PixCap - Easy to use Animation app with built-in AI mocap

in this video we'll take a look at pixcap pixcap is a new 3d software focused on animation and it also features ai motion capture tools the goal of pixcap is to make 3d animation easier and more accessible on the screen i'll share a few things that you may want to know about the software and i'll quickly mention pricing at this point almost all of pixcap features can be used free of charge including ai mocap and export but if you want to make extensive use of the mockup features then you may need to spend some money to start with pixcap you have to go to pixcap.com and register for a new account when you have your account you can click login and that will take you to the actual app what you see here is the project manager which is quite simple and easy to work with i'll click on new project now and that will load the animation up with an empty scene right away on the left you'll see a bunch of characters and if i just grab one of them and drag them into the 3d viewport here they will become a character that i can animate and i can load more than one like this then in the scene tab i can select them and give them their initial position also under assets there is this button to create your own 3d avatar if you click on it this will take you to the ready player me software which is a separate app but in here you can customize a character and finally export it to gltf format and then you can import it to pixcap again and it will be ready for animation it will appear here in the asset browser and you can drag and drop it just the same as the other characters so that's a start but you may be thinking this is a 3d software so it must be complicated if you're even vaguely familiar with something like maya or blender you may expect that there are lots of hidden menus and features but really you're seeing almost the entire interface i think i can give you a tour of the interface in two minutes or so so we already saw the library here which contains the library of pre-made characters we have our assets which are my own imported assets and the scene tab is basically a scene view or outliner as it is called another software and here you can quickly select your characters or the bones this big area is the 3d view where you can create and view your animations you have a move rotate and scale tool and the shortcuts for them are the industry standard w e r speaking of shortcuts you can just click on shortcuts here and you'll get all of the shortcuts that you can use in pxcap in the upper right you have pivot controls and down here you have playback controls you can set the length of the animation you can play it and you can enable auto keying on the right we have the inspector or properties panel as it may be called in other software and this will display settings that you can tweak based on your selection so if i select a bone we'll get some bone settings and if i select the whole character then we'll get different type of settings also on the right you have the ai mocap tab which i'll explore in a second in the bottom we have the timeline which allows us to see which frame we are currently editing so for example if i enable auto keying here and switch to rotation give this leg a little bit of rotation and then move the timeline to frame 20 and then again record another keyframe by rotating this leg then scrubbing through the timeline will show me the action that i created and we covered almost all of the basics um now if i click this button here that will expand additional animation options in the graph editor i can select the transformation channels that i want to work with and that will display the curve for the selected channel in the curve view and i can view more than one channel so in here i can work with my curves here we have interpolation options this is actually a tweening tool if you know what it is and on the right we have animation layers which is another powerful feature that you may know from maya so that's the overview of the interface if you already have experience with 3d animation then you should feel right at home with these tools obviously if you're new to the craft then you may need to gain more experience just navigating in the 3d viewport or you have to understand some concepts like what are keyframes curves interpolation and so on but i hope this quick tour puts you at ease and shows you that this isn't some monster 3d software where just learning the interface will take you days or weeks okay i'll continue with the workflow that you may actually find yourself using in your day-to-day work and in the process i'll try to introduce some more advanced features so one of the interesting features that the pix cap has is the ai motion capture in here you can capture poses from an image or you can capture a continuous action from video the video motion capture is based on the deep motion ai service so i'm going to go for a video here and you can upload your own videos just press on this icon and you can click upload video and then you can upload an mp4 which is up to 50 megabytes i've already uploaded this video which works quite well so once you load the video you'll be able to see a preview and then to turn this into a 3d motion you have to press this button but before you do notice how at first the person performing the action is just standing still so i can tweak this purple marker here to mark the start of the motion capture okay around here and then at the end we see the face of the person which we also don't need so i'm going to cut it out and since ai motion capture is paid you really want to do this so that you don't waste your credits or money on stuff that you won't actually use once you define the video segment the only setting that you can tweak is this motion smoothing by default it is set to zero and the general rule is the faster the motion the less smoothing you want in this case this motion is kind of slow so i found that a smoothing about 0.5 works well and now i'm going to run the ai on video i'm going to confirm and wait a while here i can see that my action is being processed and it's going to take less than a minute and everything is being calculated on the server side again there is almost nothing that is happening on your own computer and now my mocap data is ready i can click view file or i can go to assets and navigate to the ai motion capture folder here it is and now to actually apply it to my model i need to select the skeleton that i want to apply to and this can be applied to any skeleton that you have in your scene i'm going to select the cricut fan and press apply and here we have the motion and as you can see it is not perfect but it is a good starting point at least at this point you shouldn't expect any miracles from the video motion capture sometimes it works okay and sometimes it fails but you can expect that in the future it will keep developing and improving and it will get better and better okay and let's move to the next part of the workflow which is enabling ik for this character i'm simply going to select one of the bones and go to the inspector and click on ik setup mode start the ik setup wizard and with the standard characters that you get from pix cap you can just tick these boxes and everything will be set up for you so now i'm going to click save and apply and now i have ik for this character but the motion is still only in fk mode so what i can do is select an ik target and click bake fk into ik rings and that will bake the fk motion to the ik target it only takes a second and i have to do it for each of the ik controls and here we are um if we scrub through the timeline now you'll see that the ik controls follow the action perfectly however we are not in ik mode yet if i move this ik control now nothing happens and that is because we are in fk mode so i'm going to switch all of these controls to ik mode because that definitely helps with cleaning up motion capture data okay now if i move any of these ik targets they actually control the limb okay that was the ik setup now let's see if we can improve this motion a little bit by cleaning up some curves and even using animation layers so let's scrub through and and you'll see that here where the hands should stay firmly on the ground they kind of sink through the floor so what i can do is select this control and go to the frame where the arm plants itself on the floor and then let's see where the hand will start moving in around here so i'll select all these keyframes and delete them and then i'm going to select these keyframes at the start of this process press ctrl c and then with the timeline over here i'm going to press ctrl v and that will basically make this arm stay completely stationary during this action i can delete these keyframes to make the transition a little bit more natural and i'm going to do exactly the same thing for the other arm okay this stabilized the arms quite a bit now let's say that i'm not quite happy with the movement of the body i could add another animation layer and switch it to add additive animation layers can be very powerful i have to actually select this layer so that i'm working on it and i'm going to select the pelvis or root control here and let's say that over here i find that the body goes down too much so what i could do is around here press s to record a keyframe and then over here i'm going to raise the body until it looks good to me i'm going to record another keyframe actually the body could be too high over here so i'll record one keyframe here and then go to this keyframe and move the body down a little bit and record the keyframe again then i'll copy these keyframes which are basically the zero keyframes and paste them over here so that i blend out of this edit that i did or maybe i want to push the body down a little bit still maybe this leg as well of course this can use more work but i hope this shows you a basic workflow that you can use with pixcap pixcap has a very capable fbx in gltf import and export so if i just export this animation i'll be able to use it in other applications here it is in unity here in unreal and here it is again in blender and this also works in the opposite direction this is an animation that i did in blender as a retargeting test and here it is in pixcap transferred using fbx granted this requires some understanding about how to export clean rigs but it is certainly possible you can even learn this here on cg dive and i was even able to set up and bake the ik controls so i can keep extending and editing this animation right here in pixcap so we covered the basics we've uncovered some advanced stuff here are some more cool things that i like about pixcap here in the bottom right you'll see these finger widgets and using these widgets you can control the fingers and hand without selecting individual bones which can be very powerful selecting these small bones can be kind of painful but in here for example i can move this slider and create a fist by just using one slider this slider controls the spread of the fingers and then you can also control individual fingers so this will definitely help you with hand poses another thing that i like is that you can actually hide the bone display in the viewport but you can still animate the character so in here in the tree view i can hide the top most bone and that will hide all of the other bones and now there are no bones visible but still if i click in the area of the bone i can manipulate this part of the character and the highlight tells me which part of the rig i am manipulating if you have more than one character then here under bone you can turn bones off and that will turn the bone display for all characters in the scene the ik widgets remain visible which is nice because you need to select them in order to animate them but i kind of wish that these widgets would be a little bit smaller and less intrusive something else you can do is mirror poses so for example if i like this pose of the arm i can just press the mirror button and that will create the same pose on the other side of the character if you use legs in ik mode when you rotate this widget then you get this type of rotation of the leg but if you hold shift and rotate then this will put the character on its toes and then rotating backwards will raise the heel and then from the front view if i hold shift and rotate i can get this sideways foot roll and one more thing again the shortcuts for move rotate and scale are w e r if i press w once to switch to the move tool that will just give me the move gizmo but if i press w once more that will actually start moving the widget in viewport space this is just like pressing g in blender and same with rotation if i press e to switch to rotation gizmo and then press it once more that will allow me to rotate the selection without using the gizmo i think you can see that pixcap is a capable animation software focused on simplicity of course it is not perfect we already saw that ai motion capture does not always produce perfect results also currently pixcap is focused on standard bipedal characters you can animate any type of character of course but for example the ik controls are limited to two arms and two legs so if you have a character with three arms for example you will run out of ik speaking of which ik is one of the only constraints that you can use in pixcap whereas in software such as blender or maya you have many different ways in which you can create automation by using constraints drivers scripts and so on these are missing in pixcap which makes animating say complex mechanical parts impractical we have to keep in mind the goal of this app and that is to be easy and accessible there are many people who don't care about all the complex automations you can achieve in blender or maya they just want to animate without much hassle and for them pixcap may be just the right tool also pixcap is very new so some limitations may be lifted as it grows and matures i did get some information about possible new feature that may be coming to pixcap soon of course i cannot guarantee that i'm just conveying the information that i got we can expect custom ik soon and that should allow us to rig characters with more than two arms for example there is a plan to create an auto rigging system for characters right inside pixcap and at least at first it will only work with bipeds and quadrupeds but later it may be extended and it will feature a face rig the creators of pixcap are working on an animation library similar to miximo that you'll be able to use right in the app also i was interested if you can retarget the animation from one character to another character and it is possible that we'll get a feature like that soon another feature that i personally requested is the ability to switch to front left top and so on orthographic views which is not possible at the moment you can switch to orthographic view but not to specific predefined views i hope you enjoyed this video i'll keep testing you up i'll definitely keep playing with the ai mocap and when there are noteworthy news and updates i may make another video about the software to support cg dive please click like subscribe turn on notifications and tune in next time

Channel: CGDive

Views: 1,185

Keywords: blender3d, b3d, rigging

Id: NqjdBkP288g

Length: 17min 22sec (1042 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 20 2021