We've been doing this for a while now - end to end with very predictable results.
I would go with FBX files, but to work with FBX files, it would be advisable to have a Motion Builder lines, which means learning how to use MB.
Essentially, we do what André suggests. Our current workflow (which involves Motion Builder) is as follows. We have not moved to XSI 6 yet, so have not revised this pipeline:
1. Start with your character rig.
2. Either strip out the rig so that you are left with only a skeleton hierarchy or as in our case, create a script that creates a new hierarchy that matches your rig bone for bone. We call this the shadow rig
3. Use the shadow rig to apply your incoming mocap data. This means exporting the skeleton to MB, applying the mocap, and bringing the plotted data back into XSI.
4. The mocap data is converted to action clips (for the shadow rig).
5. Constrain your original character rig to the shadow rig so that the shadow rib drives your character rig. Plot each action to you rig.
The advantage of moving all your data to a regular character rig, is that it is much easier to work with keyframe/mocap data at the same time. Also, mocap never comes across flawlessly, so there are always tweaks that are necessary.
If you don't want to go the Motion Builder/FBX route, then the process is still doable, though you will need to work with BVH data.
BVH data is no problem so long as you have a corresponding T-pose for the mocap. Otherwise is easily solved by importing the BVH data, removing the animation and manually posing the skeleton into a T pose.
We have toyed with MOTOR and it looks pretty solid. It's missing the ability to mirror at the moment, but that will make it's way in pretty soon.
You'll soon learn to discover that animation layers are your best friend.
If you have any questions or need any more advice, fell free to ping me.
Andre
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf Of André Adam
Sent: March 27, 2007 6:47 AM
To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
Subject: Re: mocapdata
In short, we usually create a simple fk rig from the primary skeleton
intended to be mocap driven (excluding fingers, muscles and facial
animation systems), export that to Motionbuilder (via fbx), where the
MoCap studio does the retargeting and offset animation. Then we shovel
the animation back onto the original skeleton.
Getting things back in a clean fashion usually involves a more or less
fancy, preferable scripted workflow. Personally I never had good
experience with the fbx importer's merge functionality. To what extend
such a pipeline is developed depends on the amount of data; if it's only
for a few shots, I'd do it manually...
Hope that helps a bit, cheers!
-André
Daniel Jahnel wrote:
we are about to start a project involving motion capture so i just wanted to get maybe some general information how people go about using the data they get in terms of transfering the animation to their rigs in xsi. ive had a look at motor in 6 and bvh files which seems promising. one thing i noticed was that the bvh rig in the xsi demo-videos has more bones/markers than the bvh file im doing tests with here. is this dependent on the mocap-system/number of markers? it seems the best thing to do is build a simple fk rig that resembles the bvh-data/mocapsetup as close as possbile...can anybody shed some light on their workflow?
tia...dan
