Motion Capture Week 8/9 - Transfer Solved Mocap Data to Control Rig of Maya Character

This week I started to apply the solved data to each Autodesk Character.

First I needed to figure out which movements each of the characters were going to perform in the final pre vis. For example, in the background of my scene, Aaron would perform a basic walk at the beginning and a panicked run at the end. This meant I would require Aaron models with the 'walk' and 'run' data baked onto their control rigs which could then be imported into my scene.

When the planning was complete, I opened the character models with their control rigs in Maya and sent it to Motion Builder.

(Unknown to me at the time, moving my texture files in the project file meant that Motion Builder was unable to detect the textures and gave them this lovely white glisten with comical blue question marks. We love Autodesk and their fickle filing system.)

Once in Motion Builder, I merged the solved data file for 'walk' with the character file, and the purple man would appear with the mocap data.

Then under the control rig, I selected the actor as the source. After a process of adjustment, the character was aligned with the actor and the mocap data.

From there, the next step was to hide the purple actor and watch Aaron carry out the walk cycle as I played through the movement to check for issues. If there were none, I baked the walking MoCap data to the control rig and save it as a new Motion Builder file, ready for import back into Maya.

Then I moved onto the next movement and repeated this process until every character had a file for every movement. (that's quite a few)