Adding a Live Shadow to a scene is a simple process which can help ground a character without the need for an environment. The live shadow can be added to an existing scene to make renders a little more interesting or to a scene ready for editing or using during a live motion capture session to…
Archives for 2010
Creating an In-Place Looping Animation in MotionBuilder
This tutorial is a follow on from Creating a Looping Animation in MotionBuilder, showing you how to edit a traversing animation like a walk or run so that it loops on the spot There are two ways to do this in MotionBuilder: Using In Place Mode on the Control Rig Deleting Key Frames in the FCurve…
MotionBuilder Pipeline
In this motionbuilder tutorial I will take you through the processes involved in preparing and exporting your character into motionbuilder and then importing your lovingly crafted animation back on to your character. Because of the many different possible combination of plug-ins and software versions I will try to make this tutorial as generic as I…
Creating a Looping Animation In MotionBuilder
In this post I will take you through the processes required to create a walk cycle from motion capture data. I have provided an explanation and possible work flow suggestions at each stage of the process. Hopefully this will enable you to create not only a beautiful walk cycle, but also help you understand some…
How to Characterize your Character in MotionBuilder
In this tutorial you will learn how to successfully characterize your character in MotionBuilder. Before you can begin using the character animation features in MotionBuilder you need to Characterize your character. The process involves 3 main steps: 01 Put the Character in a T-Pose Aligning your character in the correct T-Pose (T-Stance) is the most important…
How to Map Optical Mocap using MotionBuilder Actor
In this tutorial I will show you how you can use MotionBuilder’s Actor asset to re-target optical motion capture data onto your character. Once the Actor is set up in this way it can be used to retarget optical data directly to your character either in real-time during a shoot for pre-viz purposes or after the…
Quick Start Guide to Motion Capture
In this post I hope to provide you with a very broad overview of the motion capture processes from beginning to end. I’ve tired to cover many of thing you will need to think about at each stage of the process in the order I usually approach a new project. Hopefully this will help you understand the work…
What is Motion Capture?
So what is Motion Capture, Performance Capture or Mocap? In it’s simplest form it is the recording of the motion of an object by a computer using a series of sensors. As a process it is the planning, recording and integration of that data – It’s the people in Lycra suits covered in shiny ping-pong…