Programming and animation

MotionBuilder’s Actor, proc and cons.

MotionBuilder’s actor, is a handy tool, but it does not have a sufficient accuracy and precision for professional use. Let me explain its proc and cons.

To retarget the animation I started with these issues and achieved some success. At the moment this technology is as internal software of the Sevastopol mocap studio and is used in transfering process for a character animation.

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SkeletonBuilder WIP

In development there is a tool to fit the skeleton \ mocap actor under a set of points, including a precise calibration using ROM file.

* ROM – range of motion

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Retarget prop MoCap animation (+ Video tutor)

Actor is rarely recorded in splendid isolation, usually in the hand he holds an object, which is called the prop. This object has its own set of markers, often three is enough, and these markers are moving close to the actor. But the difficulty begins when the actor retarget into a character who has a totally different scale and proportion. And here, if for parts of the body retarget you can do automaticly, then, for all the additional facilities will have to do everything “by hands”. Although if you look at action space property in the character settings, there appears counted on the scale of the character to an actor.

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Build you own Actor

Small model plugin for MotionBuilder, that will gives you possibility to operate with actor’s body parts as normal objects in scene.

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Girl MoCap test animations

I have uploaded two small mocap animation, dance and fashion shows.

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MoCap Animation: kick test

In the continuation of a series of mocap animations.

This animation is presented as a test and does not purport to implement a real impact.

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MoCap animation: basketball play

Earlier I have uploaded video of the ball processing with the player, but as they say, better once it open yourself than a hundred times to see.

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Extracting Actor geometry

Since actor has quite a lot work with MoCap, actor is important part of working process. And if you wish to experiment, you may to collect actor geometry bodies. I will talk about building complete alternative actor later, now I will share how to extract the geometry body of the actor in a separate file and then how to output it in a separate MoBu model.

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How to… Extract actor pivots

The script should be run with the selected geometry of the actor (who does not know to do that, press Spacebar + Right mouse button on the actor Hips geometry model). The output will be a set of cubes with the name and position of the relevant part of the actor.

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