Don't call me babe. MakeHuman field test.

Artwork Animations
1

https://youtu.be/VfWSSCUOjIA

Originally, I got interested in MakeHuman because I wanted to use it for my own projects, and finally I have gotten to the point where I can do something semi-serious. Making this animation also led to some feedback to the mocap and lipsync tools; e.g., they now work with linked assets.

There are a number of issues with this animation, but after working on it for 15 days I grew tired of it. Here are the main problems which I may fix. Or maybe look out for in the next project.

  1. Skating feet.
    Fix: Make the Leg IK F-curves flat for the duration of a planted foot. In some shot the FK rig is used for the legs, which is not good if you can see the feet.

  2. Characters float in free air.
    Cause: The scenes are rendered in passes, with the characters composited on top of the background.
    Fix: Introduce an invisible floor that can receive shadows, and which is rendered with the characters. Also make sure that the feet always rest on the floor when they should.

  3. Sudden jumps in some animations
    Cause: Discontinuities when two actions are combined in the NLA editor. Especially serious if the character’s global orientation differs between actions.
    Fix: Not so obvious. Perhaps write a script which rotates the bones with location F-curves (root, ik effectors).

  4. General noise
    Cause: Mocap data is noisy.
    Fix: The mocap tool comes with a simple filter, which could be cranked up. However, interesting information is lost if the settings are too high. Better filtering algorithms probably exist.

2

for the foot slide problem. could you have used a stride bone in some sequences? did you put the background in the background and animate through the camera? if so what i’ve been doing is very basically building the bg and manually tracking it (frame by frame) to the scene then animating over it. it’s a slow process. this way though you can parent the path to the basic bg and everything looks smoother. a simple walkcycle might have gotten rid of the stange foot placement. having said all this though you’re still miles ahead of me. some stunning stuff in there.

3

Come with me if you want to live. I will lead you to the way of the hand placed keyframe, we will laugh and play, reminiscing on the days when we thought mocap would replace animators. Lol.

I respect what you are doing here, but it still makes me shake my head.

4

…Ok… I know that this is a very bizzare short test in every sense of the word. You basically already stated the movement issue. But the video basically lost me when that person tried to do the Macarena. Since you said you gave up on this video anyway, I won’t say anything else of this video. However, I do believe that a “Nice attempt” is in order.