Sep 26, 20193 min read

Lab 3 + UnReal Animation

Lab 3 + UnReal Animation Documentation:

This week was packed with new things. I like it because finally i felt like things are connecting.

Node based in UnReal didn't seems that hard.

Data Cleaning turn out to be a group effort.

Animation in UnReal is like a whole new world!

Lab 3: first part

Louise, Son and moi were having a lot of fun.

We set ourselves with some goals:

- capture small but meaningful movement

- Clean at at list 2-3 sessions, so we can see the differences between takes or motion complexities.

It was my turn to put the suit on. i felt the pressure.

Then, we did some motion captures for our scenes.

The process was like that:

Son was the director, talking with me and helping me reach full potential.

Louise was on Motive - Making sure we are as clean as possible.

After having all the takes we wanted. We duplicated the original folder and created a "cleaned" folder to put all our cleaned takes.

We started with me walking in circles because it seemed to be the cleanest and the easiest.

The majority of cleaning were ghost markers that were up in the air without any connection to the actual skeleton.

We were working in this order:

- get rid of all the unlabelled markers

- Going from to left on the graph and checking our channels and missing data.

- Working in the order is very important to not ruin or effect other data on the later timeline

- Using "find next" was easy to find the next missing data. (Sometimes it was too small and we almost missed it).

tip: If you open the graph to a full screen it is easier to see and move inside the missing parts.

After cleaning the unlabelled markers, we found the gaps, this is how it is usually looks like

we reduce the time to %5 to see every little change in what we were changing.

basically when filling those missing data, we choose between:

- linear

- curved

- pattern

we didn't use pattern, but definitely switched a lot between linear and curved filling.

We had 3 takes that we managed to clean:

- walking in circles

- running

- free dancing

we tried to clean another funky sitting dancing that we had, but we only reached to the middle of the cleaning, it was by far more complicated, we got to how to sometimes there are actual markers that mixed with other, we needed to relabel them and make sure that the movement make sense.

Toggle between full body and only skeleton was very helpful.

especially when looking for the missing dot.

When done with editing, Export cleaned data as FBX Binary.

Save it inside the Cleaned folder.

Lab 3: second part

Moving to the second part of the process. This process was consistent of 5 main parts:

1. Building a human in Making Human

2. Rigging in Mixamo.

3. Merging character with animation in Motion Builder

3. Importing rigged caracter to unReal

4. Automation and Interaction inside unReal

1. Making human:

- open making human software

- Build your own human - played with the parameters.

in the end didn't want to put any cloths on, just wanted the skin and small modification in the body.

The most important part of making Human is inside - pose/animate > choose > T Pose.

Files > Export > FilmBox-FBX (Choose in advance where to store the file, it is easier).

2. Rigging in Mixamo (need an adobe account)

- Upload Character to mixamo

- Rigged it as instruction are saying

- Download it and save it with a different name!

3. Merging character with animation in Motion Builder

Open the Rigged character from mixamo

In scenes - i found my "mixamo_hips" and attached a character to it.

After that, I clicked file>merge and uploaded the motion capture clean file. it is immediately shown in the characters - i changed the name :) to not get confused.