Hi all!
I’ve been involved with trying to develop a good/fast/cheap motion capture pipeline/workflow in Maya.
What we got so far is this.
iPi Soft for motion capture
Maya for 3d application
Rapid Rig for cutom rigs in maya
Humain IK for mocap retargeting
I’m not sure if I’m making it to advanced for nothing, what I’m after is a non destructive, clean & fast workflow.
Here is a overlook of the workflow in maya
Here is a description of the workflow
–
(01)
Mocap_root_01
First I save new scene and name i Mocap_root_01, there I setup the Human IK with my custom rig and saves it again.
(02)
Mocap_scene_01_animation_01
I save the scene again as Mocap_scene_01_animation_01. Now import a fbx scene containing a skeleton with the mocap data. I use a templet to setup the HIK for it, now I the retargeting works and I have the animation on my character. I choose to bake out the animation to the custom control rig.
Now I dont need HIK anymore so I can delete it.
Now I have to get the animation into the Trax editor, so I can eventually export it as i Trax character clip.
I select all my characters controls and then choose “Create clip” in the Trax editor. This takes all the keyframes from the controls and puts them in the Trax editor instead. It also creates a character set that all my characters controls now is connected to. If I’d have the HIK setup left in the scene, it would no longer work.
Now I can choose “Export animation clip” in the Trax editor to save the clip for later use in another scene together with other clips.
(03)
Clip_root_01
The first time I go trough step 02 and the character set is created, I clean up the scene, removes all the animation and clips. When this is done I save the scene as Clip_root_01.
(04)
Clip_scene_01
Now when I’ve created one, two or more clips I make a copy of Clip_root_01 and saves it as Clip_scene_01. Now I imports all the character clips I created for this character and lines them up in the Trax editor. Some tweeking here and there is usually necessary.
–
Well, that’s my workflow. My biggest issue is with step 04 when I’m importing the animation clips. It feels like the character sets sometimes doesn’t match up. I could create a script for each character that makes sure that the whole rig is selected in the same order each time in step 02 so the character set is exactly the same.
Is this a normal workflow? Do people use the Trax editor like this? Is Human IK usually used as a retargeting system together with custom rigs and mocap data? Should I skip the custom rig and use HIK all the way?
It feels like something isn’t 100% with this workflow. Maybe that’s because I’m not really familiar with nether character sets or character clip. Does the “sender and receiver” of character clips be exactly the same?
I appreciate all comments, suggestions and and thought about this workflow or some alternative.
Thanks!
/John