MOCAP for DAZ - How would you make this work?
SasquatchIsCool
Posts: 251
Hi ya'll
I was hoping you could please help. Recently a company named Radical has mocap by subscription.
https://getrad.co/question-cat/results-using-radicals-mocap-data/
It looks very promising but was wondering how you could get this to work with DAZ 3d figures.
The quick answer is that if you use a fairly conventional animation rig, you can use RADiCAL. That includes all standard animation rigs you could use in Unity, Unreal, Blender, Maya, 3DsMax, MotionBuilder, Cinema4D, and many others.
And they also said
I am not familiar with the rigs used with DAZ characters, but I'll look into it, if only just out of interest. What is the standard rig for DAZ characters?
I really don't know the answer to any of this. Can you help? Also if you know of a work around or how to bring their data into DAZ that would be awesome. Here is an FBX hey shared.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I'd be interested in this also. I suppose they could just d/l DS and check out the rig for themselves since it's free, might be a decent customer base if they could get it working.
How do you find that? I don't know how to answer the quetion and they are not going to look for me. I was wondering if somene here knew that information. Cause if we get this working...we are doing some DAZ movies with UNREAL as the renderer. )
This question, again :)
Unfortunately, G8 rigs are anything but standard. They animate beautifully, but the price you pay is the extra step it takes to get mocap data on to them. There are a few ways to do it, but I am only very familiar with two of them: Maya and Motionbuilder. If you live in a country with the Indy program, you can get Maya for $249 per year. Maya will be able to retarget ANYTHING to your satisfaction.
The other options are apparently iClone and the Daz Importer's retargeting tool.
There has to be another way. I'm surprised DAZ hasn't looked into this. The creators of the software says it works well with Mixamo. There has to be a retargeting with Mixamo.
DAZ doesn't animate well then because if it cannot accept industry standard mocap and mocap is the best way to do animation in DAZ then that is really broken.
Sorry...just trying to think through the process. Maya ain't an option. They are the devil and evil. Would never use their garbage programs on principal. They stole Motionbuilder and made it way more expensive but added nothing to it. Devil.
How do you get this info? "What is the standard rig for DAZ characters? "
If there's another way, I really want to know what it is.
G8s animate extremely well because they have lots of spine bones, and twist bones in the arms and legs so that the skinning can be very accurately done. It shows. But the cost is that most canned retargeting solutions can't grok the skeleton. It's not broken, that is just how math works. By your standard, then EVERYTHING is broken because *any* actor skeleton will start to exhibit bad reach and foot sliding unless it is applied to an identical user skeleton.
I got this info from wasting a lot of time and money, trying everything. No one dislikes Autodesk more than me, but I cannot deny that MoBu and Maya are the best applications for this, by a wide margin. As soon as there is another option that works as well but costs twice as much, I'll be saving my pennies.
The "standard rig for Daz characters" must be referring to the names and hierarchy of bones in a G8, which don't change under morphing. But what is curious is that even if the rig's bone names an relationships match, the mocap is going to go janky as soon as it is applied to a character with the same rig, but different proportions. Making that look right is not trivial, and that's why we are stuck with Maya/Motionbuilder. Trust me, it's not because I like it, but because it's the only thing that works for whatever you throw at it. It just works.
But if you are dead set against Autodesk, I applaud you and you could perform a service for all of us :) and investigate the Daz Importer's retargeting tool, and see what it can do, and try iClone as well. I'm surprised @WendyLuvsCatz or @wolf359 haven't chimed in, I believe they both know their ways around iClone. Wolf may use just G1/G2, though.
But I'm in agreement... if there is one single functionality I could have in Daz Studio, it'd be the ability to retarget arbitrary actor skeletons to arbitrary G8 user skeletons in Daz Studio.
I am only on iC6 and do not own their Mocap plugin or a Kinect but yes retargetting in 3D exchange I use Genesis 1 to export BVH for DAZ studio not 3 or 8
Genesis 1 poses and animations saved work pretty well on 3 (and 8 with pose control adjustments 6 degrees in legs, 45 degrees up arms) genesis 1 aniblocks do not
Yeah I guess I'll keep looking. Maybe someone will have a solution.
I know MixaMojo is coming out and it retargets Mixamo animations to DAZ.
I haven't played with Mixamo much cause to me it is just a canned Mocap where you rig characters body only and so useless for most things. IDK maybe I'm wrong.
if you are using other software than DAZ studio and model your own figures it is actually awesome
I can rig and animate my crappy Zbrush sculpts and render them in Carrara
DAZ studio just lacks a robust FBX importer which accounts for most of the issues using not DAZ stuff
Sadness.
I hope DAZ can get on something like this and even work with RADICAL. How do folks use things like ROKOKO and other MOCAP solutions with DAZ without a 3rd party system like MAYA?
They don't :)
On a side note. I did this over 10 years ago. Used a mocap system...danced around and simply uploaded the BVH to a Michael 3 character.
I can't believe we have more technology but now is harder than ever before to get these things working together.
who are those 51 crapheads who disliked it?
People who have never created anything in their lives.
I think Mixamo still works with Genesis - why not to stick with it.
Cool video, SasquatchIsCool.
Probably mad cause the title. :) I'm okay with it. It was just a test.
You need a work around for Mixamo as well. Mixamo is just a canned animation. I want to capture performances of actors for a series I'm working on.
Radical is cool cause I can even get actors to simply record themselves performing as the character and the AI will capture it.
Mixamo is a canned response. I'd proably use it for things I can't get done in real life like flips and such. :)
If you can get the animations into Studio on either V4 or Genesis 2, there are animation converters to Genesis 3. There shouldn't be TOO much problem moving them to Genesis 8.
Gus
is this true? I have only been able to find single pose converters to G3/G8, is there an actual animation converter script to G3F/M?
Oh man, this is HUGE. The part on retargeting starts at 11:18.
Houdini takes on Character Animation
This could actually be a Motionbuilder replacement. And Houdini Apprentice is FREE.
This doesn't need two overlapping threads, I am locking this one and leaving the longer one https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/415001/mocap-translator-what-do-you-think-any-coders-around/p1