I cleaned the animations for the SWAT unit character. I have cleaned up most of it, but the issue is the hands placements as I can't seem to get the IK handles to work and apply onto the hands.
The character is supposed to be in a helicopter gesturing that the Joker is on the rooftop. So far, one hand is supposed to be grasping a handle or resting on the inner shell of the helicopter. I'll be experimenting with the constraints to make up for this issue.
01/16/2023
Today I cleaned up most of the animation layers for one of my shots for the Harley Quinn looking character. I'm saving her finger animations later after I finish the 8 other shots before getting started on their finger animations as well.
I've also been studying Johnaton C's video on Motionbuilder on his Youtube Channel for tips and ease of use for the complexity of the hand animations. There is surprisingly not many spots to learn more about Mobu.
01/04/2023
Happy New Years!
This year, I'm trying to complete a few projects using my motive to motionbuilder to Unreal Engine workflow. In order to separate my independent work from my college volunteering, I created a new page to keep track of my updates to the public.
Today, I worked on my Joker 2 Sequel PreVisualization project. I already have a storyboard and planned out the timing, all I have to do is digitize my storyboard and post it here.
I worked in Optitrack Motive, filled in the gaps, cleaned the animation, smoothed out where needed and exported my data. I then gathered my assets to create my scene within Unreal Engine.
Before I can proceed to Unreal, I have to rig my character models and characterize them in Mobu. Here is a small list of them below.
One issue I had with some of the skeletons, was that they had less than stellar skeletons and painted weights. In order to save time on fixing them and cleaning the weights, I imported them into Maya, unbinded the joints, and exported them as FBX to Mixamo. I did this because Mixamo has an Auto-Rigger feature, so I imported them there and exported them out with that skeleton. It was a quick and painless process.
After fixing the skeletons on some of the models, I imported them into Mobu, assigned skeletons to joints, and characterized all the models. After them, I characterized all my animation files to be ready to crop the animation times, retarget them to the characterized models and counter-animated them on layers to add finger data.
Faceware Project:
Troubleshooting 5/15/2023
I realized that when I retargeted the mouth params, the jaw control only had two frames. I checked my character creation file (CCF), looked in my mouth group and didn't find the jaw controls. I figured I could add the jaw control, save, and then reopen the performance job with the new file and it should update. I did that and it would still load properly.
However, the issue came when I noticed a prompt show up before the prompt about the missing expression set. The prompt read something along the lines of the default values are different. So I tried to Get Auto Poses and the mouth had an issue with moving the mouth control to the middle of the nose causing the Resident Evil 4 meme face. I deleted the key frames, but the retargeted animations were still baked on. I opened the graph editor and deleted the keys to reset everything, the issue still occurred after hitting Get Autopose. I opened the Channel box and saw that the values were differing than normal. I opened the CCF XML file and reset the defaulted values on jaw control. So far that seemed to fix everything when I Get Autoposes.
5/14/2023
Started two new projects with my face after testing my initial run. I utilized the LiveLink UE App and took multiple takes, I found three suitable ones continued with two of them in Faceware Analyzer (LiveLink_Slate65 and LiveLink_Slate70). I started with take 70 and chose it for its emotion in the dialogue.
I realized that it lacked eye movement, so I did a new take with my take 65 from LiveLink. I cleaned those two up for variety. I used @Jameshoyles on IG for his acting skills and variations on emotions between takes as reference.
I'll bring these over to the prior maya folder that I was working on for organization purposes.
5/15/2023
I'm already seeing issues with this project on the 70 Take. The model I'm using is rather hard to use with my likeness, that being of my lips are rather plump and juicy so it makes it a challenge to accurately form the words I need, and the retargeting is having issues with.
Another thing I'm seeing is the audio not matching up when I bring it into Maya from the Analyzer FWR file. When I playblast, I'm seeing some lagging it my video in relation to the audio. I'll just have to bite the bullet on it I guess. Another issue is the camera shake from my MOV, I should've gotten a stand or a headcam for better stability. I'm solving this issue with the smoothing in Retargeter.
5/23/2023
Its been a busy few day since last time and had to visit some family for my grandmother. I have time to try to complete my slate65 Take. I didn't complete the mouth on this one yet. I completed it as best I could, but there is some issues with the face tracking to mine. The lips do not match well to mine as mine as fuller. As well as I try to sound off words in a slurring motion. I have applied a filter on it using the one provided by Faceware, but that could only go so far until it starts to destroy the motion data I've been retargeting. I started to experiment with the Buttersworth Filter and selected what parts I wanted to smooth a bit more, then selectively deleted clear incorrect keyframes to match the face more.
Comments
Post a Comment