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Making Mocap Data Flexible (Patreon)

Published:
2020-08-20 01:07:03
Edited:
2020-08-20 01:29:23
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Proooobably should have held off on this video, and I suspect it's of limited use to anyone with even the most basic rigging knowledge, BUT, I've been having so much friggin' fun with this technique that I wanted to post a quick video about it! Oh and here's where I got with the shot as the video was uploading to youtube. Is it just a shot to show off these gauges? Definitely. I'm going to have to add little labels and animated needles now. I need to. 

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Making Mocap Data Flexible

Comments

sofia

Yay! The

IanHubert

You took The word right out of my mouth.

Mark Miller

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. 😀

IanHubert

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!

Mark Miller

If you figure out where to put the equation, I'll happily write it.

Aman Bhargava

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!

Christian McNamara

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

Abraham Mast

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.

thecod genius

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

William Davis

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

Seth Rutledge

This is going to be so helpful :)

Mike L. Taylor (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-20 10:00 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...
2020-08-20 04:25 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...

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...

Markus

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!

Tyler Adams

So bloody useful! Another $7 well spent haha

Mark Miller

Bah, I just realized I commented on the wrong post. You're on a roll today! I didn't realize this was a new different one!

Dyrgrip FX

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

Christina Myrvold

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!!

IanHubert

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

IanHubert

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

Christina Myrvold

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.

HerbHerbHerbert

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

thecod genius

great, yeah i binged the patreon on the first couple days, so i came across those nd used a couple to test out, ive sort of got an idea of how to do it, guess i just need to try it out :)

sofia

i was going to finish my comment but i had to ascend to the astral plane for a quick sec

Mark Miller

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.

Anderson Atlas Author

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....

Paul Wright

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. :)

IanHubert

Ahahaha, it's so much of my life!

IanHubert

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!

IanHubert

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?

IanHubert

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.

IanHubert

HAH! I didn't notice either. I ended up just hand animating and using a few wiggle modifiers, but that's definitely a thing I want to figure out at some point!!

IanHubert

Ahhh! Thanks for the kind words, and good luck diving into mocap! When it works, it's amazing! When it doesn't, it's a BIG ol' pain in the butt. But hmmm- locking the foot position to clean up mocap data? I'm not sure I have any particularly good way of doing it, actually :/ I think the standard way is to switch between IK and FK? Maybe? Yeah that's a hard one. It's totally possible to toggle between the two methods, but I can't think of anything that wouldn't necessitate a significant amount of work for, like, every step :/ THAT SAID, I'm not sure which system you're using, but there are other ways of cleaning up mocap data! In the rokoko software I use, for example, they do a footstep pass, where they intelligently identify when the feet are on the ground, and use that as part of their calculations, so the end data is pretty darn clean. I haven't looked into it, but I'm sure there are other programs that do similar mocap cleanup, even if you're not using a rokoko system.

Aman Bhargava

Thank you so much! The problem I've faced with hand animating the camera is that since the objects are moving really fast along a path, its hard keep the camera up to their speed AND keep them in focus. So what I tried doing was duplicating the path, offset it to one side and then parent the camera to that. The problem with this is I'm now restricted only to that path and I can't do much else with it later, which is a big pain for something like a continuous shot. I look forward to learning from your workflow, I'm sure it'll be helpful. Thanks again :)

IanHubert

Oh gotcha!! So- a random trick for this scene, I actually have the environment moving, and everything else is just moving relative to that (meaning if you see the scene from the outside, the little vehicles are actually relatively stationary- just keeps me from having to navigate all over the place on every frame. But yeah, that makes sense- especially if the vehicles are moving around a ton; hard to keep up and keep all the animation curves clean. One thing I might recommend, if you haven't tried it already, is parent something to the path (or even just use the existing camera), and then parent a DIFFERENT camera to that, so you get all the original motion from the path, but there's a degree of separation so you can still animate that new camera independently if you want.

Christina Myrvold

Thanks for the reply! Yeah, it's a MAJOR pain in the arse. It's the only thing I just can't quite figure out in regards to Mocap. I'll definitely try switching between IK and FK and see if I can somehow manually animate the feet's position. Rokoko is definitely waaaaayyy out of my budget, and I've spent days looking into software that deals with Mocap data, but options are quite limited unfortunately. I really appreciate your reply, though! I'll try and see what I come up with, and if you somehow manage to figure something out, PLEASE share it with us, as I can't be the only one dealing with this issue! :')

Shabs C

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

simon wu

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.

Zachary Macintyre

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.

Nate

this is cool as heck

IanHubert

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.

IanHubert

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!

simon wu

Thank you so much!

Mark Miller

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.

LB

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!

Sketch

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?

Anonymous

i like thank you very much