Final Video

Putting it all together

An important part of After Effects is knowing how to render the footage. For the previous examples I've used quicktime - compression H264, which is producing reasonably sized files (around 100mb).



I felt the colours were a bit dull and the walking seems boring and doesn't link into the flies very well. The particles don't look too dominant since I changed the lightness but one can see its bounding box when it rises.

For the next render I used Quicktime - JPEG 2000 with 'millions of colours', the colour is much brighter but the file is now 350MB. I think the darker tone works better on the transition, but the particles move too suddenly.

I used Quicktime - MPEG4 for my 3rd render, I feel the man looks a bit lost in the colour change and should perhaps change darkness with the background. The flies should maybe already be moving to make the transition smoother. Finally the particle effect is still too fast because I'm moving its position, using opacity may work better. I rendered these changes but there is a problem with playback where he powersups and hits the fly; it jolts forward. This may be due to the compression.

I rendered it back in to H264 and the movement is back to how it should be but the colour definitely suffers. I rendered using DVT PAL and the colour was richer but the motion stutters on the power up.

Fly fight

I had only rendered this as a preview (earlier post), and didn't add the lower half constraints. So I added the IK, track to, and limit rot constraints for hips, upper and lower legs, feet and toes. I had to rotate the foot bones in edit mode like before so that they touched the ground.

I should avoid making the sequence too complicated with a fly being 'dissolved' on every punch attack, so should base it on the previous version; with a fly dodging a punch but getting hit on the next punch. I was really pleased with my previous version of this and like the way the flies take it in turns,1 as if they are avenging their 'friends'. On the final punch I will have the fly drop like before and particles splurge out drifting up to the sky to signify 'the end'.

I imported one more fly and got it to interact with the character by knocking into him and dodging the punches, when it does get hit I used the explode modifier that I used for the other flies, and keyframed loc rot for it dropping down.



The final step was to create the particle effect of mist/end of flies rising up from the floor into the sky. It was frustrating that to get Blender to record the particles I had to play from frame 1, my sequence took at least 3 minutes to get to the final few frames which was what I needed to analyse. I couldn't do this again as it would have taken too long so I opened a new window and looked at what the settings did, I would have to scale up lots because my mocap scenes are so large in the Blender world.

Once I'd found settings I was pleased with I used them in my fly battle scene I put the orange cube, which I used for the particles, at the beginning of the timeline (quicker to see results). I used 40 acc z which made the particles reach the top of the camera but moved a bit fast, 20 didn't reach top and when it fades out (1700 - 1800 last frame) its life of 50 means it travels away for 50 frames which makes it look like the flies drift out of the scene.

The particles would fly up when I put it at the beginning of the scene (1-100) but when I tried it anywhere else on the timeline the particles would not go above the solid shape. I would have to add them separately in After Effects and hope it gave the same effect.

This is when it works at the beginning of the scene, but I feel it moves a bit too fast. By having it on a separate layer I can decide on the speed using the time mapping tool.

Sequence in After Effects

I imported my files into After Effects and organised them in the sequential order.

walk - I gave this a fade out to soften the change in video

fly movement - I had this fade in, making the two videos cross over

attack - I didn't need to add anything as the fly moving into the camera was a transition in itself

explosion - I alternated between red and yellow solid colours to show something was happening to the character and scene, it was a very simple technique but I think shows enough about what is going on. I used an ellipse to look like a bolt going thru the camera and had it fade in using the alpha.

rise - the yellow fades out to begin the rise clip, I had it change opacity while the action happened as this makes the transition smoother

The final video to add will be the attack which I'll need to develop further and then I can put it all together..

Fly transition

The flies follow the man walking and when the camera zooms over his shoulder I need to show what he's afraid of. I imported the flies in and decided to use symmetry and have a larger fly in the foreground. I began by keyframing loc rot from 1-100 with the flies moving towards the camera.

I used the same particle effect as the dropping fly from my fly punching scene, and thought it would look nice to have them leaving different coloured trails. This video was very mysterious and complemented the worry the character was feeling.

I added a cube and gave it particles, importantly increasing the acc z values, which made them move upwards. I played around with the amount, normal, and random values to try to create a fog effect.

I changed the colour but it would not be as simple to make the particles look thicker and bolder, for that I used a halo effect and used a low amount of hardness. I increased the acc z and also acc x making the particles spread out further and faster. Everytime I had to use ALT A to prepare the particle script and then render the animation to see the results.

I added 50 frames and moved the flies to go past the camera, this gave a 'proper' transition as before it was odd that the flies stopped. I was pleased with the largest fly moving into the camera making the scene completely black. I made the particles black but feel they are slightly too dark.

I removed the large fly's particle trail as it created an outline above the 'fog' which isn't what I want. I was very pleased with my final result (below) and its colours and brightness, it sets the mood I want, I really love the glint in the large fly's eyes as he goes under the spotlight lamp.

Attack with flies

I imported the fly and joined the mesh with its 'material', I had to go into edit mode and move the mesh to the centre point so it rotated correctly.

I then started keyframing loc rot with a fly spinning round the man, and getting knocked back, before flying in on frame 1065, there I will add an explosion in after effects and then link it into the powerup sequence.

I introduced two more flies which added a lot to the piece. I tried to make the flies interact with the character as much as possible without making the action complicated to follow. There are a number of visible mistakes with the sequence and I need to distract from this so I'll try some camera movement.

This video works well, with the important action captured but also mistakes aren't highlighted, I would need to add a transition for the powerup, so I zoomed the camera to the floor. In After Effects I'll make a bright spark or something and some colour change this should help link the powerup scene together.

Walking Modify

I was a bit worried that the body looked slightly different to the one in the other sequences. I think it is a problem with the shoulders, and I tried so many different places, and scales and I found this to be the best result. I also changed the camera lens to 20, and had it zoom over the man's shoulder for the fly transition.

Attack Video

I opened up my attack file, and modified the hips by rotating them to the same shape as the other armatures I've been working with, to get the best movement from the data. I connected the hips to the master bone and rotated that round 180 (to click to the tail).

I also modelled the face to be more worried by raising the eybrows and opening, stretching, and pulling down the mouth.

The elbow looks much better than before as it doesn't fold in so much, but the body shakes a little, and the body looks a little deformed. It's got to the point where I must make the best of what I have, so next I shall add the flies and put it into after effects.

Strong Walk

The file I downloaded was not only enormous in size, far bigger than the others which were huge anyway, but also had no imported armature, meaning I wouldn't be able to use the file.

I will play around with my previous files and try and get it all together and see what the sequence will look like.

Rise in After Effects

I imported the video in to After Effects and split into two (on two layers), I trimmed the parts I wanted using ALT [/] -- for beginning/end. I wanted to hold the video (last frame) with his hand fully up but I couldn't extend past the video's full length. I used CTRL ALT T - time mapping and pulled the created keyframe to where I wanted the sequence to be held: 2 seconds to generate power.

The next step was to add effects:

• white solid / simulation / star burst - like a continuous 'anime' style background effect
• colour / hue/saturation - I did this for the end of first video and start of second, so I had to make sure the colours matched up
• similuation / glow - this strengthened the character outline and made it more 'cartoony'

Finally I added a yellow solid to emphasise a godly power coming from above, I animated it to shoot down his body and grow, then fade out. For this I used keyframes: scale/position/alpha.

I wanted to add a transition so it moves into the punch scene smoothly,
added blue solid, block dissolve, worked backwards (completion 100% - 0%) and changed opacity of model.

The next part in the sequence will be the character fighting the flies, I will probably need to redo this, changing the model's bulk and colour.

Rise continued

The sequence is 2200 frames long, but I only really want one arm stretch, I will modify the current 120fps to something much slower so when I bring it across into After Effects the sequence is long enough to make it look like a power up.

I scaled down the keyframes in the NLA editor and displayed all of the motions quickly (due to render times etc.) I think the second motion is best, with the arm central.

I scaled the keyframes back up (to about twice the original length) and cut it to the motion I needed. This video was using 60fps, but I felt it was a little too slow, the one below is a better speed at 120fps.

Rise

I followed through the same steps, using the constraints from the rise.c3d file. There is a real issue with the armature because again the bottom sticks out strangely. In this video I lifted the body up but this affected the head.

I went into edit mode and altered the hips to the same position, the most important difference was making the hips parented by master, before they were children of spine1, I also connected them. It took some tweaking and I had to move spine1 down in pose mode:

The overall shape is much better, but there are still issues with it, the arm bends in and doesn't seem to follow the empties correctly.

I played around with the top half of the armature, getting the shoulders, arms and hands, scaled and positioned similarly to the imported armature. I had a lot to tidy up with weight painting and making sure things lined up etc. I also changed the left hand to have an influence of 0.5 which stopped it sticking out so far. The right arm did pass through the body partially but the overall movement is much better.

Attacked

I changed the spine of my armature to just a spine and chest (like the imported armature) but had to redo the weight painting of the chest because when I deleted the spine bones the weighted body was also lost.

I continued applying constraints but found problems with the hands; they would snap against the wrists and just look deformed, as well as rotating by its own accord. I altered the position and scale of the arm bones, and even deleted the other 2 parts to the hand but found the best solution was to deselect the use tail option and the followed the lower arm movement, which looked fine.

I again had problems with the position of the armature's hip and shoulder bones, and for some time I changed the position of the spine and chest moving the neck and head positions.

I believe in this video the overall balance looks better but there are still so many things to adjust, with the hand going through the head, and slight position problems.

Importantly though, I discovered a way to see more of the sequence through the camera, I changed the camera lens setting from 35 to 20. There were still parts that disappeared but it meant I didn't have to keep keyframing the camera movement and sacrifice seeing parts of movement.

I can use this to show more of the walking and other things I needed to zoom out for.

Walking

I imported the walking.c3d file and found I could not scale down the empties which were far too big for the camera; meaning they would appear invisible in the camera view when they went to certain positions. You can also see from the image (left) that the armature shape is quite different to mine. Because the hips and shoulders are in such different positions I was worried it would greatly affect the sequence.

I began copying across the constraints, the master bone used two copy locations, following the left (influence 1.0) and right (inf 0.5) hip empties, this gave a better movement than if only one empty was being followed, like before when I'd followed the spine bone.

Copy Constraints Technique:
I compared how the body moved if it was following the hips or spine. Rather than remove all the constraints and add them manually there is a technique to copy across already created constraints, this is very useful for finger bones.

• Select the empty constrainted bone
• Shift select the bone with constraints
• CTRL C
• Choose all constraints

The positions and movements were looking ok but the hips were too high (because of the difference in armature) but I found for some of the bones I could move them up. For instance moving spine1 up immediately gave the model a more balanced and 'realistic' shape, I also changed the position of the shoulders.

Doing the drastic movement in the spine meant that his head was affected (it was pulled down into the body). The imported armature was not straight like mine, so I modified my armature in edit mode moving and rotating the head and neck bones, and the problem was corrected. I did the same for the feet rotating them to a 120 degree angle.

In the sequence the character turns around but for some reason the body doesn't turn with him. I obviously can't use this in my footage so I will only record the animation up to this point.

Because of the problems with the camera I couldn't fit the whole character in view so I chose to show his legs moving and the camera coming up towards his face, I also had to move the camera back with him. The camera had to be close to the model for it to show any footage which limited what I could do.

I thought it was a nice idea to make the character look nervous as he was slowing down anyway; so I got the eyes to move to behind him, and the camera to zoom to what could be there (angry flies), I'm thinking of adding in an environment behind him and an eery particle effect following him, which I'll create once I have all the different motion capture files working.

Sequence Idea

After trudging through lots and lots of mocap files I've found some suitable .c3d files that I could convert into the similar sequence I wanted to create.

• Walk straight - man walks forwards, and slightly turns
• Avoid attack - man seems to be being attacked by little things (flies) and bends down
• Rise - this isn't really the sort of thing I'd hoped for, but if I half the frame rate and then convert the colours etc. in After effects it may work.
• Kill flies - my previous animation
• Strong walk - as the man will be a 'power ranger' a different walk could look good.

I'll convert my armature to all of these separately and when I'm pleased with each result I'll put them together in movie maker. I'll have to do a lot of work in Adobe After Effects but I do have a sequence to work with now, providing I can get everything working...

Adding more flies

I needed to add more flies, so I used the duplicate tool. I found that the animation was carried over to the new object (they were still linked), so when I moved the new one and keyframed it, the other would copy. I found the soloution was to export the fly as an object (only selected). I then imported it straight back in and the keyframes were clear.

I keyframed the fly out of view 1 frame before I wanted it to appear, and then had it suddenly jump into position. Because the movement was so fast it gives the same effect as it would if the object appeared at that frame - which isn't possible in Blender. I made the fly move up towards the man using keyframes - location rotation and then added a particle effect to the fly. I played with the settings, similarly to the previous effect (mother fly orange), but added an explode modifier, this made the object explode and worked with the particle settings. I had to enable emitter in render levels to display the fly in the animation, this was because particles are often used to show something over the top of an already existing object.

I introduced another fly, again appearing and coming 'out' of the mother, I used the same effects and made the animation more 'exciting' by having the flies interact with each other. To keep the fly in view when it rotated I would sometimes have to add keyframes and bring it slightly into view as it was important to always see the action.

I also made the eyes follow the fly, where as before it was only focusing on what the arm was hitting. It was starting to look like a nice little sequence, but I wanted to improve on a few things...

I added a particle effect to the mother fly, so that it seemed to dissolve and that the new flies were taking her place. I tweaked the key framing for the second fly, and also rotated it to make it seemed like the fly was trying to get away. Little touches like this can go to 'improve' the animation so much.

The next thing will be to find some more mocap examples to get my sequence and start bringing it all together.

The man and the fly

I created a fly to use in a similar sequence to what I'd planned. I started with a cube, used sub surf, and made it a longer wider shape. I tweaked some of the colour settings, making it a dark grey colour that didn't reflect the light. Next I made holes for the eyes and added a UV sphere and subdivided to make it look like fly's eyes. I used a mirror modifier to make sure they were evenly between the mesh. I used an orange colour and enabled emit to make it brighter. Finally I created wings using a plane and made them transparent with the alpha and ray transparent button. I also changed the man to be purple.

I had forgotten that something with a particle effect is not shown in the camera by default, this is why you can't see the fly moving around and the movie just displays a sudden orange particle effect. I spent a long time getting a cube to move at the right point from the top (out of view) to where the man punched and then display a particle effect. There was no need for this because the cube is not seen because of the particle effect. I would have to put particles on separate objects as I needed the fly to be displayed.

To get the particles I had to set a number of values:

• its life - how long it displays the particles
• start and end frames
• give it random and even settings
• change the normal and random values
• I also needed to make the object orange to make the particles that colour, I first did it white and you couldn't see the effect.

It was quite a rough example but it displays the techniques well.
Next I'll add more and more flies and continue using particle effects to make it look like the man is fighting his way through trouble.

Kick using empties

On another website I found a kick.bvh file. The empties moved about but the armature did not, so I would have to add constraints my armature. I used Limit rotation, track to, IK solver, but you can see the body still jumps about. I feel the file wasn't a very good one as the master bone which was copying location kept jumping about giving the body some strange movement.

Despite using a limit rotation, and experimenting with the most approptiate space to use (world/pose/local view), some of the bones would still flip out.

The overall movement is not bad, it's just the folding of the mesh etc. it's proving very difficult to make look right.

Using a .c3d file

I imported a .c3d file from CMU motion capture database at a 120 frame rate. It doesn't give you the option to import as armature or empties, but instead comes straight in to blender with both. The file itself came with constraints, so all I needed to do was replace the same constraints to my own armature.

My armature had 5 spine bones but the imported only had two, so I had to put the constraints on the middle and bottom spine part. Another difference between the two armatures was the master bone, which was much smaller and pointing in another direction, so I changed mine to meet this. I had to change the parents of the legs when I removed my previous knee and leg constraints, and also reparent and connect the hips to the master. The constraints for the master bone were different to how I had seen before, it had a copy location but for the two hip bones, not the spine.

When I had constrained the entire upper body with IK, track to, and limit rotation, I looked at the sequence. Because of the way the head follows the empties the face is pointing down and goes into the mesh. I played around with the IK settings, removing use tail and using a chain length 2. This put the head up straight and 'corrected' the movement.


Problems with the hands were that they pointed backwards when relaxed, they looked fine when doing a straight punch. I edited the proportions of bones in the arm and improved it, but in the end I decided it would look better if I took out the constraints so it followed along with lower and upper arm parents.

The sequence worked very well and there was some really nice subtle movement being demonstrated in the video. One thing I thought
would make the animation really sharp was to get the eyes to move together with the animation, as they were focused on the eye constraint the whole time. So using keyframes I moved the eye constraint to where the hand was when it 'punched'. I adjusted the camera to keep everything in view, and ended up with this final result:



There is a part in the sequence towards the end where the character violently nods his head down, this is a fault in the mocap file and could have been due to magnetic interference, but other than that I'm really pleased with how it looks. If I can find more karate examples I can piece together my final animation. I will also base my previous mocap attempts on the constraints used here.

The mocap file itself

I used fraps to show the actual empties as they're meant to move, with the brought in armature. As you can see the file itself isn't great, so for me to use it as the final animation piece is impossible. My video with the red character is very similar to the empties, so I've used the right constraints and made the most of the file.

I will have to grab bits of footage and tie it in to a similar sequence as I'd wanted, it's a real disappointment that I couldn't get the footage I wanted but half the battle is getting the footage into Blender, so I shall still be working hard.

Videos

There are still lots of issues with the legs they just don't seem to be the correct shape. I think I may have created problems by weight painting in two parts.

The movement overall isn't great with a lot of magnetic interference ruining some of the empties. I'm not sure what went wrong when my actor bent down, because the body leans to one side.

There are some nice movements that I wouldn't be able to create using keyframe animation but the process seems much more difficult, certainly with the files I've created.

To create a good looking final animated video I may need to use already existing motion capture files and add bits over the top. I don't have the time to create any more sequences using the mocap suit.

I shall see what results I get from my other mocap files, using the same armature.

But also continue to tweak this file to make it look as good as it can.

Improving the sequence

I experimented a bit more with the IK influence, and found by dropping the values (arms and hands) to 0.545 they seemed to sit away from the body more realistically. Full influence makes the bone lie across the empty, and with lower influence it means the bone moves away from the bone.

I realised that one of the feet did not follow the right path, it was as if it had flipped backwards.

I tried rotating the bone but this would affect it in the whole animation. I used keyframes but these had no effect, as I would have to edit it in the NLA editor but using this would force blender to crash as there was too much data for the computer to handle.

I removed any limit rotations and cleared rotation for all of the lower half.

This corrected the walking problem, but while looking closely at the feet, the right foot spins round when the body crouches down, it converts back, but I cannot do anything about it using the constraints I've used so far.

Overall though the movement is good.

Lower body

I had a fair bit of trouble weight painting the lower half, mainly because I didn't do the whole body at the same time, meaning the arms etc. were covering the vital areas. By moving and rotating the bones I did manage to paint as much of the area as I could see.

I extruded from the lower spine and as default the hips weren't parented this resulted in the legs not following the empties, so I made the hips the children of lower spine, and you can see the movement looks decent now.


There were some issues with the feet, they crossed over when walking, this will be because of magnetic interference when creating the sequence. I won't be able to correct this fully, but by rotating (RR) the feet out I made it look slightly better. I had to change the IK influence because when it was at 1.000 the feet pointed downwards like ballerinas.

Changing the chain length also 'shaped' the leg better, as well as adding a limit rotation. Adding and tweaking different modifiers did a lot to change the results of the sequence.

Upper body videos

I weight painted the lower half of the character to the lower spine, just to have the whole thing moving.

This is a slightly larger size without the lower body, as I thought it ruined the animation to have a static part moving. There are quite a few problems with the sequence, some I may not be able to rectify, but this displays that the movement is working.

• The arms sit up too much, affecting the walk
• The body and head don't rotate to where they should be focusing
• I do like the yawn at the end though.

Analysing the movement

I now had the upper body moving along with the empties, obviously it didn't look as accurate as it might have but it was beginning to look like the sequence that I'd recorded.

The head seemed to have a mind of its own; swinging around as it pleased, so I added a limit rotation in the x and z coordinates. 'World space' seemed to look up too high so I used 'local space.' This stopped the head spinning and it seemed to 'attach' to body better.

Next I had to consider whether to use an IK or track to constraint. The former seemed to more accurately place the mesh, so I replaced all the track to's with IK's. I was quite pleased with how the overall shape of the chracter was looking, but the arms seemed to cling to the sides so I experimented again with what constraints were needed.

Upper body armature

I tweaked the putty character I had created months ago and began building the upper body armature, making it as similar to the 'imported mocap armature' as possible.

I weight painted the mesh, ignoring the lower body, and started renaming the empties and bones. I discovered that where I'd thought there was only one mid point empty there were in fact 3, roughly placed alongside each other. They each display different movements when the animation gets further in.

I used 3 constraints for the mid spine which I'd use to follow the empties: the copy location which made the bone 'stick' to the chosen empty; IK solver which seems to help generally in mocap to position/rotate parts; and copy rotation making the armature position towards the empty.

For the 'less important' bones - lower, upper arms, hands I used a track to constraint.

Modelling character alongside armature

If I want to avoid the problems I came across before I could try to model a character to work with the mocap armature. I started with a cube, and just extruded, this of course is a very simple version but takes shape when I set smooth and add in subsurf modifier.

I tested what would happen if I weight painted, so I added the armature modifier and chose one of the arm bones and weight painted, as you can see it jumped up away from the armature, moving towards an invisible point again... I weight painted the head as well to see if it made a difference. It didn't appear to...

Looking at the tutorial I had forgotten to move the armature modifier up (but below the mirror as it affected the middle - because it wasn't finished), I then weight painted with clicks, as opposed to dragging the brush, and it seemed to work more systematically, getting all vertices.



Once again the problems occurred when the mesh started moving, with various points flying about the screen. It seems the only way I'll be able to use my own character and armature will be to make it follow the empties

Imported Armature and Bones

I imported the final sequence as an armature and in the display options I showed names, this will help to know what bones are moving. I need to get my mesh's armature to be a similar shape.

I imported the empties as well to see the correlation between bones and empties. There are 21, with the hand bases and feet bases seeming to do nothing (no keyframes)

For some reason it always seems to extend the length of the sequence when I import it into Blender, the sequence was 2.5 minutes long, whereas realistically it was no longer than 30 seconds. Changing the frames/second would not work because there was a maximum of 120fps. So I had to scale down the sequence using the NLA editor, this forced the Blender program to be INCREDIBLY slow and I had to wait up to 20 seconds after every click, button press. Being patient though stopped it crashing, and I scaled the sequence down to 20% - it now lasts 750 frames/30 seconds, which is far more sensible length! As soon as I took the NLA editor off Blender ran smoothly again.

Next I'll need to base my armature/mesh on to the imported one, and get the empties to follow...

Getting somewhere

I kept changing what bones point at what empties, because the mocap system armature we used has a different number of leg bones, it's really a case of seeing what works best.

I finally got the armature to follow the empties, it wasn't working because I hadn't put the right constraint in. I needed a copy location. It was now following, obviously I need to tidy up the position, rotation, and tracking of the bones, but now I'm getting somewhere.

I looked at an example of a rigged mocap sequence, it wasn't the same armature/bone ratio but just by looking at the constraints I know what is needed. Like the copy location!

Twisted

I removed the 'track to' constraints and added IK solvers instead, to see what they did.

It seems to shape the body far better, but as you can see so many of the bones are twisting round. A limit rotation may be needed, but it is still not 'sticking' to the body.

Constraints on empties

Rather than weight painting my model to the armature I'm trying to use the empties with constraints.

I imported in the same 'walk.bvh' file as empties this time, and deleted the constraints I already had. (knees, eyes, legs, but kept the master), I then had to change some of the parenting to make sure it all still matched up (toe.l - foot.l - lower leg.l and for the right side).

The empties start in the middle of blender on frame 1 but when you move on in the timeline it jumps to a different place and plays the sequence from here. Then using the 'track to' constraint I made the bones in my already made armature follow the relevant empty. It made the bones jump about into an odd shape, but when they move along the timeline one can see they are doing something.

I added in some IK solvers, to see what else would happen and it seems to move the bones slightly, they are still not attaching to the empties but really pointing, I manually moved the mesh to the empties and it seemed to become more of a body shape but as soon as the empties moved away the armature and mesh seemed to fall off it. It's not following properly...

More Problems

I did manage to change the arm, but it was quite a tedious job, having to rotate the arm vertices separately. It does improve the look of the character but because of the other problems I was having it didn't seem to matter too much.

Rigging to a .bvh file (cont)

In the armature's edit mode I shaped the bones to work with the model. Surprisingly when weight painting it didn't flip out to the side, so I carried on getting all the bones to fix to the mesh the model is not created for this armature so it wouldn't fit perfectly (especially the spine as it is only one bone, four less, then what I used in my character's previous armature).

I then tested the sequence and the armature did move, but not in the way I had expected...



Firstly the arms are out at the sides - I had moved the armature into this shape but when the sequence was created the arms were by the side. I will try to change the arm shape in edit mode to see if that makes a difference.

The movement seems backwards, and very bouncy. But of course this is the first attempt so I can improve on this. I thought perhaps the armature was backwards, but upon rotating the armature, this happened:

It was like the character was melting, it was obviously something to do with where the 'mesh' label is, as it points towards that.

// It's not possible to change the frame rate on an imported mocap file, because we set that when recording.
I had to select the frames and scale down by half. This made it 450 frames, rather than 900.

Rigging to a .bvh file

When importing .bvh files they show the movement captured from the mocap, that's fine, but to get it to rig to a character is where the real challenge lies. Obviously I already have my mesh from the tutorial so I tried to use my previous 'walk' file.

I imported the file as an armature, and rotated it to stand alongside my already rigged character. I then scaled him down to get them to the same shape etc.

I changed the armature constraint to track to the new armature 'mocap_arm' and then weight painted one of the bones and this happened! It does move when I run it along the timeline, but it is placed completely wrong.


I then weight painted everything, just to check that it still formed the mesh's shape, which it did.

But of course it would not move as the motion did because it was all following the right upper arm. The black lined armature and eyes is what I used before, I've not rectified/removed this yet, which may be part of the problem?

I thought putting the armature into rest mode and changing the position and length of bones so I put the x mirror modifier on and it jumped out like this...?

Summary of Tutorial

I've learnt a lot from this tutorial, modelling a character from scratch, creating the armature, weight painting, and animating.

From here I can create the character I want (as a man, and as a 'power ranger') and get the motion capture sequence to make him move.

The next step will be to use the practice mocap sequence and see what happens...

CAT- More Facial Expressions

I found the narrow shape very difficult to make look right, perhaps because of the way I've made my model. I always thought I'd find difficulty with the way I've made the mouth. I then did a shape for the upper and lower eyelids closed respectively.

I closed the eyelids together, and combined the mouth open and narrow to create this yawn animation:

CAT - Facial Expressions

• add shape key
• with a 'basis'
• and a new shape key: open
• x-axis mirror (perfect for this) a mirror modifier would delete weight painting etc.
• snap cursor to side of head, change anchor point to rotation
• rotated from side view
• manually moved/rotated to make open mouth shape
• next I made the wide shape
• I was able to mix them in the action editer, so I could have them working at the same time.

CAT - Animation

Summary

"We split the interface into an Action Editor and a Timeline window so we can access some animation tools. We created an action (a quick wave) by moving the bones and inserting keyframes in the Action Editor."

Summary

"We created a new Action and animated a walkcycle in the Action Editor. Next, we'll mix the "Wave" action and the "Walkcycle" action together."

walkcycle

• left arm goes with right leg, vice versa.
  
• the leading hand twists the top of spine towards it

// I used the copy pose buttons, flipping the cycle position every 10 seconds.

At first the pasting did not work, but after looking in transform properties (N) at the 'roll' properties and converting to 0 it seemed to work.

ALT A - Preview animation

CTRL PG UP/DOWN - the lower action overides what's above it in NLA editor

The arm sharply jumped up when doing the wave so I used the blend tool to make the movement flow smoothly.

In the above video the eyes wobble up and down, because the eye constraint doesnt move down with the body. I spent a lot of time adjusting this by making a new action, getting the head to move towards the wave as well, but adding in lots of keyframes following the movement. It was time consuming but is well worth it:

Summary
"We used the NLA Editor to convert the actions we made into NLA strips that can be easily manipulated in the NLA Editor."

Final Rig - Screenshots

CAT - Rigging - Do's and Dont's

• head: use trackball rotation (R-R) to swivel the head around.
• eyes: move this bone around to control what the eyes are looking at. Move this bone farther away from the face to correct cross-eyes.
• make each eye track either tip or root on the "eyes" bone. Doing this makes it much easier to correct the cross eyes, and give a more natural look. simply rotate the eyes bone 90 degrees, and adjust the "head/tail" setting in each eye's Object Panel (F7).
• neck and spine bones (except spine1): Rotate individually for subtle bending of the body, or use Auto IK on the head bone for extreme bending of the spine.
• arm bones: Turn on Auto IK and move the finger2 bones for broad sweeping motions of the arms.
• master: move and rotate this bone to manipulate the entire armature. For example, using the master bone is the only way to get the whole character off the ground in a jump.
• spine1: Move this bone to move the entire upper body while the feet stay put. Very useful for walkcycles.
• knee: these bones are not used very often and are primarily used to keep the IK constraints on the legs under control. But when you need to point the knees in a direction, use these bones.
• upper_leg and lower_leg: leave these bones alone. The leg bones and IK constraints do all the work.
• leg: These are the most versatile bones. Move the leg bones to move the entire leg.
• foot: leave this bone alone, it is rotated by rotating the leg bone.
• toe: Rotate these bones to bend at the toe.

CAT - Rigging - Adjustments

Summary

"We constructed the lower body armature, added IK constraints, and weight painted it. Next we'll tweak the rig to make it easier to control."
____________________________________________________

"In this section, we'll make some final adjustments to the rig to make it easier to control. Specifically, we'll add:

• a master bone so we can move the entire character at once.
• knee-lock targets so we can control where the knees point.
• an eye target bone so we can easily change which direction the eyes are looking."

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Tutorials/Animation/BSoD/Character_Animation/Final_rig_adjustments

Eye tracking: Z points up, Y points backwards, so -Y points towards eye the newly created eye bone.

USEFUL TIPS
SHIFT i - IK constraint

CAT - Weight Painting

Summary

"By weight painting, we told Blender which vertices to move when we moved the bones. The character finally moves! Next, we'll build the lower body armature and do some more weight painting."

CAT - Rigging

FK - forward kinematics, rotation and 'children' follow. IK - inverse kinematics, the 'parents' follow, AUTO IK - follows all the way back to original 'grandparent' - spine. Deselect con (edit mode) to break the chain to the spine at that point.

Add modifier - armature, making sure at top, ob name = name of armature.

USEFUL TIPS

SHIFT E - symmetrically extrude
CTRL TAB - pose mode (armature)
ALT R - clear rotation
ALT G - clear location

CAT - Materials and Lighting

Summary

"We've added a material to the body that had a texture on three different texture channels, and added two materials to the eyes. We had to rotate the eyes outward to make them look good for this character. Next, we'll rig the character with an armature (an armature is sort of like a skeleton) so we can animate it."

USEFUL TIPS
CTRL ALT NUMPAD-0 - snap camera to current view
SHIFT P - preview render (drag to area)

CAT - Mod - 6 Torso Legs and Feet

Summary

"We created the torso, legs, and feet in a series of extrudes and vertex movements."












Having finished creating the model I've learnt a number of infinitely useful techniques that I'll use in the future, certainly for character animation, and importantly for making the models I need for my 'power ranger' animation.