15/3/13 - MoCap Cleanup part 1

I'm going to give the cleanup process a go today and tomorrow as its kinda important i figure it out.

Before i go into the process though anyone with a fear of graph editors, look away now.

And zoom

 Zoom some more

-Gulp-

So i started using motion builder but there seems to be something weird going on with the amount of markers and the tutorials all use motion builder 2012 and i have motion builder 2011 at uni so i'm not sure exactly how to get stuff up. I've hunted around on the internet a bit but no success so far so instead i'm gonna try and do some basic clean up in Maya. First of all, fixing these excess markers....

Here you can see the skeleton that Blade creates for us using the motion capture data and all the locators around it symbolize the markers, the only problem is there should only be 53 but obviously there are a few more than 53 in the scene. I'm presuming this is caused by noise in the recording so possibly anything white in the background that the cameras are picking up and interpreting as a marker. 

Fortunately there seemed to be a fairly simple way to figure out which are markers and which aren't, click on them and if the time line shows it has lots of keys in it then it's a marker, as shown by the screen cap above. This seemed to solve most of them anyway. Until i moved the character...

More of them appeared which did have keys on them.They had been hiding behind legitimate points and must have been caught up in the movement somehow. It was at this point i realised there was an easier solution. I opened the outliner and felt a little stupid. I could even get rid of the cameras.

They were even in separate folders and everything... sigh.

Side note. When deleting the unnamed points there will still be one left that isn't actually part of the markers. This is the parent marker and i think it might mark where the origin of the stage is.

So here's the cleaned up version of the basic mesh. Next comes the painstaking process of looking for any jumps in the footage.

 The most obvious ones will show up clearly in the graph editor. As you can see above they tend to stand out a bit.

You have to remove the whole keyframe which looks quite scary because there appears to be 6 points in each keyframe. You can then apply the appropriate tangent to help the animation play smoothly.

It was at this point i remembered while watching the tutorial in motion builder that they applied some filters to it which sorted out any jitters the footage contained.. I can't do that in maya so i started the whole thing over. I found that i could remove the excess markers in motion builders equivalent of outliner.

And as we've basically come full circle.. that's a good place to leave it till tomorrow to figure stuff out in motion builder. I'm tired and brain doesn't like me doing things right when i'm tired.


As a bit of a side note in general:
Yesterday i had a mini session in the MoCap suite and got someone else to take part in the animations. Being able to watch the screen and direct straight from what i was seeing from the recorded footage sped things up massively and was a real help. As well as this i also remembered to record the timings of the actions although this won't be made useful until the rest of the Give_ set is recorded

I also thought about recording which takes were the preferred ones which will save time for me later on. for example we recorded Give_1 and Give_2. Give_1_Take05 and Give_2_Take02 were the best takes even thought they weren't the last ones we did.