After all the trouble getting the rig to work I can finally start using the motion capture data and have been extremely excited about this for a long time! Unfortunately I have zero experience in using motion capture data and zero experience in using Autodesk Motionbuilder. Luckily Youtube is a great place to look for tutorial videos for most things and I have found some excellent tutorials from TheCGBro.
At first, I started by importing the "sword attack1" motion which was the first motion we recorded using Kingston University's inertial Animazoo motion capture suit. It took a little while to get used to the interface of Motionbuilder but after a lot of repetition [and troubleshooting] I got the hang of finding what I needed to find. The rig used for motion capture didn't use Motionbuilder's characterisation naming system for each bone so I needed to manually characterise the mo-cap rig (BVH reference) which is a tedious but necessary process.
After characterising I imported the rest of the motion bvh files and merged so I can access all the animations in the same fbx file. I assigned the Motionbuilder control rig the the BVH reference and baked the animations onto the rig ready for cleaning up the keyframes.
At first, I started by importing the "sword attack1" motion which was the first motion we recorded using Kingston University's inertial Animazoo motion capture suit. It took a little while to get used to the interface of Motionbuilder but after a lot of repetition [and troubleshooting] I got the hang of finding what I needed to find. The rig used for motion capture didn't use Motionbuilder's characterisation naming system for each bone so I needed to manually characterise the mo-cap rig (BVH reference) which is a tedious but necessary process.
After characterising I imported the rest of the motion bvh files and merged so I can access all the animations in the same fbx file. I assigned the Motionbuilder control rig the the BVH reference and baked the animations onto the rig ready for cleaning up the keyframes.
I started by attempting to clean up the sword attack 1 motion. Here's how it looks before cleanup:
I then ran the "key reducer" filter on the FCurves as there were full-body keyframes for pretty much every frame of the motion. The data was recorded at 60fps but luckily when baked to the control rig it reduces to 25fps (or whatever setting you choose, in my case it was 25fps) so already I have fewer frames to work with but it would be more practical to reduce the keys further to remove any jitters. It already looks quite good though even without running the key reducer.
Even with reduced frames the motion hasn't lost any integrity - this filter is a very useful tool!
Now that I can [quite] confidently run a quick clean-up of the motion data and bake it to a control rig I just need to attempt to get Caruso's mesh moving!
