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You can't just put on a Rokoko suit and start importing animations. You have to do a lot of retargeting...whereas in the old days you could do it quite easily. Here is my animation where I used Optirack..exported the BVH and within 1 hour had this all done.
This was Micheal 3. I did not post work, no retargeting....simply imported it onto the model.
Another good example of why you need to learn hand klkeyframing. I had to hand keyframe all these animals. They do make mocaps for them
click to play
It was an FBX file...oops didn't see the zip part
Almost completely done by hand keyframing . they do not make Mocaps for gymnastics either
Completely had to be done by hand keyframing.. they do make Mocaps for content like this in any software.
click to play
80% hand keyframed Because the nature of this type film there is no mocaps for these type scene in animation in any software.
This film won 2nd place in animation contest.
click to play Best viewed in 1080HD
I did not bother finnessing too much as you are uninterested in my method
it needs translation fixing, I did try a bit
but here is your mocap as a duf pose animation for Genesis 8
Wow, your are so fast, Wendy.
I have tried motion on Bridget 8 in iClone, but have not succeded with hip bone, yet.
One need to unzip the file, to see my efforts.
@Artini and @Sasquatchiscool
I did one frame advance in iClone and translated the figure, after a couple of seconds it maintains a level, then resaved it as an iMotion
I of course used Genesis 1hip not node or actor as that is the only way to get an accurate export and DAZ studio import
in DAZ studio you need to first click the bowtie rigging icon
select genesis 1 and move the red gizmo to the floor 0,0,0 rightclick memorise selected node
then load the bvh on the hip
I then did my 3 figure domino save G1 save pose, load G3 savepose, load G8 pose arms up 45° legs in -6° save pose
And yes you need the $600 USD Pipeline version of Iclone to export FBX ,Alembic or BVH out of Iclone,
I understand your desire to use the Iphone based Facemojo plugin for Daz studio and I certainly understand your desire to render in UE4 over IRay or the decrepid 3Delight in Daz studio.
What I do not understand is why you do not export your Daz figures to UE4 and use your mocap suit to retarget capture performances directly to them IN UE4 instead of waiting for a mocap parsing plugin for daz studio to be possibly developed someday.
you don't need an interactive license to export content for rendering in other software
only to make and redistribute 3D games
Unity / UE4 are pretty close (OK, so they will actually never finish but simply grow their work in those databases) to finalizing huge libraries of animations of cleaned up mocaps with handkeyed extensions in small places, all snipped up into small pieces such that they can be reassembled on the fly by their respective game engine's animation state machine according to your mouse/game I/O controller and path finding / behavioral AI for the AI NP characters. So it's essentially an animation database accessed though the animation statemachine via the game engine's statemachine and your game I/O controller.
People can then just create an animation using their game I/O controller(s), save it, edit it to be a unique personality with variations, if desired, and retarget for their animated movie. It'd be much cheaper and easier than mocap and you could use the actual character you intend to use in your animation in the game engine so weird shapes don't play a big role messing up the retargeting phrase. Face it, all bodies have range of motion limits on every joint so it's not as if doing yet another mocap is going to win you something hugely unique. Say that someone has a subset of mannerisms regardling 'talking with their hands' or facial expressions or their gait is unique (and since each of out bodies are unique so are our gaits) then you can still mocap and feed those mocaps to their animation system and assign statemachine values of when they'd get used via 'game play' and the I/O controller and then 'play it and save it'. It's a trade-off though, is your new mocap going to be unique enough to engage in the extra labor and expense of recording and feeding it to those animation state machine systems or not?
The easier, faster, and more accurate thing would be to learn to make animations using those animation state machines controlled by a game I/O controller and then edit them to be unique so that your character has some personality of it's own. That said though, I agree with Ivy, hand keyed animation wouid be most useful to learn to be able to edit animations via hand keying portions to change them a bit, but I split from agreeing with her that you'd only want to hand key animation or forget about mocap or animation statemachine databases in game engines. You actually preferrably want to use canned animation loops, whether they result from, mocap, a game engine's animation statemachine dB, or a prior created hand-keyed animation and then edit that animation to be unique in personality for how you define your character at hand. You needn't become Disney proficient at handkeying to create new animation or edit existing ones and can't, being they literally have dozens, if not hundreds of staff that do literally nothing else, but you need to get quick to getting 75% of the way there because getting that last 25% right and to your quality standards is going to take 90% of your animating time. There are lots of tutorials on YouTube for Blender and also on CGCookie for Blender. I know some of you have expensive 3D software on your home computers but personally I can only afford Blender. If you might think that modern Disney blows off mocap or animation statemachine databases you'd be wrong as they actually are pushing more and more to those things because the quality is better and smoother than any handkeying person could manage, they spice those up though by having people hand key some things, not much though. I mean look at the new Disney animations or many of your 35 or younger friends and notice many have these telltale expressions that you wonder where they learned them: I suspect from the actors of Disney Channel live actor situation comedies since the 90s but am not about to sit through a bunch of those to confirm it. Those live action actors, in turn, were probably taught to do those expessions on queue by the directors of those Disney shows. Literally every new Disney animation I've seen uses canned animations based on those and I know the animators must be retargetting with cleanup with little to no unique personality traits added to those animations.
Having looked at the earlier post by MadForKatz (sorry WendyLuvsKatz now (spelling)) of the developer that made an animation walk driver plugin for DAZ Studio it looks like they used some much simplified and smaller variant of that game engine concept that UE4/Unity has been developing and growing.
You're right, @cosmicdawnseries said he wrote it but someome else did most of the animation. He's even here trying to acquire yet another animator. I hope he finds one.
Thank you! That there might be other plugins in other places never even dawned on me. There's stuff all over the place!
OK really dumb question looking at the bone naming of that file.
Is that set in stone?
Can you in your capture software actually rename all the bones to match a DAZ figure?
and more worthy of our support, methinks.
--ms
There's something strange about the way G8s understand bone rotations that I couldn't figure out. What was supposed to be the "hard" part was easy and the easy part was what stopped me.
So, he said the same thing that everyone else says when you mention Genesis: "Never heard of it"
I did a DAZ iray render with a background while I slept last night
3 dancing girls
LOL.. I've been trying your method. :) I'm interested in whatever works but if it can go faster and easier I'm interested i nthat as well. :)
Mainly because the way FaceMojo works and mainly DAZ limitations...you cannot get that great looking ahimation over to UE4. Something about 1 level of subdivision.
How do you like the EVEE render in comparison to the UE4 realtime render?
Great work...now imagine what you can do with great MOCAP? Especially if you know how to dance. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8asOmYw90Xw
or imagine doing this in a few hours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQmZFZ5dXnU
I could have been doing mocap for years if I had the funds
but
one reason I never bought a Kinect and the iClone 5 plugin was I cannot dance
buying a suit and a dearer solution is never going to happen
Rather than mocap what I would want is one of those poseable art figures that map to a 3D rig, something that really never eventuated.
Googling I see "Stickybones" but that is still apparently fund project and lots of money being poured in, not the one I saw years ago on Youtube either.
Quma doll! I always wanted one of those. That would be awesome1
I have bought Kinect and iClone 5 plugin long time ago,
but the results were not so good, so I have used them not so much.
Maybe I need to try it with the newer computer.
I guess, you have saved a lot of money, not buying them.
Unreal engine has higher realtime quality overall from the Demos I have seen, however I prefer Blender for rendering my animated films because it is an actual Full 3DCC application that I use for my custom Daz clothing creation and has better Fluid & Smoke,particle,Rigid body dynamics than UE4.
Since you plan to render films in the slow brute force path tracer in Daz studio ,you may wish to invest in a pair of NVIDIA 2080's to get better render times although you will never approach the veiwport look dev or final render speed of EEVEE or UE4.
Something interesting in the Iclone domain, is that there are no kinect-based 'plugins' to their new mocap infrastructure. They have their older mocap plugins that use kinect, but the new Ic7 tools do not have any of the usual Kinect-based interfaces, only the iphone face mocap, which uses an Apple variant. I found this interesting and perhaps telling.
Ivy, if you are interested in playing a bit, the xbox 360 and xbox one Kinect devices have *really* dropped in price. xbox 360 kinect from gamestop for $20/$30 bucks? (xbox one kintects are probably still busting $100-ish - check ebay for better numbers). I think mjcasual has a basic script that can pull in very basic skeletons (check his pages for details) from a Kinect, and others have a variety of medium priced capture tools that might be transportable to DS. Poser 2014-dev might even have a kinect based mocap available for capture and pz2 import to DS. (?)
That said, I'm with wolf359 on the general roughness of the kinect results in general - at least with my experiments. Perhaps other have gotten better results (Joe Pinkleton (sp?)).
One of the reasons I'm moving my animation work to Ic7 is the new Curve Editor add-on has some mocap clean-up capabilities that I could only find in Motion Builder (not an option). I'll report back after I've played with it. Doing mocap cleanup manually isn't practical but can be done, and compares to manual keyframing in terms of time/effort. Mjcasual also has a keyframe decimator script that has the nice *side-effect* of smoothing mocap data, but it wasn't really designed for that and can be hit/miss (but it decimates frames wonderfully in general - as was its intention).
--ms