using mocap

#1

I have a load of character which are fully rigged and need to be animated with the mocap files which I have. The mocap skeletons are maya binary files and I also have some fbx files. The skeletons however do not match my rigged characters in scale and so I am unsure if they will work in motionbuilder. Is it going to be possible for me to transfer the animation from the mocap files which are a different scale onto my completed characters rigs in motionbuilder.

Many thanks,

Leon

#2

I don’t know if this completely answers your question, but lets give it a try.

The way you would apply mocap data to your characters in MB is to import the raw, but clean, data (.trc for instance).

  1. Drag in an Actor from the Assets browser, and scale the markerset to roughly fit him.
  2. Do some individual scaling of his body parts to best represent the size of your marker data.
  3. Create a marker set for your Actor, and place your marker data in the appropriate slots.
  4. Click ‘Active’, and the Actor should then be driven by the marker/mocap data you’ve imported.

You may need to poke around with this procedure a bit, as it requires some degree of experience to see what works and what doesn’t.

Once you have your Actor running well, you can import your Maya skeleton (saved as a .fbx) andcreate a Character (Assets browser). A Character is just a definition of the skeleton you’ve chosen to use, where you select which bones to define the legs, arms, etc.

The scaling of this Character does not have to be the same as the Actor, it can be translated to pretty much any sized skeleton as long as you set up the Character definition correctly.

When you have the skeleton running well with the Actor input, you can plot the motion onto the joints as keyframes (in the Character properies panel). Once you’re happy with whatever you’ve plotted onto your skeleton, save it as a .fbx again and import it to Maya.

I normally use ‘exclusive merge’, to simplify things.

I’m sure there are heaps of things left unexplained here, so hit up the tutorials, and you should be fine.

Best of luck!

–
Daniel

#3

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