Devblog #3: MotionBuilding Lovecraftian Horrors

Last 2 weeks I've been finally getting into MotionBuilder and what a journey it has been.

Motionbuilder seemed very daunting from the onset and it still does even now. While I'm beginning to open up to the possibilities that MotionBuilder offers, if I did not have an experienced friend and Mocap mentor, Yaro Copijn, I don't think I would've gotten nearly as far.

The UI seems ancient and every accidental button press leads me to reload my latest save (oh god when did I last save?). My first attempt at exporting to Cascadeur had some interesting results...

Not just a stop along the way.

When I was asking around about Mocap cleanups, a lot of people mentioned using MotionBuilder to retarget the animation to their preferred skeleton before moving on to Maya and cleaning up any issues there, however, I found I much prefer working in MotionBuilder for a majority of my cleanup and splicing.

My first successfully cleaned animation was a combat idle loop that I spliced together using the story menu in Motionbuilder and then exported to Unreal Engine.

Combat Idle unedited:

Combat Idle looped and edited imported into Unreal Engine:

For the cleanup and editing of this idle, I first created a control rig animation layer for the hands to add closed fists to the animation before I double-looped it to make a nice and consistent idle loop.

I then tweaked the playback speed a bit to create a more relaxed idle pose and locked the feet into place.

Next steps:

Now that I've gotten a (basic) handle on MotionBuilder I will be continuing the cleanup process of the additional 45 shots left in my backlog (god help me).

First things first though, I gotta work on my Learning Log! It's the document by which I'm judged each block here at BUas and I'd very much like to pass :)

Cya in the next one!