Simulation Nodes and Motion Capture - Geometry Nodes Tutorial

Grab Rokoko Video: rokoko.co/Erindale_Rokoko_Video
Blender Experimental Builds: builder.blender.org/download/...
@RokokoMotion was founded in Copenhagen in March 2014 through Kickstarter. Headquartered in Copenhagen, Rokoko has become a world leader in motion capture hardware and AI-powered software with more than 50,000 users globally. Rokoko is guided by a mission to equip every digital creator with the power of animation, ultimately becoming the backbone of digital human motion.
In this tutorial we're going to learn to use Rokoko Video to process video into animation data which we can work with using Simulation Nodes!
Final lesson file: / 79432292
Dancing woman video: www.pexels.com/video/woman-da...
Break dancing man video: pixabay.com/videos/boy-jump-d...
Geometry Nodes Toolkit: gum.co/erintools
Merch? erindale.threadless.com/
Discord: / discord
Courses:
www.canopy.games/p/advanced-g...
www.canopy.games/p/bcs-geomet...
www.canopy.games/p/procedural...
Contents:
00:00 - Intro
01:23 - Rokoko Video
03:38 - Rokoko Studio
07:38 - Exporting to Blender
10:21 - Download Experimental Blender
11:08 - Import FBX
13:40 - Pinning points to a deforming mesh
17:20 - Creating the simulation
20:00 - Cull old frames
24:03 - Calculate the surface velocity
28:40 - Create points
30:15 - Particle Lifetime
32:02 - How you could make a looped animation
33:51 - Particle Age
35:28 - Velocity
36:35 - Gravity
39:52 - Removing the glitch
41:41 - Floor
48:12 - Escape Velocity
50:50 - Colour
Patreon: / erindale
Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/erindale
Twitter: / erindale_xyz
Instagram: / e.r.i.n.d.a.l.e
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Blender Market: blendermarket.com/creators/er...

[@Erindale]

Be sure to check out Rokoko's products on their website rokoko.co/Erindale_Rokoko_Video

[@KaizenTutorials]

At face value this seems like a video about creating a fun little animation, but there's actually so much applicable GeoNodes knowledge in here! Good stuff and a must watch if you want to learn about Simulation Nodes in my opinion. Thanks Erin! 🙏

[@hisroyalillness]

Thanks Erindale, you are a great dude and teacher!

[@heinzlu8671]

Super interesting stuff, there are so many applications for this. Loved the tut !

[@Erindale]

Thank you!

[@roguecherry]

This is awesome stuff

[@JRBEditor]

Probably the most helpful sim nodes tutorial I've seen, considering I mainly work with animated characters and one of my problems with the sim nodes was not knowing how to implement effects onto animated/ deforming meshes and the shear fact you showed how to pin points in order to not have them flicker when moved is one of the biggest things for me to know

[@activemotionpictures]

Wonderful!! Thank you for sharing a simulation node video.

[@Erindale]

Glad it's useful!

[@__leoayres__]

I was a bit bored with Blender these last few months, but after this tutorial, I wanna give it another try. Thanks so much for sharing! 😍

[@fabriziolorito]

You are Number 1!

[@vstreet7583]

Just brilliant! Thank you! Dg

[@Erindale]

Thank you Dg - hope you're doing well!

[@MedicinalMJ]

Thanks for these videos!

[@Erindale]

Thank for following along!

[@andrea_ciani]

Always something to learn, tx Erindale :)

[@Erindale]

Thanks

[@blendercomp]

Supper awesome! :)

[@TimDownsAnimation]

It's like you can't even try to mess with geometry nodes without making something EXTREMELY useful. Not even at the main topic of the video yet and you show how to make a smear frame generator or a rough 3D onion skinning tool like you said. It's utterly amazing. Thank you for doing what you do. EDIT: UMMMM. OMG??!! Like, the first half of this video is essentially half of how Disney's proprietary software Meander works?! It's how they got the motion vectors from 3D animation to generate motion flow to interpolate 2D drawn frames on Paperman and Feast. I've been trying to figure out for a while now how to get something like that to distort Grease Pencil Objects. This is HUGE!

[@Erindale]

Mix with Sverchok and you'll be able to control your grease pencil as well 😁

[@abhaysiddhartha5374]

Simulatiiiingly nice video!!

[@terminatorcyril]

Thank you for the video ! this was really interesting !

[@Erindale]

Thank you!

[@terminatorcyril]

@@Erindale i'm now a patreon baker btw ! Lowest tier but still ! Can't wait to see what you'll do with those simulation nodes and learn along the way :)

[@BenP-hr2rc]

There is a pretty nice animation smear tutorial hidden in this one. Thanks Erindale!

[@Erindale]

Yes! Definitely a cool process to get working

[@MrPETERDESIGN]

It's so sool you went through how to pin the points to the surface. I guess expirenced users may just want to go to the main part of the tutorial but this kind of stuff shows more understanding of actually how people will use the tutorial. Thanks Erindale love the geo nodes stuff hope Unity is going well.

[@Erindale]

Thank you! Really enjoying Unity still 😁

[@sugar_ltd]

His tutorial is a thorough one. It's why I love the blender community.

[@crisishotl1ne]

Great video!

[@crisishotl1ne]

I've been playing around with sim nodes since the branch came out but there's still a lot of valuable little details in here so far !

[@Erindale]

Thank you! Definitely making geo nodes a lot more fun again getting a big new feature like this

[@maxwindsor_]

Thanks so much for this awesome tutorial! Also if you're watching this in the future, as of the February 28th 3.6.0 geometry simulation nodes branch, rendering works! I was able to get a great render using the experimental feature set with cycles.

[@Erindale]

Amazing! Thanks I will give it a swing. Did you find there were any changes to how you had to work with the simulation nodes?

[@maxwindsor_]

@@Erindale Not that I noticed, no. Everything you did in the tutorial worked without any problems.

[@sunbok.]

🔥🔥🔥🔥

[@WaterShowsProd]

Very interesting exercise. I like the bit about "faking friction" and "faking gravity" as if the gravity and friction in simulations were real and not theselves faked. It was interesting to see this method and realise that's essentially a simplified version of what the simulation software was doing.

[@Erindale]

Haha yeah all smoke and mirrors! Definitely not physically accurate as least

[@chicao.do.blender]

AMAZING VIDEO, i feel like a little kid watching his hero's arc final battle. i love geometry nodes

[@Erindale]

It just keeps getting better 😁

[@zboy303]

Very cool tutorial. I believe the trails can be done slightly more elegantly, which I kinda learned from a Chris P tutorial: 1. Insert 'Store Named Attribute' after 'Join Geometry' and call it "Age" 2. Place 'Delete Geometry' after that. 2. Insert 'Named Attribute' (Integer and using name "Age") into a 'Math Add 1' into SNA value 3. Plug previous 'Named Attribute' into 'Greater than' (however many frames you want to keep) into the 'Delete Geometry'. This also gives you a handy attribute to scale particles by etc.

[@Erindale]

Nice yeah you can! You can also warp the mesh or generate proper mesh trails by preserving verts of previous steps that exist on the back of the motion (normalise position delta, dot product against position, compare) and transferring position onto some donor mesh like a grid etc

[@zboy303]

@@Erindale Great ideas! Food for thought indeed. Just love GN and even more so now with the new Simulation stuff. :)

[@dulcamara2851]

very well done, importing animation data in simulation opens up a new vista, I wonder if in Blender there is a possibility of shading the clouds of particles more interestingly, for example by spreading textures coherently over the clouds like over a dynamic screen, using a picture, for instance, rather than flat colors, I always thought that particles are powerful for drawing shapes but their shading is monotonous.

[@Erindale]

You'd just have to find a good way to assign UVs to each point based on the desired outcome. It's all deterministic so the points will always end up in the same place. You might be able to use this to generate interesting visuals

[@tekhiun]

FYI there is a new simulation nodes branch, not yet in the alpha build though, but hopefully it will be there soon

[@Erindale]

Yeah I saw that a couple of days ago! I recorded this on the 19th I think, just took a while to get uploaded 😅

[@goartist]

this method is not adaptable 1:1 for animated objects, since the whole duplication gets moved around and rotated (of course), but works well for shape key animations, even if the shapes are just rotations and/or movements of the whole mesh. thx a bunch for the nice inputs packed into this tutorial

[@goartist]

solution is very simple though: insert the object with relative coords into a new object carrying the geometryNodes (i was very tired when i wrote the upper comment ^^)

[@Erindale]

Yeah as long as the simulation object is static then you should be golden

[@OnePatrix]

I know what im going to do today :). Currently Im working on your Shader Course. Im learned Geometry Nodes (I think that im using it on good level now, but still have some minor problems with understaing "Accumulate Field" node and use it) but I forgot about Shaders. I found your videos very usefull for Tiling and random tile rotation in shaders . Currently I also want to Learn Houdini and use it with Blender in the Future , so I make sure that Im going to do your every single tutorial with deep understaing what im doing - not just blindly follow, so thank you for our content :D. PS. Do you know when Simulation Nodes officialy will be announced without delay? They should be in 3.5.0 but I heard that Devs still working on some problems with them.

[@Erindale]

Scheduled for 3.6 in June 🤞

[@OnePatrix]

@@Erindale Thanks!

[@UTubeSuhail]

Incredible!! curious if I could use an existing rigged model and import

[@Erindale]

You certainly can yes. The simulation just evaluates the scene so you can even just grab and move things live and the simulation will work with that

[@prajwalkumar5930]

Hello Erin, i have a suggestion, you can make your blender UI scale slightly bigger for tutorial videos, because you are using big monitor, the scale is looking quite very small for youtube videos 16:9, btw nice tutorial as always ✨

[@Erindale]

Yeah I gotta remember to zoom in as I'm working. Hopefully you can follow still 🙏

[@prajwalkumar5930]

@@Erindale yeh, i can follow preety nicely without any issues, but not everyone can watch videos in HD due to data and network limitations.

[@diegomac2006]

Great, thanks a lot for that! One question: in this version is it already possible to render and export projects, or is it just for internal testing in the software?

[@Erindale]

You can do an alembic export and rendering like normal works. It's just extra nodes :)

[@diegomac2006]

@@Erindale Thank you so much!

[@abhaypanot8097]

Hi, is it possible to do something similiar to this but on Autodesk Maya? I've read something about bifrost but I only see tutorials about fluid mechanics and particles which is not what i am looking for. If anyone can help direct me to something like this that would be great! thanks in advance.

[@TommyLikeTom]

can you give us a tutorial on how to look cool?

[@sugar_ltd]

This is literally what I'm currently working on but using mixamo data, will it work with mixamo?

[@Erindale]

As long as you pull in your Mixamo mesh you can. All my tests for this effect were with Mixamo 👍

[@sugar_ltd]

@@Erindale Great. Thank you for the reply.

[@arktessellator_10]

How much work exp you have, just curious to know about how long u been familar with procedural generation stuff

[@Erindale]

I am entirely self taught. Started with shaders in 2019 after Lance Phans “Procedural Fabric Fiber” tutorial. Then taught myself Sverchok which is a blender addon (I wouldn’t recommend it any more). And then geo nodes came along at the end of 2020 in experimental builds and I’ve been using it probably averaging 6 days a week since then. So quite a lot of time spent on it BUT also because I was one of the first in, there was nothing to help you just had to brute force it. I think that mindset is the best way to learn. Tutorials are nice for solving specific problems but they don’t generally give you the ability to problem solve all your own problems

[@arktessellator_10]

@@Erindale commendable and inspiring, thanks 😄

[@Claudio_Pink]

hey erindale, i tried to follow your tutorial but on the speed part, i'm having trouble. many clones repeat the dance and follow the same path, I tried to solve it alone but I couldn't. Can you help me?

[@Erindale]

Are you deleting the older clones? Maybe jump on discord so you can share screenshots

[@TommyLikeTom]

I have never used mocap or even been interested in it because to me it seems like more work than simply animating, plus there is less control, so your result in the end looks bad. Animation is meant to be art, it's not supposed to be realistic. To me it's the same as the tradeoff between frame by frame animation vs building a 2D rig, because the 2D rig will be cheaper for longer animations but look stiff, whereas the frame by frame animations is quicker for short animations but gives you ultimate control.

[@xd1845]

hello

[@3ATPAXEP]

it's math madness what happens

[@NoBullshitJustGaming]

Like 69

[@markholroyde9412]

Is this what snowflakes are "into" today?, hilarious, we had cars and motorbikes LMAO

[@Erindale]

I'm literally building a house but sure