Retargeting motion capture onto a control rig in Blender

In this video I will show you how to retarget a motion capture animation onto a proper rig in blender.
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[@TheRabidgoalie]

You know, before watching this video, I thought I was an unskilled hack when it came to animation. Now I realize that I need to practice a lot more before I can call myself an unskilled hack.

[@Cyber_Kriss]

Epic comment 😂 ... but so true !

[@m_tth_w9647]

hahaha

[@rayvellart]

One of the best blender riggers and animators! Useful stuff as always, thank you!

[@PierrickPicaut_P2DESIGN]

Thanks, really appreciated

[@Hongsen]

My top blenderer 👍🙏

[@JJ_Artworks]

Thank you Pierrick for these valuable insights. For a Blender animation project, I'm actually trying to retarget an Unreal Manny skeleton into my Rigify control rig, as the official Epic plugin to transform a Manny def rig into a control rig is not yet updated for 4+ versions of Blender (not working). My goal is to be able to start from mocap and other animation bases that are mapped into Unreal rig, then retarget animation on my Metarig CTRL rig and bake it, so I can then add facial animations and polish it (since there is no facial control with mocap / Unreal rigs, I messed up with that from days until your video helped me get out of the situation (skinning was messing up between facial / no facial, I was only able to bake on DEF bones and not on my rig, now I hope I can bake them on the useful CTRL bones !). The hard thing on my setup is that Unreal rigs have not the same axis (bones are not aligned on their "natural" axis but like perpendicular in some ways) - but thanks to your solution, I am now able to add some emptys in my scene with track to and change axis so my CTRL bones are now correctly aligned. What are you thinking about my approach to mix mocap and facial / control rig ? I also think this manual approach can give me more freedom since if I would have used the Epic plugin (if it was working), I wouldn't be able to maintain my control rig modifications to add facial controls since if I convert another animation it will (i think) override all of my work. Do you think I took a good path to do so? Will you do the same approach, or another one? Many thanks again Pierrick, and greetings from Aix-En-Provence ! :) Jessica

[@PierrickPicaut_P2DESIGN]

@@JJ_Artworks that’s one solution. Most tool just automate the process. You could also create the same armature as unreal with proper orientation for blender. Parent each blender bone to the corresponding unreal bone getting a child skeleton. Create a second skeleton with blender orientation and proper hierarchy and bake copy transforms from the child skeleton on them.

[@mugyoung5726]

great thanks! I've check 50+ video on youtube no one like this one solved my problem!

[@Shattered3582]

there is so much i need to learn to make my dream series come true. i have found you animation course but it is way to expensive for me at the moment. but and am pushing hard on character animation

[@ColinLevy]

Fantastic walkthrough.

[@PierrickPicaut_P2DESIGN]

Hi Colin, Been following and admiring your work, really happy you liked it and dropped a few words

[@davidecheagaray2256]

Wow. This is amazing

[@CattoMeme]

Man, this tutorial is pure gold :D Thx for sharing

[@KwasiMedia]

This is a lot. I so want to animate and use some mocap, but that's a lot to do for just using a walk cycle or a jump, etc that will be in the shot for less than a second or so. But I also like the detail and how well it works. Think I need to find a rigger.

[@michaelsmusicinstruments9980]

looks great, I tried to build and rig the NAO robot a year ago. He is currently on standby with IK rig. maybe I will activate it again with your great tutorials, thank you

[@Micromation]

I'm just in time for another amazing video :)

[@PierrickPicaut_P2DESIGN]

Thanks mate

[@ХрумБурундук]

Great, thanks a lot! Very useful information for animators!

[@VortexArtLab]

Amazing! I'm looking forward to the next video 🙂

[@Fashion67-x]

How good you show it. Maybe I can install such a robot in Battlefield 2142 II. By using LOW POLY when using iClone 7. Of course it changed its silhouette so that it would not be the same as the original. .... When I find time of course ..... Thank you for this movie.

[@Mrationality]

great informative tutorials, thanks. A couple of questions if I may: 1. does the Mixamo Rig keep it Y up orientation? If no, how did you align it to Blender coordinates. If yes, how do the rotations constraints copy the Z/Y rotations correctly. 2. You spent some time adapting the Blender Rig and cleaning and modifying the different curves - why then not making this run cycle from Scratch at Blender? You master your art so I trust you have good reasons, as a novice I simply try to understand better when and if mo-cap is faster than traditional animation.

[@PierrickPicaut_P2DESIGN]

I didn't generate the motion capture animation myself so I won't be able to help for your first question. Regarding your second question, the idea is not to get a quick animation but get a quality animation. Motion capture help you by providing a solid base animation that you can then polish. Building a standard run cycle might be faster (I'm not sure though) but would it be that acurate, I'm not sure neither ^_^'. Mocap may not be considered to replace hand keyed animation but more to help it or as another medium. You won't see any mocap used without hand polishing in any industry standard production.

[@Mrationality]

@@PierrickPicaut_P2DESIGN Thanks for the details. First I have to precise that I find the outcome impressive. Literally, the robot has a character (une propre personalité). The workflow and the pro and cons are very intriguing. I try to find an exchange. Mocap provides a great reference and starting point, but for it to apply to a human rig, the later needs to be a complex rig to avoid bones penetrations etc'. Applying it then to a human rig forces other issues like Y, Z rotations and additional tweaking of the re-target as the complex rig alters also weight paints distribution. I have no answers, and your input is very helpful to better understand the challenge. Cela dit, 'top' for the animation!

[@airkidproductions2848]

nice job, thanks for sharing

[@warrenography]

oh laaaa.... excellent cours, d'ailleurs, et la, tu vas m'economiser un temps fou! Puis, la suite? Je me vois devenir magicien. J'ai remarque que dans certaines des actions mixamo, on dirait que l'acteur etait positioner sur un materiel assez mou; je pense qu'avec cette methode je vais pouvoir eliminer cet effet; exemple en prime, il ya un mouvement d;un perso qui escalade comme un rocher, puis se met debout, et l'une des main ecrase visiblement un sol mou, ce qui rend nul une scene d'escalade d'un rocher... en tout cas, merci pour ce partage de tours de genie!

[@Bone-studio]

Great tutorial, congrats :)

[@JonathanSouzaAnimation]

Thanks for amazing video. Do you have subtitles on portuguese in your course of rig in blender?

[@PierrickPicaut_P2DESIGN]

Hi Jonathan, No unfortunately, only in English and Spanish

[@JonathanSouzaAnimation]

@@PierrickPicaut_P2DESIGN Thanks!!!

[@ayoadeabobarin522]

wow,good stuff please can we have a timelapse please,the knee pole target clean up was a bit fast.thanks

[@vinism]

great content, as always!

[@stefanguiton]

great video!

[@TheBryancrochet]

woot

[@MikeyAce]

👍

[@AlexiosLair]

I feel like a lot of this can be avoided just with using Auto Rig Pro and its retargeting feature which is pretty fast at this point.

[@Kyle-ho4lj]

excuse my noob ignorance but how would that work? we would run Auto Rig Pro before running the animation?

[@filmdon2475]

@Pierrick Picaut Hi Pierrick, I tried this same method with the controls on a rigify rigged character, however I am not getting the same results. Any tips on how to apply your method to a rigify rig? Thanks

[@olory3869]

Hmm je me demandais justement s'il était possible de contraindre un rig de contrôle avec les os d'une armature bvh ... Eh bien voilà la réponse ... Bon il faudra décortiquer attentivement toute la vidéo parce que c'est assez dense .... Bravo et merci

[@DmitryPekarev]

Good tutorial! Thanks! Unfortunately, blender become helpless when you have to deal with more than 300 frames mocap data. Import, Export and Bake operations begin to take much more time than before... Action Editor, Graph Editor and Timeline become laggy. FPS level drops to 2-4 frames... Hope they'll fix this problem in the future versions of blender.

[@AlexiosLair]

Just use Auto Rig Pro, it is the best tool in Blender for retargeing and creating bones. I used animations around 2000 frames and it took around 20-30 sec to retarget.

[@DmitryPekarev]

@@AlexiosLair hmmm, thanks! )

[@Cyber_Kriss]

J'arrive même pas à comprendre le titre 😂

[@PierrickPicaut_P2DESIGN]

🤣🤣🤣 tu m’as tué

[@Cyber_Kriss]

@@PierrickPicaut_P2DESIGN T'es trop un monstre, tu ne le remarques même plus 😂

[@aelendysfaery182]

@@Cyber_Kriss La même, mdr... En gros, ça veut dire que je peux prendre n'importe quelle animation de Mixamo ou même n'importe quel .bvh et donner cette animation à mon rig ? Je sais déjà faire ce genre de truc avec RADiCAL (un addon pour blender) mais ça ne marche qu'avec un type de rig. C'est un rig à peu près identique au rig que Pierrick montre dans cette vidéo mais le procédé est vachement plus simple. Avec sa méthode, ça marche pour n'importe quel rig ? J'ai l'impression qu'il fait à peu près ce qu'il veut dans les moindres détails. Qu'il peut ajuster le moindre mouvement. C'est impressionnant. Vivement la prochaine vidéo "step by step" ! C'est trop cool ! :-D

[@aelendysfaery182]

PS : Quand je dis "ça marche pour n'importe quel rig", je sous-entends "n'importe quel rig COMPATIBLES" (rig similaire avec même hiérarchie, en gros) ! Par exemple, est-ce que je peux faire un rig humanoïde classique avec Rigify ou Auto-rig et utiliser sa méthode pour appliquer sur mon rig une animation venant de Mixamo ou d'un .bvh ?

[@Ranss-game]

I'm really hope u make some tutorial from modeling to rigging

[@PierrickPicaut_P2DESIGN]

You can learn the whole pipeline with the crimson ronin and the art of effective rigging