've got and you want to check that the adjustment that you just made didn't wreck the other takes in it so like I say I've done some like retargeting this already I'm not gonna go I'm gonna talk too much now about retargeting but just make sure that you reach out as possible if you're working with a really good makeup studio a really good retargeting people it'll already be a really good retarget anyway and you might have to worry about this whole process so the real work starts once we plot to the control rig so I'm just going to character here and I'm gonna click plot character to control rig I'm going to turn off constant key reduction because this reduces the amount of keyframe data and tries to optimize the curves but I don't want to lose any any detail at all so I'm just going to remove that if I had multiple takes in here like a big long list of you know different walks different shots that we did in the makeup stage you can click plot all takes here and it will plot everything that's a good way of batch processing all of this kind of like stuff and getting it all on to your and character at the same time I'm just gonna click plot and it's now baked sets now I've got my control rig there I'm just going to hide actor all and you see it's it's still some c3d markers here so what I'm doing is I just click ctrl + W these are my C 3d optical markers which is what comes out of a vikon system these these are basically the balls that are attached to a to your mocap actor and what I'm going to do is down here I've got groups selected I'm just gonna create a group I'm going to call it C and then I'm going to turn off visibility in there if she's never used groups and sets before they're really good for this kind of thing otherwise you have to go through and individually and turn on and off visibility on on each object so now we've got this for our character he's plotted on actually I should have her just thinking about it I should have done that that plot all takes because I have two takes okay I'm gonna get my determined walk I think I already plugged it before though just a che I'm going back to the actor nail and plotting control rig I should have done that really and it would have plotted both my tapes but I'm just going to plot this one take again now okay so I've got my two walk here you'll see the hands of storm at you know messed up because we didn't capture finger data I don't actually don't need this anymore the whole point of the range of motion file is just in a file to to validate the the mocap data went through fine it's it's the mocap actor on the stage moving to different extremities so that you can kind of test that when you want your retargeting test that everything went across fine and and make sure that your retarget is clean so you've got all of the information from the mocap shoot you've got it onto your character now and you're ready to start animating so the first thing that I would do with this walk cycle the goal is to get a walk cycle that loops and there's good as much unique information in there as possible and then to fix any extra issues that may have come across as part of the retarget and to prep it so that it's ready for the game so the first thing that i'm going to do with this is i'm going to put it into the story editor here I'm going to insert a character animation track I'm gonna make it look at this character I'm going to insert the current take and then I'm pressing a to frame this up because this is captured it at a weird time on the mocap on the makeup shoot so I usually like to zero this this is not essential at all it's just it's just a good for seeing how long you know your takers and I'll frame this up and I'll also bake it just sorry I did that a bit fast actually just right-click frame start and end and it won't make my time slider much up and then right-click the plot whole scene to current take I just do this as a good backup I'm not even actually going to animate on this take but it's a it's a way of cleaning up cleaning up the source data before you start working proper I'm going to go to a new take copy the data from the Conte to the new ta no I don't need to do that I'm gonna frame start and end again and what we need to do here is first we need to straighten this up put it in the scene properly not sure what that is okay it doesn't seem to be affecting the rig but we'll check that later what I've done here is I've turn on ghosting and you can see that the character's path here through the through the scene I think this guy's is 180 there in the round in the wrong direction he was probably just walking backwards through the mocap volume on the stage so the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm gonna turn this guy all the way around and then I'm gonna double click on here and zero this so this should be moving totally on a line I think that's zero that's not lined up crazy bizarre usually that was alright well that doesn't need to be perfect so just go line this up that should do and what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna go into a side for you what I'm looking for here as I'm looking for two similar frames but the thing that I need to clip off is that when he was starting here he leans into this and we don't want any of that lean this is just as he's accelerating from an idle to walk we don't want any of that lean in in with the walk cycle so we need to clip it off soon as he straightens up really and we want to get as much of this mocap data in as possible where he's actually walking and then this is the point of which he moved out of the capture volume so and no longer captured that so you usually want to click the last couple of frames off that because what happens is that there's there's a a space within on the mocap stage where the cameras have got good coverage of that space and then as you hit the edge of that space the character stop then you know the character state data starts breaking down because it'll only pick up data that for example is on the back of the character it won't pick up the hand as it goes out of that volume so this kind of stuff you really want to clip off cuz it's not really good data it's been reconstructed but it's not it's not actually what the guy was doing usually so what I'm gonna do here is I think I'm just gonna clip that there I'm just looking for a pose that is going to be like where I'm gonna loop this so I'm gonna clip that off I'm going to delete everything that's after that I just used the razor there in order to I think that's what it's called yeah and so here we've we're on right foot passing position I'm gonna scroll this back and I actually want left foot passing position really here because I need a bit of overlap because I'm gonna loop this he's still leaning forward a little bit there but I'm okay with that because otherwise I'm gonna have to scroll all the way through to kind of here and I'm gonna put a lot of make up there up and really you want this to be as long as possible there are some game engines that will only accept kind of like two footsteps like one left and one right because they they want to the actual system wants to know that that when it's 50% of the way through an animation and knows exactly what footstep it's on but really like you want to have as much variety and this cycle as possible so depending on how your game engine works you if you have the option to kind of like have lots and lots of different footsteps it's always better it makes much more varied looking walk cycles unless they're slightly less robotic looking walk cycles okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to clip it here on the opposite foot and we'll delete all of that information I'm going to click on this and zero and I'm gonna right click and I'm gonna frame start and here so here we've got left foot passing and here we've got right foot person okay just again I'm gonna go into this other view that's sorry this is control and easier to get into that view and it's controlling our to get into the air side and go front so I'm just gonna check that this is kind of straight again roughly straight doesn't need to be perfect better yeah that's certain that's fine so go back in our and I'm now going to pick the frame that's going to be the start of my animation so it's usually passing positions usually a good one to start with with walk cycles because it tends to blend pretty well with with stuff with other motions contacts are a little bit extreme when it gets to actual gain blending so I'm gonna go for that I'm gonna cut that there you want something about halfway through I'm gonna drag this to the other side I'm gonna drag this back and you see we've still got ghosting on so we've now get information about where each of these clips start this is where this clip starts and I'm going to go in to translate here pressing T and I want to make sure that I'm in global and I'm gonna translate this forward and then I'm going to click this and I'm gonna translate it back to roughly around there so what I'm going to do is that the start of this second clip is left foot passing and you see here we got almost right foot passing I'm just gonna scrub this back until its left foot passing doesn't have to be perfect for now okay and then I'm gonna run this back to that frame just gonna drag this for a little bit I'm gonna zoom in try and get this a little bit better and what you try out what you usually looking for at this point is you want the feet to match up but you also want the pelvis to match up the pelvis when you're blending motions together this is super important because if you don't want any interruption in the motion this is where the center of everything comes from the center of all the emotion comes from the center of mass you want this to be consistent for a smooth motion but obviously you also don't want foot sliding so I tend to prioritize the pelvis first because you can fix you can always fix feet I mean you could fix both but I tend to prioritize the pelvis first but you need about 50/50 between the two of these so I'm gonna go about there you see these aren't these aren't perfectly aligned on that frame you see again you want to step through this about 50/50 as well you want to make sure that that kind of lines up as well as possible it's probably more important than this than this frame here and if you really wanted to you could turn off snap here and you could just adjust this it's a very fine kind of detail just this back or forward maybe you just need to scrub through and make sure it's like that all the way through might want to get to the end here and then I'm gonna put this on scale good scale it forward a little bit so all the way through this is pretty consistent and then we want to make sure that all of this stuff stays on a we don't need beyond sub keys so I'm just dragging all of this so that it's on whole keys well I'm gonna zoom in here with both of their selected and this is closer to 91 so I'm just going to scale everything down to 91 so okay as we can and that's a pretty good match should also make sure that it's matched up in the front which it should be already because we made sure that that path through the scene was restrained don't worry about the fact that this is now deviated off-center that's that'll that'll happen just because as he was going on this big walk he probably drifted off a little bit inside and then went back and because we split it in half and rearranged the order of these things then once you split a tree compensates for this for those trajectories so yeah back in back in the front there's a bit of sliding but that's fine so what I want to do here is then now I'm kind of happy with that I'll test this is I need to slip both of these and do a frame start and end to make sure that this is this is the right length and we'll play just gonna click ctrl + a to switch myself on to models only you see toggle in here and I don't know what the frame rates like on the capture butter that's not too bad he's leaping he's leaping alright I'm not going to be cleaning this this motion up you know to to super polish it kind of stands because I've only got so much time on this tutorial but um okay so I'm fairly happy with that so I'm going to right click on this and I'm going to go plot whole scene to current take again I'm going to make sure constant Q reduction is often we definitely want to make sure plus all takes is off on this and plot and then you could either leave this in here if you want to but what can tend to happen is that if you forget these are in here then your files will get pretty big so I'm just going to get rid of this now because I'm happy with it with what I've got sometimes actually I leave it in here to just make sure that you know because you can mute this or you can turn the entire story or offer here in which case you know the control rig will take over sometimes I will leave it in here in fact yeah I'll leave it in here for now because it's a good reference for the areas that you need to fix this is this all of this stuff should be pretty clean because it's just straight-up mocap this is the area where all of our blending is kind of like not happening so there's likely going to be problems in this kind of area sliding feet usually and maybe some trajectory issues you know offsets with the pelvis so I got my data on my character I'm ready to start an amazing first thing I would want to do is just check that the pelvis is it's clean going through here so I'm actually just gonna go to the entry point here for this and you could you could select this key and delete the entire key if I'm on full body at the moment um and that would wipe out all of the information and just let interpolate between between those it's usually at this point at this point that there are there are blending issues and so yeah I'm just gonna click on that and delete the whole key I'm gonna do the same for here I'm just saying we can't get a drink of water okay so that you'll probably not notice that at the moment but especially with the framerate they capture but somebody's playing Batman turn you off at the moment so okay so we'll clean up that that'll just mean that again it's probably difficult to tell with this frame right but that'll clean up the trajectory of that the next thing that you want to clean up is the feet and make sure that there's no sliding and the way that I would do this is I'm going to select this I'm going to make sure that I'm on full body I'm going to click on animate animation sorry and plot selected all properties and plot what I'm doing there is to the motion builder runs on two rigs you have an FK rig and ika at the same time and when you're doing AI kfk switching when you're switching the the weight of the ICO blend between stuff you just want to make sure that things are consistent between those those two things you want to make sure that what you're seeing in the scene that when you turn off the weights or switch the weights between between these effectors that it's going to be consistent so I'm about to switch these so that this is the controlling point and that this is turned off and so it's just good at least the button in my workflow it's good habit to get into to make sure that those are consistent between the two rigs so I'm now going to go in here I'm going to turn off the weight for these and I'm going to turn on the I'm just control clicking here so that I've got both of those and turn on the weight for those this is the point that you really want to edit for locking feet you need to be careful that when you're doing this editing that the heel of the foot doesn't lift up too much because this can happen where it's lifting off but this is the point that is really locking when you're doing a footstep so I'm going to go to my F curves here and it's translation that we care about not rotation at the moment and you'll see here and my z-axis movement so these are a flattened points but if I just compare this against my story editor as to where we were having issues probably will expect issues this foot will probably have a little bit of sliding on it yeah yeah you see there's there's some sliding stuff there it's going through the ground although I don't mind too much it's not too bad so specifically at this point when you go into my F curves and like I said go to translation and what I'm going to do is I'm going to find the point at which it first touched down selected a I'm going to lock that on I'm going to copy this and at this kind of point where it's lifting off I'm going to paste and then I'm going to delete everything in between and now we have a nice locked foot now because I pasted this you see there'll be glitches in here so I'm gonna go in and just iron those now that's pretty close already you see this is like oh you see it's problem where you see that'll actually change a lot what you want to do here is that I'm selecting all of this stuff here is that I want to compensate for that difference for this snap over the course of this entire footstep I don't just want to you know fix this one frame because then that's not you're just gonna you know if I just did like this it's just going to replicate that kind of problem along the line the more that you can spread fixes like that over over multiple frames the better I mean you do need to be worried about the changes that you are actually making but just gonna slide this up and then should get rid of that doesn't matter if it slides back a little bit as he lifts off its just the plant that you care about again I just noticed that we've got some foot sliding here I'll show you another way of doing foot sliding actually so I have my thing selected here what I'm going to do is I'm gonna find the point again when he hits down and I'm gonna select that and then scroll forward to the one where I want it to lift off there and I'm going to with this selected I'm going to right click on here and I'm going to say copy rebus key on selected Iko jects I think as well as I'm gonna do just translation so what this does is it takes that key and it makes this flat like so for the entire selection that I that I did there I know other animators that do this personally I prefer to actually do it manually you get a little bit more control and you still need to fix this thing and sometimes when people do this they feel like it oh that just did the whole process for me you still need to edit your cursor so that you could good good ins and outs at the end I promise here so I'm just adjusting these these curves to make sure these footsteps of smooth and when you first start you probably might check this as much as possible you get used to have over time to how to adjust these curves without breaking your animation so what I'm trying to do here this is kind of a tough situation really because it's just I really only want to move some of these down but what's gonna happen is when I move this it's gonna actually make these longer so I'm gonna move this close like that and then I'm gonna drop those down to there so we're just trying to make these curves line up with these flats so that as it goes into and out of this flat footstep there's no jarring I mean again all of these could probably use a little bit of work but uh I think we've mostly covered the areas I'm just trying to show you examples of what to do yeah you said definitely noticed some sliding they're sliding all the way through this yeah definitely want to fix that copy and when you're when you're doing this you know I've generally found that it's best to copy the first the first keyframe so if you got a flat here it's generally better to copy that one because you have a choice really you could kind of let's say okay well I'll copy something from here why the foot is lifting off and I'll copy that back to here or you can copy here where it first contacts and carve and copy it forward I generally always copy here because when this contact comes down that tends to be more important to maintain the original motion than this where it's lifting up the contact you should you should pose usually defines the actual feel of the walk cycle so it's good to keep that as clean as possible so I'm gonna copy this and do yeah but sliding around a bit so lifting up and paste yeah back and delete those slept all of these put them on the flats go in just ease I'm doing the same kind of stuff over and over again sir I'll make this the last one I I clean up because I'm not really showing you anything new lately okay say I'd go through and I would clean up that kind of stuff there now the thing that is probably sticking out to everybody here is that these fingers are flat on make out on the mocap stage let me bring that back the markers to just show you let's talk a little bit about MOCA about no cameras I see 3ds well you see 3ds this is our okay just gonna pause and then find out where these things are okay I found it okay the issue was is that because I copied to a new tape there's actually no motion capture on here anymore it's still back on there so my actors collapsed here because there's no mocap data so yeah let's just go back to the determined walk and we'll talk a little bit about how this works usually the issue that you have with motion capture is that you have all of these markers all over the character and there and when you're attaching these balls to the to the actor you can put it apart on as many as you want and the more that you do the more information that you have about the shape and the motion of the actor as he was moving around the problem is is that often say for example your hand will pass here in front of your body and it might obscure one of these motion capture markers and there might not be enough cameras on the mocap stage looking at these markers in order to triangulate that position because the the arm was in the way of the market that at that particular point so what you then have to do is that you have to look at the other markers that are here and say well you know I know that this marker is always probably going to move relative to the sternum so I'll say while using the position that this was in and maybe these two other markers try and reconstruct where this marker was went on that frame when it went missing and there are automated processes to try and do this but what you get is if you have too many of these put together when the automated process tries to fix this sometimes it gets confused about them if they're moving very fast so for example in one frame it was here and then it still powered by the control rig so I'm just gonna switch this back to being powered by the actor so in one frame it was here and then okay okay I know what's happened all right no man I'll just talk about it anyway say in one frame that say that the hand was really moving fast like this marker might get confused with this marker if the hand then moves over to here so you generally don't want too many markers too close together and because of that it's usually very difficult to turn mocap hands so there are some you know mocap setups and this is something that we do every software you put an extra marker on the end of the finger and you approximate the entire hand using one marker naturally works surprisingly well if you've got a good tool for it but in this particular case with this particular animation that is not the case so what you do is just get ourselves back to where we were with that cat - walking through the scene and we'll hide all of that stuff so what you do is that you start animating so in this particular case I'm going to go back and select these hands here I'm going to frame up in it with F and you might actually have a pose bank somewhere pose us here okay we've already got some hand poses in here so or some different poses okay so I could take a walk pose and I could shift and select all of these and I click on body parts so that it only pastes on the hand it doesn't overwrite the entire body and I could put a walk hand pose on that you know or I could just start keyframing where I say okay I want you to move in a little bit one of these to move in a little bit apologies if these mouth clicks are a bit loud also not really talking much about what I'm doing I'm just shifting between translate and rotate by pressing T NR I'm also shifting between local and global points by pressing f5 and f6 but most of the stuff that you would do here would be local and I'm just adjusting to try and get a kind of natural hand pose a lot of beginners tend to make hand poses quite flat but if you actually hold your hand out in front of you and the natural pose it tends to curl up a little bit maybe spread these out again at none of these stages of mine they might go into town on making it super clean because it's a quick tutorial so don't judge me I'm just going to make some little adjustments to here got the same crane out of that event maybe Curly's a little bit more make tweaks after I see what happens okay so I've made a bunch of tweaks I'm gonna go to this animal air that's already here and I tend because I've been skipping around a lot of this I could just stand buddy parts here and just key the stuff that I've done but I want to be keen the I K and the FK and all of that kind of stuff so so that you know what we see is what we get so I'm just switching to full body here and I'm gonna press K to key and little key that all the way through I've just done this on a layer so that sounds probably a bit far forward but whatever I go in here sometimes just manipulating this gives a bit of a weird pose on on this part of the body of the hand sorry so I'm just going to go and I'm going to flatten that out I'm gonna move this forward if you ever find the you're animating and and there's part of your rig that really works kind of badly although that is not what you know is that you're finding it very difficult to kind of get good poses with that with what you're doing it's sometimes worth talking to the character artists I mean if you're halfway through production they're not gonna be able to make any changes because they need to keep the rate consistent but if it's really early on it's good to have a good dialogue with your your riggers and to say like you know this could be you know better don't be judgmental I mean like those guys know that know their stuff better than you do but um but say you know I'm trying to animate this and I'm trying to get really good poses it would be great if we could if we could work on making this better and I'll send you some test day or just anything that you think you can do with that generally people are receptive to that kind of thing okay so now that I've got I've cleaned this up on one hand I am going to make a pose I should really be naming these but but because this is just quick I'm going to click a mirror and I'm going to select the other hand I'm going to shift you can shift click to select all of these at once and I'm going to I don't want to paste all of that I just want to pay something so I'm gonna do that and paste and again I'm gonna kee-kee them and turn mirroring off so that I get rid of my plane here and well and that's better than it was but it's you know not great you'd really want to want to do some work on this make sure that the hands are if you want it with the hand seat I mean it's different for each kind of pose but you generally want to get used to how hands kind of line up with the forearm so that you don't break you know don't have the look like it's broken the wrist you know something like that like somebody's not maybe naturally gonna hold her hand like like that or whatever you just have to get used to this stuff observe people and learn good body mechanics I suppose and again you can always go back and refer back to your to your to the mocap videos that's why they're there it's not just for retargeting so anyway I'm just tweaking these I'm just doing very quick tweaks here once in today I'm doing is that I'm about to do here is that I'm getting a keyframe yeah let's try and a full-body one any keyframe here just because that was the point at which I happen to make that one adjustment but I think that this is a global trench so I'm gonna get rid of this original keyframe on my layer so that this change that I just made here is gonna affect everything across the board I mean I could drag this back in now I hope people understand what I'm actually doing here I'm making adjustments on this layer that are affecting the entire animation it's the whole point of layering really and you know we have a walk cycle here ready so there are plenty thing plenty of other things that you know I might do this like he's looks a little bit hunchback there so you know you would maybe do stuff where I'm gonna go up here I'm gonna I'm probably if you click on this stuff you can you can either toggle on depending on our off here or you can press W and E to do the pinning it's kind of useful actually want to return the control of this rig back to default so because at the moment the feet are being powered by this I've been pulled around by this eye care factor so what I'm going to do is while full body is selected again first of all I'm going to bake down my changes on this animation lasso by just looking on that control clicking down there and then clicking this and merging the layers but yeah I'm going to select this or you can select any point on the body because it's in full body I'm going to do animation plot selected plot and again this is just making sure that any changes that I make on the IKr egg are also consistent across the body on the FK regen what-you-see-is-what-you-get I do this before I've written almost every time that I change weights unless I want a some sort of specific weight change you know where at one point is interpolating with I can and another point is interpolating with okay so turn that on turn these off we go back up okay so I've got my character there you know it's maybe say about this kind of like slight hunting and a slight hunching on the back it's probably to do with how that spine is set up might be to do with the actual head and neck or it could be to do with the shoulders there then I probably want to push that back like this but I don't want this to counter animate I don't have to counter on it animate it sorry so I'm gonna slit all three of those and I'm gonna lock I'm actually gonna lock those as well and then I'm gonna select this and move and you see now I can adjust my spine a little bit without moving all of this other stuff again gonna add a new layer so that I can make my adjustment across the whole animation and get keyed out there and well it's not as hunched for sure if we were really tweaking that we would go through and you know do things you know all the way across the time line instead of making these global changes but this is just trying to do the trying to fix the big things that are noticing one of the awesome things with MotionBuilder from from 2012 onwards is that in the new layers there's a layer wait this wasn't in older versions of MotionBuilder so I can actually just adjust that layer as I want so that if I think I've gone too far you can kind of see this here you see I like the kind of silhouette at the top here a little bit more like this kind of maybe like it down here a little bit more like that maybe not probably instead he said this is kind of line now making him like he's like he's gonna bump here so I probably need to instead go in and maybe change the pelvis I'm gonna lock these down here so that when I changed the pelvis it's not gonna roll these sometimes you might also want to set these to a rotation so that you don't affect the legs at all I'm just going to draw move this up and again I'm gonna key and because my key is away from here and I want this to be a global change I'm gonna delete that but you get the idea that this is the kind of thing that I'm doing when I'm cleaning up a motion is that once I've made this cycle and and dealt with that once I've fixed the hands at least a little bit and normally I would put a little bit more variety on the fingers I would actually animate them moving as I'm going through the course of the animation instead of just the static pose that we pasted but you're just now looking at the animation and saying the things that I could change that you know things that the retarget didn't get quite right things that you know don't look correct as he this is gait wrong in his walk you know whatever else but again as this is a quick tutorial and we are coming up on an hour I'm gonna speed this up a little bit so bake down that change that we just made to the spine and the next thing you want to do is this thing here and this may look totally different in whatever game engine that you're using or your game engine may not even have this this is the the root or the displacement it's basically a marker to say kind of like where is the the position of my character and you this is going to be used by the game engine to align different clips of animation so that when you move from a walk to a stand it needs to have a center point around which to blend those animations and it also needs to know you know this is how it will in in some animation systems like if you have a physics driven animation system it will attach this to to whatever physics object is driving your character around the around the world so basically this is just some positional information that that the game engine will use to understand where the center of your character is and to keep you know keep things consistent when it moves from one motion to another motion so what I want to do with this is I want to constrain it so that it's following following the pelvis and then I'll make some adjustments afterwards so I'm gonna go into my asset browser here and I'm going to add a new constraint I'm going to add a parent-child constraint well actually now I'll just add a position constraint because we only really we don't really care about rotation for this particular animation he's just walking through the scene and I'm gonna click and I'm going to drag that into the scene and here it's gonna create a new constraint you just ignore all of these constraints this has had a set up to to make the Z character deform more like the in game character to give us better feedback when we're animating so this is my position constraint Here I am gonna select this and I'm going to alt drag and say make this my constrained object I'm gonna select this and I'm gonna alt drag it and I'm gonna say make this the object that is driving this object I am going to zero that and normally when used zero it would actually like make these snap right together but this particular object has got something to snap it some settings doesn't make sure that it snaps to the ground constantly you find those in when once the object is selected you find it in properties and where our degrees of freedom these are global restrictions on how this object can kind of move and in translation you'll see that it has restrictions in Y don't move more or less than zero in Y and if I turn this off it would snap up there so this is a good thing because you generally don't want this to lift off the ground unless perhaps you're doing an animation where it goes jumping over something or something like that so this is just constrained here there's no and it will follow the character now there are no keys on this object to person to specifically say that it's doing this keyframes to do that so it's just constrained and I'm gonna go now that it's constrained whatever this is doing in the scene when I plot it will actually paste keyframes on top of this say again plot selected plot okay and now I can turn my constraint back on just a thing about constraints a lot of animators I'm surprised actually at how many animators don't like using constraints or that they're sort of intimidated by constraints because you know a lot of animators are a real incredible artists but they they tend to shy away from some of the more technical kind of stuff not all animator sir but they tend to shy away from some of the more technical solutions and they kind of brute force of stuff by doing key framing because it's a very similar to traditional animation and really some of the more technical aspects of the earth these programs can really help you solve problems very very very fast things that you shouldn't really have to brute-force with key framing and constraints is one of them for example you know I could be framed this to follow this guy perfectly but it's a really painstaking process just it's constraints and motion builders is super easy unless you get into something you know like relation constraints which are you know once you start being able to do math that logic and things like that but simple stuff like position and translation stuff is definitely worth learning about there's a bunch of information in the help about it but anyway now this I've turned off my my constraints that's no longer powering this it's under its own steam on keyframes which we can see here now that it's got this we don't want this guy to we don't want this to be back and forth once you get into the game engine I mean this is a player character so he's going to move based on either physics or or being animation powered but especially for AI that has to move along specific paths you want a guarantee that he's actually moving in straight lines the character itself can stray away very subtly from this not too far but you generally want this itself to be on straight lines because this is what it's going to use to to kind of snap a character to a to a path for example so in this particular case I am now that it's done by keyframes it's no longer following the pelvis I'm gonna select all of the x-axis stuff and I'm gonna flan it this is a really useful bit of a curve editor if you've never used this I just click this a little zero all of that stuff out so that's now moving exactly on zero you can actually set different values in here just by typing on them very useful for flattening stuff so this is now flattened on zero I'm also going to move the character across I'm just selecting translation I need to now put him on global so that it doesn't slide him down into the floor and I'm gonna create a new layer get going to the front and I still got locking on all the stuff I'm just going to click this to ignore all of the pinning that we've done and I'm gonna slide this guy across so that he's roughly matching that I'm gonna key it I also want to make sure that I didn't slide it too far one way or the other on this you see that's a little bit over to the left so that yeah to my left so I'm just gonna slide this back and you see now he's just looking at these two lines you want to make sure those pelvis is roughly kind of moving between that those two lines you see it's fine for him to move off-center a little bit you you kind of want that you know you don't want it to be directly on this otherwise it's just gonna look too robotic and in the same way you don't you know you want to keep all of this the reason I constraint this and then baked is because this guys are not moving at a 100% consistent rate and you want to keep a little bit of that forward and backward then information like if I if I show you what I'm talking about I get a translation on this and the base layer if we zoom in a little bit and if you can see this butter but this is not completely flat there's very slight kind of bumps in here and that's good that's just because you know as you rise and fall like there's a very soul acceleration and deceleration that's going on and you want to you want to keep it and keep that in there you know if you if you remove too much information from this like it's going to make you an animation robotic in fact that's a good kind of point about anime about mocap in general a kind of newbie mistake with mocap and something that I definitely did for the first couple years when I was doing make out clean up is to go in here and to look at all of these keyframes and think that you have to flatten them out totally in order to get kind of clean motion looking at this kind of thing like you could say oh that's not a flat thing I need to flatten this others it is really really flat reality if you cut if you mess up we mess with this stuff too much you're going to get something that looks robotic and computer and swimmy mocap is a weird kind of discipline and that sort of it is it is as as close to human motion when it first starts and then the more that you work on it kind of the worse that it gets really I mean great animators can you know do things to to make it more visually appealing by making by say pushing to more comic-book poses but in terms of pure body mechanics and physics it is as good as it's going to get when it first star starts if you've got a good retarget and it's really more about preserving that and making any changes that you need to make if you want a caricature certain poses without losing that information you know we have to do certain things like loop this animation or make it hit certain poses in order for it to work in the game engine but like I say you want to do as few moves as possible in order to kind of clean this up so anyway so we have a we have our character and he's moving through the scene and yeah this would be good enough to do a first pass export into your game engine you'd probably want to polish this up a little bit more you definitely want to do some more work on the fingers you'd probably want to clean up all of those footsteps that we had he's looking a little bit bowlegged in some of these these things here this here again we want to make sure that that's not too hunched back the hunchbacked you know you might want to work on some of these poses to make sure that it's exactly as you want it but this is fine you can that you definitely want to get a fast version into the game engine as quickly as possible so that your designers can start designing missions or start building features based on this kind of stuff so yeah so that's basically what I would do to to clean up a normal walk cycle hopefully I'll be doing some more kind of tutorials like this I hope that the you've picked up some interesting kind of tips from it and yeah thank you for your time

Channel: Dan Lowe

Views: 65,429

Keywords: motionbuilder, motion capture, mocap, tutorial, animation, motion, capture, game, games, mo-cap

Id: XxHi7_pXN-k

Length: 62min 54sec (3774 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 03 2013