Animators demonstrate motion capture for emotes: Motive capture and cleanup, T-pose calibration, retargeting, and MotionBuilder's IK/FK control rig. They also cover seated emote variants, blending takes, and a new Austin Studio bar set for bartender NPC animations.
TL;DRThe item behind him is a bar built for the universe's bars, with props NPC bartenders can use to serve drinks, and the room is an Austin motion capture space with twelve cameras.
So what you're looking at behind me is actually a bar that we've built for our bars in the universe. And if I see if I can slide out of the way there, we have a full layout with things that the NPC, the bartenders, will be able to pick up and use and deliver drinks to other NPCs or to players. If you go and sit at the bar and order a drink, the bartender is going to come up, do a big concoction, hand you a drink.
Now, we can't see it in this shot. You're actually in the new expansion that we've added to the Austin Studio this year. Austin Studio is building out, it's expanding into the area next to it. And this room that you're in, we can't see it again because of the camera, you actually have a motion capture rig all around this room that you're in.
Oh, we do. So we decided to bring 12 of our cameras into our animation pit and set it up so that anytime we need to capture something, whether it's a small transition or we're doing some R&D and blocking out animations, we can quickly capture it, have it off to the designer so they can implement it in the game.
The director usually gives the actor some sort of motivation. Are you just a normal person? Are you happy? Are you gruff and angry? Are you cocky and confident? Are you a Han Solo? Or what kind of a personality are you? The actor thinks about what the direction is and then they make acting choices. And the acting choices, well, you see it, that drives the character. You can see how both of these actors, who are pretty much doing the same performance, are doing different things, even though they're within the same character.
Yes. This right down here is live. This is what was in our software called Motive. This is the capture software we use. So this was live. We come in and we actually go in and we clean up any occlusion or dropped markers, swapped markers, that sort of thing. And when it's clean and it looks good, we then export a skeleton and we retarget to our character.
TL;DROlder motion capture software needed a T-pose to tell body markers apart, since arms at the sides could swap markers; now it isn't required but keeps files clean and marks the animation start.
So what the T-pose did typically in the olden days, back in the olden days of motion capture, you would have to have the actor go into a stiff T-pose because the software needed to be able to recognize the different markers on the actor's body and say, this is an arm, this is the upper arm, this is the lower arm, this is the hand, chest, and so on. When the arms are down to the side, a lot of times those markers can flip and get swapped for markers that may be on the hips or in the chest. So by kind of spreading your limbs out to the side, it helps the system. Nowadays, it's not required, but it's really nice. It's a nice way to just kind of keep your file clean. It also is like a good time marker saying, this is the beginning of the animation.
No, the keys that I'm setting, actually I'll just expand this so you can see what I'm talking about. So here's my curves. These are what the actual animation is that's being applied to the different controls in the rig. Right now, these are set to auto. They're just auto smooth. I actually had them set to stepped, which is like a stair step, and he's just going to rigidly pop from pose to pose, and I didn't want that. I do want that when I was blocking out all my bartender animations. I'm going to put that back to auto.
TL;DRSeated versions of emotes are possible, but for high-fidelity motion they would likely recapture them seated rather than adapt standing ones, since the body moves differently.
There is. We probably want to capture it from a seated position because the way your body moves is a little bit different. In fact, I have some seated animations here I can swap over to, I believe. So here's the facepalm sitting. So we can actually sit here and we can evaluate between these two animations to see the difference. So with the sitting, he kind of leans over and he does kind of the Picard-esque facepalm. Hand doesn't quite make contact, but you can kind of see how he's leaning over in the seated position. If I go to the standing version of it, you can see how the core of his body actually acts and moves and postures differently. So while in theory you could probably play an upper body animation on a sitting set of animations, if you want that really high-end fidelity of motion, you probably want to actually just capture that motion sitting down.
So obviously we have a lot of emotes that can be performed while standing. If we wanted to have versions of those emotes that played while sitting, rather than adapt those, we would probably just recapture them from a sitting perspective to get all that natural nuance that comes from when people sit.
TL;DRThe MotionBuilder control rig combines an FK skeleton (spine, limbs, fingers, neck and head) with a separate IK rig of spheres, and the two switch smoothly without snapping because the rigging is programmatic.
So this control rig in MotionBuilder, and this is why the control rig in MotionBuilder is so powerful, is it has an IK and an FK rig built into it. Everything that you see in yellow, it's pretty much this whole tree hierarchy, this is your FK skeleton. This is your spine. If you think about this, this is kind of like a person, right? Here's his hips, spine, shoulders, down into his hands. I usually color code these fingers so I know that they're fingers, so to speak. Here's his legs right over here. And then right over on this side is his neck and his head. We actually have two neck joints in our character. Over here in the red and blue spheres, I'm going to X-ray him so you can actually see what I'm looking at. So again, here's the FK. Now all the red and blue spheres, these are the IK. And these are kind of like two separate rigs that have a symbiotic relationship with each other. They work with each other really nicely and you can easily go back and forth between IK and FK. A lot of programs, a lot of rigs, you have IK snapping and they have to do all sorts of code and scripting in order to prevent that kind of snapping. But because this is all programmatic, it's all built into the rigging.
TL;DRIK (inverse kinematics) lets an animator drag the end of a joint chain, while FK means rotating each joint one at a time, which makes IK much easier for 3D animation.
IK stands for inverse kinematics and I can show you real simply what that is all about. So FK. So to get FK to work, I'm going to have to rotate my arm up. Let's say he's going to point at something. Then I got to go select my elbow and I got to bend at the elbow and then I got to select the hand and get the hand into position. And that's how I'd have to animate the entire character. And then one day somebody got the idea of being able to create an inverse kinematic chain. And what that does is it allows me to grab the end of a chain of joints and drag it around, making it much, much easier to kind of drag and rotate and point or grab onto something. And I'm old enough to remember what it was like pre-IK. And IK has made animation in 3D so much easier. So much nicer.
It's in the actual capture data. Chances are the marker floated off or got swapped or something along those lines, or maybe there's just a little bit of noise on it.
TL;DRYes, they often capture a performance in separate parts, such as a jump and a separate impact, then stitch them together, for example to avoid actors performing dangerous drops.
Absolutely. A lot of times we will film something specifically in parts because maybe it's impractical or we don't want to kill our actor on stage doing these things. So we say, all right, this one, you're going to jump from this little platform onto the ground. They do it. Then we're going to say, we're going to bring you up a little bit higher. We're going to do the same kind of jump, but when you hit the ground, you're going to have this big impact. So then they do a big impact, right? Then we take the element of jumping down and the element of impact. And then if we have to put a predetermined height on it, we'll raise that character up however high in the air the character needs to be, let them drop, and then we'll stitch those three elements together to make one element of a character jumping off and landing on the floor. And let's say if it's a superhero game and he's jumping off a building, I don't think my actor wants me to have him jump off an actual building to hit the ground.
Typically, we would try to use the emote in its entirety, but I'm going to give a for example. Let's say the data came back, and see how he has this nice swing in his arm like that? And this has happened a lot. The data will come back and he goes shunk and he'll just lock right there. And it looks bad because you don't have that settling. And if I try to motion edit that, it wouldn't feel so good. But there may be another take where he does have a bit of an arm swing that works with it. So we'll kind of piece in and motion edit the ending of one animation onto this to finish it out to make it feel nice.