Motion Capture, Motion Builder and Me...

24 hours in the life of a Motion Capture Newbie...
This weekend I was determined to crack the secrets of Motion Capture in Motion Builder....and 24 hours (with only 3 hours sleep) later.... i've done something? SO where to start...
The T Pose
Chris said this would be the trickiest bit, making sure everything was line, all the points were correctly labelled etc, and after an hour I finally named to 'bind' a semi successful T-Pose with my data and the MB actor. As expected (but was really hoping not to have) there were a couple of issues, mainly the head spinning and the torso jerking rudely. I was also seeing a few 'stray' data cube point things

Rude Head

Stray data cube thing hiding in the Optical sphere thing

What then ensued was a glorious 4 hours of cookie eating and feverishly attempting to find how to fix these things, including re-reading the data, recreating the T-Pose (many a time) and All to no avail!
And in typical me using new software fashion and learning everything after hours of getting it wrong it clicked that the head was only jerking like that cause the data points were suddenly moving to completely different positions (Front Head had switched to the back etc) which I hadn't been able to spot (all the cubes look the bloody same). I knew MB had its ow equivalent of a Graph Editor like Maya and and it pretty much works exactly the same and I was able to tweak the affected translate joints to FINALLY get the head and torso to stay in place. HUZZAH.

HELLO T-POSERRR

Creating the Market Set ready to import onto new Actors for my dance data

This then lead me to the 'stray cube', after realising that these cubes names were pretty important... oops... I took the time to investigate said stray cubie and deduce that it had strayed away from its origin point of the ankle which I was able to correct with the Rigid Bodies feature. 
Rigid Bodies
My lord I love this feature... if you have data points that become unreadable or start to stray a bi too much during your sequence, you can create a rigid body between data points which then creates a kinda of central point for the points all stay around... not good at explaining things, but it kind of acts as a triangluation for the other points. e.g. You can create a rigid body for the torso, to make sure the sternum, clavicle, C7 and right back points stay as part of the upper torso.
In this feverish search to figure out more about this (Chris has run through it briefly in our meet-up) I also finally found some really useful tutorials that do actually address what i've been looking for as a beginner... it's funny how you always find these things when you're looking for a different piece of information smh.

It has been VERY flipping useful!! I've been having quite a bit of pooping in the torso points and the T10 in the lower back.

RIGID BODIES AND THINGS

Naming Conventions

After many an hour of Dawson's Creek (and proud) a dark cloud of data error began to loom.

SO after my T-Pose I started attempting to import the T-Pose marker set over to new actors and aligning these with the dance data... and thats when new problems started. They were over okish, but then the arms were getting all twisted up funny, and I realised that some of the data names were incorrect... the whole upper half of the body had switched sides (right side data was marked as left) and I had to spend some time figuring out how to clean these up as this would impact all my dance stuff.


But once I sorted that all out normal business resumed! Bloody hell I learn a lot from all these problems.

Not gonna lie, i'm a massive fan of this process, data is fun. ack.

Although, in figuring this out I still couldn't work out why the arms were twisting wrong - I was more than ready to fix this all in Maya, but theennn Chris suggested that I double check that the points for Wrist A and B were in the right place.... and obviously they were now. HA. Arms are now fixed!


Character Transfer

All dance FBX files have been set up (12 in total) and i've been doing a little bit of clean up - and re-setting up rigid bodies and checking for errors. The rest will probably be tweaked towards the end in MB or in Maya, as my main issues based on the actor, appear to be the mesh penetrating itself and a bit of elbow popping.

I'm now at this glorious stage and it has been less kinda. I've had to rename the joints of my model as per MB's naming conventions so the character control can line up...

Naming convention example

I've been semi successful, but when it comes to them transferring the actions to that of the relevant actor the rig is moving but my model isn't. Woe is me...

I'll crack it. If not tonight then i'm meeting up with Chris again this week for the last bit of our tutorial to then get my files back into Maya for extra crazy times...

________________________________________

In other art life related new...

I have become semi- Tumblr famous over night....

A quick Orange is the New Black bedtime sketch has landed me nearly 9000 reblogs on Tumblr (6000 when i first saw it) AND featured as one of Tumblrs top photos...

Now... whilst i'm no stranger to these types of numbers for the bands I worked with for my last job, this is DEFINITELY new for anything i've done artwise... O_O