Making Mocap Data Flexible

i like thank you very much

Hey Ian, I got this problem onece I apply a mixamo animation a rigged asset of yours, it basically doesnt work, the chacaters pose gets broken with the animation, Also once I try to apply rotation to the armature thinking it might solve it, the armature rotates 90 degress. Not sure how to fix it, any help please?

Hey Ian! I'm currently making a film for my degree and I just want to say THANK YOU because this project wouldn't be possible without your tutorials. You're an absolute legend. Thanks for giving me the skills to make my dream come true!

My suit finally came in, and it's pretty exciting. I'm curious what you're rigging your characters with (or if you're doing it all manually). All my rigs had weird problems with retargeting (auto-rig pro rigs seem to literally explode). I had some luck just starting with an imported fbx, wiping its animation, editing it to match the mesh and parenting directly to it. Then, the rokoko retargeting stuff seems to work. B ut those rigs don't seem to be very handy for tweaking stuff. Also, it's a bummer that you have to pay extra to export at different frame rates, although scaling the keyframes seems to work OK to fix that.

Mark Miller

Thank you so much!

simon wu

Ooo- so, most all the money I've made over the years has been through doing VFX work, which honestly ends up being more compositing/tweaking shot footage than generating things in CG. This isn't the best advice (cause I don't know the best advice), but the blender market is really taking off lately- if you spend time making high quality assets that people need, and get them up there, that should make some money. The trick, I think, is picking good assets. making them easy to use, and creating a demo scene that really showcases them. Personally, I like trying to think of stuff that'd be useful/fun, but that hasn't been done a lot (like, I want to make a little library of subtly animated pigeons you can stick on the edge of buildings and telephone wires and such, or a collection of sign-mounting brackets. People love having signs in their scenes, but nobody wants to spend a couple hours modeling all the random brackets). One of the big things to keep in mind is that when people buy assets, they're effectively paying you to do the work they don't want to (or can't) do. So identifying the bits folks in general hate doing the most, and then figuring out a way to sell a solution for that (or, inversely, identify the thing you LOVE doing the most, do a bunch of it, and offer it as a pack.) Just my thoughts!

Ian Hubert

Thanks, Zachary!! Here's the post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/some-post-35533684 In after effects, there are lots of options for grain emulation/generation, but in blender you can just slip a little noise on top. You can also import a noise sample as a video (or even shoot your own), and just comp it over the top.

Ian Hubert

this is cool as heck

Nate

If you scroll back he uploaded a video on his post pricessing in after effects and blender's compositor. Adding film grain is a large part of it.

Zachary Macintyre

Hey Ian I really love the grainy look on your work, can you make a tutorial of how you did that? Also I'd love it if you talked about what you do after you render your footage.

simon wu

Hi Ian, I was wondering if you could do a video on how to make money using blender skills. Would be really helpful. Thanks

A dogfight scene! Awesome! And totally yeah! I usually hand-animate all the camera keyframes (apart from a little modifier noise on top)- so a lot of it's just intuition, but there's a certain kind of workflow I go through that might be useful- I'll try to make a video the next time I'm animating a shot! Because it's totally true- the moment you start applying constraints to animate a camera, things can feel very controlled/artificial really quick, unless if you're really lucky.

Ian Hubert

thanks

yea that would be awsome

Ah, I'm glad!! You're welcome!

Ian Hubert

Totally! Which aspect? The capturing of the mocap data itself I do using a Rokoko suit, which is really cool, but maybe not in everyone's price range, which is why I've been focusing more on using the data itself (which you can usually find floating around online somewhere) rather than actually capturing the data with a specific method, you know?

Ian Hubert

AH! That's great! I think you're gonna love it! And oh man yeah- so- I think that's what the animation NLA editor is for. You can record little animations, and it lets you blend/overlap/add/mix-n-match them all together, so you could have a few legs-only animations, set em to loop, and combine them with a few upper-body animations. I haven't played with it much, but someone here (I'm sorry I forget who- I have to find out so I can re-find the video they sent me, hahaha) showed me how easy it was to turn a random armature action into, like, an "animation clip" you can drag and drop to create new motions. It's great!

Ian Hubert

Ahahaha, it's so much of my life!

Ian Hubert

This is very helpful - Thank you!

I just enjoy the fact the we really are all the same. 'And this should just... woooooah! Why's that not working...Oh right...'. Makes me feel loads better. :)

could you do a toutorial on mocap please

this looks easy and might just solve my problem. I'm trying to get a lizard to run on the ground. Not using mocap, but I'm using a walk cycle that allows the feet to go through the ground. maybe if I make ground the constraint and use influence. just maybe....

Anderson Atlas

Oh man. I finally sat down and watched this. This got me so excited that I ordered a rokoko suit. Blending the mocap data with hand animation/IK so easily is amazing! Is there a workflow for blending mocap data (say from upper-body and lower body) as easily? I know you did that in the Corridor video with the "swimming", but that was early on, and maybe you've learned alot since then.

Mark Miller

This was the most useful 10 mins of my life thank you

HerbHerbHerbert

Quick question, Ian -- if you don't mind me asking! How would you personally go about fixing sliding feet while a character is walking forward? I feel with your video the answer is in there somewhere, but I can't quite think of a good, simple solution.

Ooo- yeah that's hard, and depends a lot on your element. Obviously limiting the camera angle to stay in front of the cards is the biggest thing, but from experienceI can say that having lighting on the people that matches the lighting in the scene helps a TON (like directional sunlight or something). Also- I'm not sure what tier you are, but I've got some low poly photoscanned people over here, and you can probably stick a few thousand of them in your scene before your computer gets bogged down (I have a hefty machine, but I can still have 100,000 of them no problem)- if you mix some 3d folks into the foreground and leave the cards for the further background, that could maybe help? https://www.patreon.com/posts/asset-33-low-39998570

Ian Hubert

YES!!! Yes that's it exactly!! I keep doing experiments with constraints, and my little whims and tests turn out fine, but my attempts to repeat them never work, hahaha

Ian Hubert

Ian, you beautiful, beautiful man. Thanks SO much for this! I'm about to do a deep-dive into Mocap in the next couple of weeks, and your tutorials have been SO helpful. Really, ALL of your tutorials have taught me so much. You're such a huge inspiration!!

Thank you for this! I was about to dive down that IK hole and now you gave me the push. Yay!

Dyrgrip FX

Brilliant

Jan van den Hemel

So bloody useful! Another $7 well spent haha

Tyler Adams

Hey Ian! Thanks for this super useful insights how you do things. It’s really a simple yet effective technique... it‘s so funny because I‘d have probably never figured this out on my own although now - once seen from you - seems quite trivial. Well, but I guess that‘s how learning works... thanks!

Markus

WOW! Ian you are on fire today!!! I have been looking for this exact solution for a few months and it seems so obvious thank you! Parenting empties to the hands and feet will provide a lot of clean up and customization opportunities for various mocap. I happened to find this tutorial today by Royal skies "Blender 2.8 Inverse Drivers (Mixing Motion Capture & Manual Animation)" Which is a similar want but totally different approach where you can mix several rigs on the same mesh. Like if you wanted to have a rokoko rig with mocap and your own custom hand animation rig on the same model and blend between them. The driver approach is little out of my depth for now but I get how you did this... I think...

Mike L. Taylor

This is going to be so helpful :)

Seth Rutledge

Incredible tips and tricks! Thank you for sharing this knowledge--extremely helpful and awesome

Anyone know how to implement crowd images in a blender scene without them looking flat?

Think you may need to animate the IK constraint influence as well. The forearm is still following the hand, even though the hand is trying to be parented to the forearm.

Ahh this is too cool! I feel like even *I *can animate a thing with tricks like this

Ian, if this is possible somewhere down the line since you're working with such animated sequences right now, could you do a small video on how to animate the camera and those fancy vehicle movements? I know you did a lazy tutorial on car chases, but I was working on a short Star Wars dogfight scene and realized how terrible follow path constraints are to work with right out of the box. There's an exciting sense of chaos in the movements of these Hyperbole players. I found it hard to have the camera follow the vehicles in the way you showed us in the last Hyberbole clip (big ol' swooshy camera movements that follow the players and keep them in focus but still feel like they have their own movement. I've tried parenting the camera to the moving objects but it just looks so stationary like they've been attached with a pole). If you get some time to do this, a tutorial on the actual animated movements would be amazing!

Aman Bhargava

Ahhhhhhh- man this would be PERFECT for that! Some of those would be easy (or- maybe? Translating one axis movement into rotation is easy, but I've never pushed through to figure out two-axis, haha), but stuff like acceleration and such. I'm sure it's possible, but I have no idea how. That'd be a very fun project!

Ian Hubert

The gauges are beautiful! It seems like a good opportunity to drive the needles automatically from the velocities/forces the object is experiencing with script or drivers, and then teach us how to do that. 😀

Mark Miller

You took The word right out of my mouth.

Ian Hubert

Yay! The

sofia