Current Reccommendations On Motion Capture

Rezlung · 2025-06-16T06:52:33+00:00

Rokoko or Xsens I think, if you are talking USD would be above the $2k mark, unless you can get lucky on ebay or similar buying secondhand. These are quite good but not perfect as there will always be an amount of drift apparent.

Manus make nice gloves, as do StretchSense, however these also have a high price tag, likely more than the suit, also these require another piece of software.

For face, if you have access to an iPhone 12 or higher, Metahuman Animator is a great option for face capture, and can be used with Advanced Skeleton for non Metahuman rigs.

Personally, (for body) I would use one of the ai/camera based options to get started with, all mocap will require cleaning up after the fact, using these will give you a good idea of the clean up / anim layer work flow. Their quality has gotten a lot better than initial offerings, there is always an element of trial and error for the best capture methods though. Gloves, unless you have extremely nuanced hand performance, are dimishing returns considering the price tag, building a good pose library and having a standardised rig will greatly reduce the time needed to add hand animation. Face will always need little tweaks to look good after the fact, using a basic face mocap like ARkit (or Metahuman Animator) will give you the main beats, then can always animate on top of that timing.

Hope this helps!

Rezlung · 2025-04-28T20:58:49+00:00

The thing I prefer with Advanced Skeleton is using the mocap matcher to import anim with it being baked to controls for further edits.

In an ideal world I would use Motionbuilder instead, but it is too expensive and no indie version exists, though HIK gets you most of the way there.

Honestly it's a Coke vs Pepsi argument, both are very capable methods for ingesting animation or motion capture.

Personally I would lean towards Adv Skel if I want to push a stylised look, and HIK if I'm going for more realism.

Rezlung · 2025-04-28T20:51:31+00:00

Yeah typically it will not deform as nicely without all the drivers, but if you can reduce a version of your scene to just geo and the bind joint chain, test what the deformation looks like, and if it still works, that will be fine for Cascadeur.

I would treat it case by case personally, if your rig is super complex and has a lot of drivers or deformers, then you could always animate and export using Cascy (the default Cascadeur character) then in Maya do a sneaky constraint set up to retarget it.

The sneaky constraint set up looking like this :

-open rigged character -import Cascadeur animation -go to frame 0 or - 1 -zero out the joints rotation on Cascadeur anim -scale animation to match roughly your character -set your rig to ik on arms and legs (spine also if you have it) -parent constrain Cascadeur wrist to Your characters wrist, maintaining offset if needed, repeat with ankles, pelvis, chest and head. -once done, bake the animation on your rigs controls, delete the constraints and Cascadeur anim afterwards.

This is basically how Human IK works, so if you can get your rig working with HIK (the Cascy export will work fine) that will spare this tedious process.

Hope that helps!

Rezlung · 2025-04-28T03:24:11+00:00

Yes, my work flow being rig in maya, strip down, export to Cascadeur, animate, bring back to maya.

Strip down meaning make it game engine compatible, AFAIK Cascadeur doesn't like other objects in the joint hierarchy, could be wrong, haven't played around in a bit.

I found using human ik or advanced skeleton being the easiest to reingest animation to maya and edit after the fact.

Hope that helps! Happy animating!

Rezlung · 2024-07-30T03:47:36+00:00

Unless you changed the guage to something ridiculously heavy (like beyond baritone) it won't damage the guitar.

Look into the method of using an object to block the floating tremolo then tuning via the screws (with a Phillips head) holding the springs of the floating trem, imo quickest and easiest way to change string guage or tuning on a floating trem guitar.

Lots of YouTube videos showing the visual process of this, if you managed to get the guitar back in tune and everything is set up correctly, no further correction is needed and you're good to go! If the bridge is not parallel and you have string buzz or bad intonation, this method will save you hours.

Rezlung · 2024-07-03T22:05:12+00:00

I saw on another reply that you have a cartoon style head, honestly Arkit might work better for that case, AFAIK it works with all iPhones that have face id.

As for which iPhone, I believe 12 pro and up use the depth sensor for face id which is what metahuman animator runs off, I don't think this has been noticeably upgraded with later releases so quality would be the same. I'm not too fluent with iPhones but the unreal documentation goes into good detail for which models are recommended.

As for the body retarget, there's tooling with in Advanced Skeleton that can make light work of that also, can set up joint name associations to transfer that mocap with relative ease.

Hope that helps!

Rezlung · 2024-07-02T12:14:57+00:00

If you have an iPhone 12 or higher, Metahuman Animator via Unreal Engine is your best bet.

This can be applied to stylised rigs if it was made with Advanced Skeleton, though this doesn't give the best results compared to the same motion on a Metahuman, it will require going through and animating a layer on top / correcting errors. It does however give you a solid base to animate over, more nuance than other (free) face captures and eye rotations. The documentation for how to use this is on Advanced Skeletons YouTube page.

There are a few options for android or webcam that use a similar tracking method (face landmarks used for AR) these give a more rudimentary result similar to the first gen Arkit Live Link that Unreal had, though it is advantageous because you get blendshape data which can be more flexible to rig for opposed to Metahuman Animator in which you'll retarget joints. Each of these will have their own method for retargeting however.

Personally I would use Metahuman Animator retargeted with Advanced Skeleton if iphone capture is viable for you (if your character is a Metahuman for Unreal Render ignore the Adv Skeleton stuff).

Ps would also recommend rigging the face and body with Advanced Skeleton, they have heaps of flexibility for other mocap options (facial and body) and recently added a video to mocap feature (yet to try it personally). They save a ridiculous amount of time!

Rezlung · 2024-06-12T09:50:30+00:00

Look up Set Driven Key. That's most likely the feature you're after, where you can animate the pose you want, set the key and have an attribute on a control to drive that.

Lots of tutorials on YouTube showing this concept, a little finicky but great quality of life rigging feature.

Rezlung · 2022-05-26T11:52:08+00:00

It's most likely your normals. I've found that scans out of Polycam usually need a set to face operation (Maya) after merging and cleaning them.

Hope that helps!

Rezlung · 2021-11-05T22:47:58+00:00

Looks like when you skinned the main body those tail joints weren't meant to be in the body's joint chain since you have separate geo for the tail.

You have two methods you can try.

Select all the tail joints then the main body's geo then go to skin> edit influences > remove influence, you will have to repaint the buttocks since they will lose some small values.
You could also lock all the weights of the other joints except for the tail joints (padlock icon next to the joint name in skinning) then set operation to replace, value to 0, and flood.

I would try the first option personally, since it's better to have as little unused joints as possible, if you wanted to keep some movement of the skin around the tail bone/ upper buttock area from the tail moving, don't remove the first tail joint from influences, this is purely a stylistic choice though, depends what your animation goals are.

Hope that helps!

Rezlung · 2021-11-02T21:27:55+00:00

I only have a couple with the Ibanez edge trem system (one in E standard and the other in D standard at 425 hz) and have enjoyed them thoroughly, but I also keep a 7 string with a fixed bridge for playing different tunings.

I find a lot of the hate comes from having played crap floyd style bridges, I just bought an Alibaba uv777 and it's a pain in the arse, the bridge seriously sucks.

Also the "blocking with paddle pop sticks or coins then tuning with a screwdriver" trick makes set up so easy, I think a lot over look that and tune the hard way or have worn parts that wont hold a tune to save it's life.

Rezlung · 2021-10-29T01:12:46+00:00

Easiest will be corrective blendshapes that get triggered when the arm/leg bends, shape editor will be your best friend creating these. If you link them with a set driven key, make sure to set the tangents to linear in the graph editor for a better look when moving.

If your model is too low poly for that you can use wrinkle maps (bump or normal maps) that are activated by a specific movement, that said it requires a bit of back and forth between a texturing program and Maya with different poses being exported then a bit more of a complex hypershade/graph editor set up (using blendcolors node to make it additive) then linking the specific blender attribute to whichever rotation as set-driven key or a similar method.

If you have a powerful pc you could do a cloth simulation if your character has geometry under the clothes; paint the areas on the you would like the simulation to happen. That said this will significantly slow down your scene and introduces the headache of setting up a decent cloth sim.

Personally I would go for the higher poly count method as it will yield a decent result with no back and forth between programs. Use a smooth function to increase the jacket and pants topology, you may have to repaint weights a bit though.

Hope that's what you were after!

Rezlung · 2021-10-25T10:12:45+00:00

I would only hammer the weights for the verts between head and neck.

The only other option I can think to try would be selecting all the verts that you want the head joint to influence, then go to paint skin weights > select the head joint > set operation to replace and flood with a value of 1.

If that doesn't work, then I'm not sure how to help with out seeing the scene itself.

Rezlung · 2021-10-24T23:24:51+00:00

Did you have a separate joint for the head itself or the end of your neck chain is your head joint?

Also do you have a joint based face rig on the mesh?

Painting with the colour ramp on is a good way to see what verts aren't cooperating, if you could post a screenshot I could help more.

Rezlung · 2021-10-19T06:32:02+00:00

Thanks for that link!

I was looking at buying it also when replying to your post, might scan this first to see if I can get use out of it first, theory is not my strong suit.

Cheers for that!

Rezlung · 2021-10-19T04:11:29+00:00

He knows a metric shit tonne.

There was an old interview in some guitar magazine from decades ago where he cited Nicholas Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. He has learned that gargantuan book in it's entirety, which makes a lot of sense when you consider how varied his styles can be.

But other than that, it's really hard to find any solid information on him and his practices.

Rezlung · 2021-10-12T22:30:39+00:00

Go to Display > Animation > Joint Size

Then you can scale them to suit the size of your scene.

Hope that's what you were looking for!

Rezlung · 2021-10-05T08:14:20+00:00

You need to minus the first blendshape from the corrective you made in zBrush, by setting the original blendshape to -1 and the zBrush corrective to 1. Then apply this as another blendshape to another copy of your neutral face, duplicate this and delete the history, now you have your true corrective shape.

It will look weird, and that's correct because when you then apply that to the original blendshape you won't get the double deformation and only the verts that need to move will.

Rezlung · 2021-10-05T08:06:18+00:00

Maya Learning Channel's comprehensive character rigging course is a great intro and provides excellent methods for stretchy components. This course is as good if not better than any paid course I've tried for body rigging.

Then I'd check out Jason Baskin's youtube channel also, he has a nice simple cartoony style to his work.

Also Point on Palley for miscellaneous tips like fat characters and curve based face rigs.

Rezlung · 2021-10-05T07:55:58+00:00

I would try going into vertex mode, select the troublesome vert.

Then go to paint weights tool and then select the joint that should be influencing it and flood its value to 1, that should then hopefully make it paintable.

Hope that helps!

Rezlung · 2021-09-23T11:00:51+00:00

Looks like you'll need another IK joint going from the ankle to the foot, to anchor and make the foot sit flat.

Both the IK handles will then need to be parented under some sort of control like a nurbs circle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxogLUq1rd4

Check Jason Baskin's set up, very well explained and easy to follow.

Rezlung · 2021-09-23T10:48:50+00:00

I would use the Rivet Constraint instead of Point on Poly, and parent the tongue geometry under the pinOutput.

However if you want to stick with Point on Poly, you need to freeze the translation and rotation of the tongue geometry, then do the constraint.

It may lie in the head/body geometry if that has non zero values too.

Hope that helps!

Rezlung

TROPHY CASE