Motion Capture Week 9 - Motion Editing

In our lecture and lab, we were introduced to Motion Editing in Motion Builder. Motion Editing involved adjusting the movement of the characters so there was no mesh inter-penetration, adding animation to the fingers (as they didn't have any marker data) and ensuring that the feet remained flat on the floor. This was another tedious process, but entirely necessary for the realism of the CG characters.

ALSO I GOT THE TEXTURES BACK!! GREAT SUCCESS! Don't mind the scary demon eyes though...

I would start with the feet going through the floor. Originally, the character's feet wouldn't lay flat on the floor correctly as there is no solid surface to press against and prevent them dipping through. Motion Builder has a function that ensures the feet don't dip below a certain point using these small green and purple cube controllers.

It took me a while to figure out that the floor contact controllers were hidden inside the mesh because my rig's feet controllers were really tiny. This meant I had to find the cubes and resize and position them around the feet in order for the function to work. I'm pretty sure the issue could have been avoided by scaling up the rig's controllers earlier in Maya but I didn't know that at the time.

Next up was fixing the mesh inter-penetration issues. Most commonly the issue was present in the shoulders and the knees - especially so for the men. This was because the proportions of the male characters and Jasmine's body were very differently, and Jasmine's movements did not account for the extra width in the thighs. (It also meant that their walks and runs had a very feminine appearance :D).

Some fun mesh inter-penetration in the legs:

Here is the Jordan's shoulders in their raw unedited state (oh no so bad):

Compared to Jordan's shoulders after motion editing (oh wow so good):

Finally (my least favourite part!)... hand animation. I adjusted the individual fingers and keyframed them on separate animation layers so that the original mocap data remained untouched. This also allowed me to turn the animation on and off to see the difference, or to delete the layer altogether and start over. I analysed a lot of the reference footage of Jasmine from our Mocap Studio recording session to help me figure out how the fingers behaved in each movement.

The Before: (default position)

The After: (don't mind the wonky thumb oops)

When the mesh inter-penetration, foot-floor contact and hand animations were complete, the Motion Editing was finished and the file was finally ready for import back into Maya.