I wanted to make a walk cycle for Caruso so that he can walk around in the game engine. I took the data we recorded and plotted the animation to the BVH reference rig. To make Caruso move, all I had to do was set the "source" for Caruso's rig to the BVH rig and Caruso's rig would follow the same motions as the source rig.
After several hours of trying to make a walk cycle my limited knowledge and experience of Motionbuilder started to really show in my work. I'm sure there are some tools in the software that I'm not aware of but I'm cutting it so close with the deadline I think it would be best if I didn't waste any more time troubleshooting. Here's how far I got with it:
Testing out some of the other motions proved to be quite funny - we didn't realise how important it was to have a T-pose starting position so during one of the sessions with the mo-cap suit our actor kept forgetting to T-pose and in the end we scrapped the T-pose altogether. Now that I have done a lot of learning in Motionbuilder I finally know why we need a T-pose...this is the result of not having one:
The control Rig for Caruso has a T-pose stance and the motion data had an acute A-pose resulting in Caruso having raised arms for the duration of the motion. The faults don't stop there though, in my inexperience I have found I encountered quite a few mysterious errors that I'm not sure if it's a bug or something I have done wrong...sometimes all I have to do is re-do all the stages until I get to the re-targeting and it works again. Not really sure what happened here...but I re-did all the importing/characterising/rigging and it worked a second time.
Due to time constraints I posed the hands in a relaxed semi-clench...at least it looks more natural than straight fingers! This is where the IK controls on the rig really helped to save time as I have only ever used FK controls for fingers prior to this project.
It got to a point where I was really running out of time and I was encountering too many problems to spend time troubleshooting so as a last resort I decided to search the Internet for free mo-cap files that I suspected would already be cleaned up - at least I found a run and walk that were cycle-able and can use it temporarily for the build so Aleks (Experience Design) can do a last minute usertest.
As you can see they're not the best looking animations and I did try to edit them but my limited knowledge hindered me again (and my growing impatience) to prepare it for import into Unity I arranged the animations onto a single timeline in the Story window and plotted the animations on Caruso's skeleton:
A jump animation was needed for Caruso as it was a much used action in the game but I couldn't find any decent jump motions so I hand-keyed the animation...it's not my best animation work but I am suitably happy that this is another animation ready to use for the game build. I added this to the timeline along with the walk and run cycles.
Sadly, I have been plagued by many technical difficulties in the last few weeks that although it feels like I have done a lot of work, it looks like I have done barely any! I think if I can at least get a simple idle animation, one attack and one shooting animation then Caruso will be usable enough for the demo build.
