Kiss and Make Up Dance Pass 5

Kiss and Make Up Blocked Animation Pass 5

Autodesk Maya 2022 Arnold Renderer Single Frame Render Test

For this pass I focused on just blocking the hands of the character.  While I still have a long way to go with this animation I have come to learn just how details in the hands can really give some personality to a character.  As I was studying the dancer from my reference I was noticing that he does a lot of pointing, spider-man finger pose, and the okay hand pose.  I personally found this detail about the dancer to be very interesting and how quickly his hands actually are able to change poses so quickly in some spots.  Definitely the most difficult part for me to get right is when his hands are on his hips or thighs.  Zio is a very thin character and I've come to find that his hands are larger than you think so his hands cover his thighs.  I think that part of the dance where he does have his hands on his thighs or on his hips is an area that I definitely will need to spend more time on.  Some of the problems I ran into while blocking his hands is that sometimes his fingers would break where the geometry would crumble inwards and I found several ways to fix this issue, the most effective way being to either set all his value to 0 or rotating his fingers completely around and seeing the geometry return to normal and then zeroing out the values.  I also fixed the issue where the character was very shiny when doing a single frame render test with Arnold.  I fixed this by adjusting his materials in the hypershade.  The next big thing I will be working on this animation is his arms and taking a look at how his hair is moving.  For anyone who doesn't know the Zio Rig is by Hernan Ares.  My choreography reference is from 1MILLION Dance Studio starting at 1:58.  The song is called Kiss and Make Up by Black Pink and Dua Lipa!

Idle to Walk Mocap Animation Part 2: Adding the Character

Motion Builder 2022 Trimmed and Plotted Azura Walk Animation

For this week I chose to work on adding the mocap data to a character.  For this animation, I worked with a character named Azura who you may recognize from the Fire Emblem series.  This rig is of her special costume and I got her rig from my grad school mocap rig library.  I though she had a very cool design and she also had some very interesting hair and clothing.  I find hair and clothing very interesting and something I want to learn more about so working with her would give me some more insight on how hair and clothing work when it's time to work with both of those areas.  

To start off I open Azura in motion builder.  I then also add my folder path to my cleaned and characterized mocap data in the asset browser so that it is easier to work with.  After adding my folder path, I drag one of the mocap animations onto the scene and FBX merge.  

Motion Builder 2022 Azura and Mocap Data Rig

From here I select my character in the navigator outline and switch her Input Type to Character under the Character Settings.  I also plot the character so I can delete the mocap data from the scene.   After I plot my character I opened my schematic and deleted the mocap data.  Azura has many nodes in the schematic view!

Motion Builder 2022 Cleaned Plotted Character Schematic

After I plotted my character, I created a new folder for my plotted scenes and saved my scene.  I did the same process for my other animation before I moved into trimming the animation.  

Motion Builder 2022 Short Gif on Azura Idle Animation

Motion Builder 2022 Short Gif on Azura Walking

Once I got both of my animations plotted I began to look at where I could begin trimming.  Because these animations weren't given direction when shooting the mocap, I will have to copy some keyframes for when I merge the two animations together.  What I mean by they weren't given direction I mean that the actor wasn't told to lower their arms first from T-pose before beginning to walk.  

Once I find the frames that I want to cut using the cut filter, I set my set start to 0 and my set stop to the frame I want my animation to begin. I then used the same technique to cut off the animation at the end.  For the walk I kept it simple and short.  For the idle I'm going to be showing that one's trim in the next post!

Motion Builder 2022 Azura First Walk Frame After Getting Trimmed

Idle to Walk Mocap Animation Part 1: Cleaning and Characterizing.

Motion Builder 2022 Short Gif Cleaned and Characterized Walk Animation

Motion Builder 2022 Short Gif of Cleaned and Characterized Idle Animation

I decided that I wanted to gain some more knowledge about mocap animation and learn about the animation process in motion builder.  To start my journey on learning more about this area, I started simple with just a basic walk and idle animation.  I'm starting these animation off separately before I combine them into one.  While I was in grad school,  I went to some of the lectures about mocap animation.  I never got to finish any of the animations but I did learn a lot from my professor.  

To start off, I found my mocap data from the animation I started in grad school.  I'm starting from the very beginning where I have to clean and characterize the data.  I see many red dots in the scene which is data I need to clean.

Motion Builder 2022 Original Walk Animation 

To begin cleaning the scene, I first start with opening the schematic.  I deleted the system, unlabeled markers, markers for props that were not used, and the markers that were on the actor.  

Motion Builder 2022 Unclean Schematic View

Motion Builder 2022 Clean Schematic View 

Motion Builder 2022 Clean Perspective View

To take the cleaning process a bit further, I characterized the scene.  Characterizing allows me to label the joints to transfer the data to a mocap rig.  I first set the starting frame at 0.  I also zero out all of the rotations.  I then selected just the hip joint and rotated the X 90 degrees. Next selected everything and keyed it on frame 0.  Finally, added a template character and renamed it Mocap so I know what the mocap data is.  At this point I save my cleaned file in a new folder. 

Motion Builder 2022 Cleaned and Characterized File

I then run through this very same process for my idle animation.

Motion Builder 2022 Original Idle Animation Short Gif

Kiss and Make Up Dance Pass4

Autodesk Maya 2022 Kiss and Make UP Animation Blocking Stage 4

Autodesk Maya 2022 Arnold Renderer Single Frame Render Test

This is an animation I started while I was in grad school but never got to get past the blocking stages.  This is very early stages of this animation as this is my fourth pass at blocking in all of the movement. I chose to do dancing for a high action animation because choreography has always fascinated me with the way the body moves to the music.  Dancing doesn't always make sense to me and I myself am not very confident about dancing.  When I first started learning animation, I did an animation with one of my best friends to this same song and reference video.  We both animated a character and brought them together.  This was one of my favorite memories from school.  This dance variation is further in the video.  The song is Kiss and Make Up by Black Pink and Dua Lipa.  The choreography reference is from 1MILLION Dance Studio on Youtube.  The rig is called Zio by Hernan Ares.