creating animation : poseframes emptyframes
Community Forums/General Help/creating animation : poseframes emptyframes
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| Hello, :) Let's talk about creating animations for humanoid characters. Personally, i first capture my motion with a camera (from the front or from the back and from the side), and i make sure to make the motion related to an origine point and toward a specific direction. Then i watch the video and i extract the important poses (the "poseframes") and i also count the number of emptyframes between one poseframe and the next poseframe. This then allows me to recreate the poses in my animation software (fragmotion) and let xemptyframes between one poseframe and the next poseframe depending on the number of emptyframes in the video. This produces a convincing animation where the poses but also the speed of a transition between one pose and the next pose is taken into account. What do you think of this method ? I have also tried to capture my motion with a kinect camera and ipisoft in the past, this worked well but only for simple motions, for complex motions, the orientation of some joints/bones can sometimes be erroned, and then it is time consuming to correct manually because all frames are poseframe (there are no emptyframes), so there are many frames to modify, it can be a pain. If you sometimes create animations for humanoid characters, can you explain how you do it ? Thanks, |
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| Might be good idea. Do you have screen shots of your procedure? But if we're talking 3d, isn't this generally done using a blue screen cat suit with joint markers on it for the skeleton movement and then attach this animated skeleton to the model so one doesn't have to actually animate the model itself? Like this:  |
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| Your image shows the same method that ipisoft + kinect camera uses but the problem is that sometimes some joints/bones are not captured with the correct orientation and then you have to modify several frames manually which can take more work than to create the animation by using pose photos taken from a motion video as a guide. Btw, your image shows excactly why motion capture can be useless if not done appropriately (in this case, the humanoid is not positionned/does not move depending on an origine point, and is not oriented along a specific axis, so imagine if you have this walk animation in Blitz3d. Your pivot move forward, and your character starts his animation somewhere at back left and ends up somewhere at front right. Yeah very good... That's why most indie games (and even some big studios games) have bad animations or limited animations (in complexity). |
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| Hmm, didn't know about that one. Hence your different approach. |
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| I create the animation by hand by keyframing main poses in blender and relying on IK and interpolation. I cannot explain my wife to record my self on camera while scratching my back :-)   I think the more "stylized" the movement should get, the less motion capture you should do :-) Just recognized I missed to render the shoes. Before you are wondering: the walking render is done from a slightly tilted pov (to allow for more visual depth). Edit: I think my walking-cycle shows what RemiD was talking about: the figure itself is not changing hits place on the ground. This is really needed when exporting sprite sets (else you will have to eg. animate the render border in blender). If you intend to export your movement and use that in your 3d engine, things might benefit from a having the location getting adjusted too. bye Ron |
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| the figure itself is not changing hits place on the ground. If you use motion capture technology, even if the humanoid moves from a position to another, you can always reposition the root pivot of all poseframes to the origine, but only if the character moves along the same axis else it will look weird. |
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| I usually find quality .bvh files from somewhere (its what I've done in the past) and simply use those....good for fairly routine animations, not so good for less common ones. Poser/Daz usually has lots of these available. |
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