A Question about rigging for Motion Capture

[Goob]

Hi,



if the acclaim skeleton and your character skeleton are exactly the same (no retargeting) you should use point constrains and bake simulation to animate locators on the acclaim skeleton, witch are driving your rigged character. in the trax editor you can do offset animations.
BUT: if you are working with rotations in the trax check the animation curves in the graph editor. here is a big risk of gimble locks (a jump on two rotation axis between two frames). you can't see them in in the view port or play blast, only in a render with motion blur!

hope this helps


goob.

[Nemises]

Thanks Goob,
Really good info.
:airguitar :

[Stahlberg]

Yes!
Goob, how exactly would those locators drive his skeleton? An IK handle on every joint, point-constrained to each locator?

[typeA]

well the only mocap sist. i have used is kaydara..and all im gona say is get ready for a ride buddy....:wavey:

[bigfatMELon]

This subject can get pretty deep, but here's an overview of what we did for SWAT:UJ.
[list=1]
A complete, freestanding keyframed rig with external constraint options on pelvis, elbows, wrists, knees and feet.
A mocap rig that included all the joints needed to recieve the mocap data and offset IK limbs and offset pelvis. Pretty much the two-joint thing with IK on the offet joint.
A customized Acclaim importer that would apply data to the right joints of mocap rig. We just took the stock importer our mocap house provided and remapped a few things. About 15 minutes worth of effort.
A completely unrigged, free-standing skin-skeleton (this is what we bound the meshes to). This is the receiver of all data from the blend array.
A script to connect the channels from every bone of the key framed rig and any number of additional mocap rigs through a massive array of blendWeighted Nodes and allow the sources to be mixed via custom channels of a control object.
[/list=a]
With all that in tow, you can blend between any number of motions (we also split the skeleton into separate sections so we could take the upper from source A, lower from source B, neck from source C, etc...), custom keyframe ability, local offsets of mocap data and resolving individual parts of a any mocap for resizing data or replanting feet, hands, elbows, knees, pelvis as needed to manage contact points.

That might all sound complicated but it's really just kinda big, not really hard. It's also a heck of lot cheaper than Filmbox and way more advanced than Trax and all the tools needed are already in Maya.

The other benefit is that everything is kept nicely abstracted so you don't have to worry about how your keyframe rig is built except that it has the same number of joints and so forth as the output skin-skeleton. Since the final result is arrived at via some offset, resolve or blend function, the original data can remain intact and live. Almost no baking will be needed, tho sometimes we would bake an output result back onto our keyframe rig and reblend to get some tricky refinements.

-jl

[Goob]

kaydara blows out one motionbuilder for one year for 100$. the control set rocks (for offset animation), the nle is powerful and there is a gimble killer ;)

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=32287


goob.

[Michel Besner]

By reading what you have to do to rig mocap data in maya, I strongly suggest to take a look at MOTIONBUILDER.

Go check the VTM at www.3Dbuzz.com !

Or even better, get yourself MOTIONBUILDER PLE ...

M.

[womanonfire]

Can Motionbuilder export the animations in .x format ?

[Michel Besner]

Not in the current version (we are getting more requests for this everyday)
Until then, you can go back to your 3D apps using FBX in order to export .x files.

M.

[womanonfire]

ah... too bad. the problem we have now is that the Maya .x plug-in takes -f-o-r-e-v-e-r- to export animations.
but can you point me to info for this product anyway....where can one find out what formats it does export ?

[Michel Besner]

Basically AVI, QT, TIFF, FLASH (SWF) and FBX (which can be imported in many apps)

M.

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