Best way to edit mocap?

#1

So I have a mocap skeleton that needs some edits. The feet don’t land on a consistent “ground” level, and the movement is kind of jittery.

I loaded it it into the Human IK feature, set my character to be controlled by it, and then baked that texture to a control rig. I did it this way (as opposed to baking to skeleton) because I wanted to have a control rig to fix the animation - with IKs and stuff.

The problem though, is that if I, for example, select he foot control, and delete a few frames, it doesn’t just the frame for that control, it deletes all data for that frame across the entire control rig.

Why does it do that? Is there a way to delete data from only one control? Is this happening because of a glitch? Is there a better way to edit mocap per skeletons?

i’m relatively novice when it comes to this stuff. Very much a “learn as I go” guy. Any help would be appreciated.

#2

Only the frames you’ve selected should be deleted. How are you deleting frames?

If you want to do feet planting, you don’t need to delete keys. Bake your animation to HumanIK’s FK controls and turn off all IK. (The IK controls shouldn’t have any baked data–delete it if there is.) Then, keyframe the IK controls where they should be planted, and key on the foot IK controls at each footstep (the IK weight) so they override mocap when needed. That gives you simple keyframe animation for the feet where you need to control them, without needing to actually touch the mocap data directly.

A different way to do it is to bake the animation to all controls (both IK and FK), so the animation looks more or less the same whether any control is set to IK or FK. Then, add the animation to the time editor, turn on the foot IK controls (don’t keyframe it in this case, just leave them enabled), and add an override layer for each foot IK. Then you can key into the override layer to plant the feet where needed, and key the layer’s weight to zero when you want it to go back to mocap. This is a more general solution and lets you make a wider variety of edits (eg. offsetting a control to adjust an animation while still having it driven by mocap), but the time editor is its own complex beast so I’d start with the above simpler approach.

#3

Give this a look.
Autodesk MasterClass - Live Animation Binding
https://vimeo.com/31046583

You can find the scripts on his site.
http://markj3d.blogspot.com/search/label/MasterClass

Mark Jackson is the guy behind Red9 for Maya.
Hey Mark! If you see this.