Programming and animation

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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Fixing Feet Sliding

I want to tell about quite popular issue of the MoCap animation – feet sliding effect, and how to fix it in MotionBuilder by several ways.

First of all, through the algorithm of feet stabilization and feet contact on the floor, and of course through self-editing by hand.

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Prop in a hand, video tutorial

A small video tutorial on how to take prop in a character’s hand in the MotionBuilder.

Spring box tutorial

I have prepared a small video tutorial on the use of plug-in of the spring simulation.

Plugin is here (with the source code):

http://neill3d.com/spring-box-constraint

Two ways to edit an animation for the Story mode

I present to your attention two small video lesson with possible approaches to editing an animation clip in the Story mode. Often this need arises when going from final character’s story and need to make certain changes in either animation.

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3ds Max tips and tricks by Louis Marcoux

Louis Marcoux on arrival from Siggraph shared some interesting moments about 3dsMax. Look, there about:

- CAT Rig, the use of char meshes with UV’s and textures as bone’s meshes

- Tips for working with new modeling tools

- Integration with MotionBuilder, workflow

- Depth of field for the camera in the a viewport (“This feature us not officially supported by Autodesk but you can enable it at your own risks”)

All these points are well covered in the form of video material, I hope will be useful.

See here.

FbxObject – Storing and retrieving a data

Writing and reading in fbx format has its own characteristics, I would like to briefly talk about it.
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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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Prop in hand

To put & hold prop in hand, U need to todo:

1)      make a character hand pose like already holding prop in hand

In MB there is very usefull Align operation, which U can make up with dragging one object to another (from the context menu choose Align->Translation/Rotation).

2)      add Parent/Child constraint, where use this setup – hand IK effector (LeftWristEffector) set as source object and prop object set as constrained.

3)      Press Snap button in the constraint options pane

If U want to write motion from constraint to object position/rotation U need to execute plot operation. For this, select object and from main menu choose Plot Selected.

Loading animations on body parts separately

 There are two common ways to solve this task:

1)      Story

Each character track has a context menu with body part influences.

2)      MotionBlend

Put on track FK elements with animation form one take, and in viewport choose another take. That will mix two takes. Just plot animation on character bones.