A few folk have mailed to ask when the MasterClass is being presented so I thought I’d do some blatant self promotion and spill the beans… The MasterClasses are now online only, Autodesk figure they get a bigger audience this way and it stops me looking like an arse doing it live! (well, less of an arse anyway!) It should go live on TheArea under their Siggraph feed on Tuesday 9th. Here’s the basic outline, although it got expanded slightly since this into using HIK as an intermediate object, and mapping to raw optical moCap data. Hope you find it useful!
“This Master Class will outline a method of transferring character animations between any source data and a given animation rig using a binder template file. This method was originally designed to enable Motion Capture data to be mapped to our in-house rigging systems whilst allowing for easy manipulation, but quickly evolved into a retargeting system in its own right. In the most basic form it allows for MoCap fbx files to be dropped directly onto your animation rigs. However, expanding the technique allows you to transfer animations between characters even when their skeletal structures and proportions are completely different. Because it relies on a Binder File and isn’t code based it gives you the flexibility to manage any skeleton structure, allowing you to add custom bind nodes between any character specific joint and it’s relative Rig Controller. Finally because the bind is a preset file it makes it very easy to bulk process animations, casting CharacterA’s animation library straight to CharacterB.”
Damn…now that sounds awesome. I won’t be at SIGGRAPH this year, but I’ll def pick this up after. This would be a great presentation to livestream for the RiggingDojo guys too!
Thanks for sharing Brad, hope it’s useful, always hard to know what to pitch and at what level. Spent ages redoing the examples to try and make it interesting! Be sure to get to the last section though, that’s where all the cool stuff is.
“even when their skeletal structures and proportions are completely different”
So, does it actually ‘re-target’ the motion to compensate for these different proportions or does it copy the data onto the new ‘controllers’ and doesn’t actually adjust the motion to make it fit the new proportions?
If it does re-target, I’m really interested to see how you did that without code!
Looking forward to seeing it.
Its basically an intermediate rig, nothing over fancy in concept, binding source nodes to Controllers via offset nodes and relying on your rig to handle the incomming data. The beauty of it is the simplicity, and the fact it’s just a file, so is dead easy to pass entire anim libraries through for retargetting. Towards the end of the class it does go into some quite complex setups. Inserting HIK and having that handle the retarget (although it’s not something we actually do in production, yet anyway). The last example is an interesting one, raw MoCap point cloud data driving stabilizer nodes which in turn drive the binder and the rig.
I’m taking all the examples with me to Siggraph so if you wanted to take a look, let me know.
I tried both Firefox and Chrome. As soon as I log-in the check boxes next to the classes and “I agree to the terms” disappear. This prevents me from registering.
If you are not an AREA member, please proceed to the registration form.
If you already have an AREA login, please log-in before proceeding to registration. The log-in will pre-fill the majority of information obtained from your personal profile.
Register for:
Juan, I had the same issue, the Area showed me logged in and then when I registered the first time it didn’t work.
I had to log out of the area, then go to the link, click the log in button, re-login and then register and it took. Some how it was not seeing that I was logged in even though it was filling out info for me like I was.
What can I say, it’s an Autodesk website! Yes I’ve had a few people moan about the registration process but I think it’s been sorted out. As Brad says, register then log out and back in, that seems to fix it. Not good though, I’ll follow it up with Autodesk.
At some point I’ll stick a direct link to it from my blog as well. The code is already there anyway if you want to take a look.
Actually I figured out my problem. I was using the light color theme color for the Area website. Check boxes show up for the 2 dark themes, but not the light color theme, if you are logged in. If you are logged out, the check boxes show up for all themes.
hmm, even after logging out and in (and out and in and out and in ) I still see the “In order to view this MasterClass, you must be registered and logged-in…” message.
Thats not good, I’ll ask Autodesk about it again. I’ll stick a link off my blog to it anyway at some point in the near future, just got to recompress the masters and find somewhere to stick it. The Python toolset is already linked off the blog if you wanted to take a look at that.
