MoCap W7 24: Cortex and Motion Builder

After our recording session last week, I took the captured data and used the Cortex software to clean it up. This process was tedious, however I quite enjoy the monotony of it and working on something technically. You can view my Week 7 blog post 2023 where I go into depth on how Cortex works and my understanding of the clean up process. This semester I had 4 shots to clean versus last year's 5.

Here's a marker with a lot of inconsistencies in the data (little blocks of orange). The marker represents the back of the head on the right side.

Here's the same marker with the data cleaned. The 'V' symbols represent minor inconsistencies such as slight jittering. Then I did the cleaned the rest of the 54 markers on each shot until...

A beautiful sight.

With my cleaned data I exported the shots as .trcs and took them into Motion Builder for retargeting.

I had to scale up the head and neck a lot and rotate them forward to match the location of the head markers before assigning the opticals to a marker set. This caused some janky looking neck movements in certain areas but these can be tweaked out using animation layers.

With my data retargeted, the last thing I did for the week was create the control rig on my Autodesk character using Human IK in Maya.

Then I transferred my retargeted mocap data onto the control rig of the character in Motion Builder.

With the character resized accordingly, I could bake the data to the control rig.