@Dalrond: fixed mocaps makes no sense to me. Just a few klicks and it`s done. The hard work has to be done in the 3d software.
What about the platforms ? We need some sort of file format that can be read by everybody out there. Namely we should do the animation and skeleton export in the fbx format, so the 3ds max, maya and blender users can share their results. Any alternative file format ?
Now the animation should be more or less game ready. The problem is that everybody out there uses different RIGs for animation. I`m using a modified BlenderGuru Version which is different from the makehuman (that has also like 10 Rigs to choose from) .
What tells us that ? You CAN have a game ready animation, but you HAVE TO retarget it either way.
Animating is hard work, so i would do the following thing:
you want to use the animation ? download it, but before: upload your own game ready animation. Like a share marketplace…
Some guys looking over the animations if they are ok.
This would automatically result in a big database… And the ones who are not familiar with animating dont need them either.
Ill make a short Tutorial when im ready with my charackter on using the mocap files together with blender and getting them game ready…
We can start collecting things there. We need a folder structure though, I am not sure the best way to go about it, any more suggestions?
If it gets some interest and we get several submissions, we can start a proper web site for it, but for now this seems the fastest way to begin.
Blender formats: Blender is free and open so everyone can use it. If people have made their stuff in other tools, there’s usually a way they can import it into blender and save as a .blend. We could use FBX but there’s just too many different FBX formats… as we’ve found, just because it’s exported as FBX by one program does not mean another program can open it. In my experience .blend tends to work across any version of blender. The 3ds and Maya users can freely download blender to convert to and from their format but not so much the other way around.
Makehuman IK rig: This seems to be the best MH rig to me for UE4, because the others have either too many or not enough bones for game use. It’s also again freely available and there are existing tools from MH for retargetting motions to this rig automatically which I expect will get better and better over time. People who aren’t using that rig could (in theory) export their motions and then use the MakeWalk tool to retarget fairly easily. If we agree to standardise on a rig, then we can directly share motions between us that are game ready and build up a really nice big collection.
We can of course have some area for people to share stuff that is not converted to these standards but still useful… maybe then someone else will then convert it and upload it to meet the community standard later on.
I don’t know about the nightly build of Blender, sorry. But when in doubt, just try the github version of the fbx exporter.
You have to import the textures manually into UE4. Blender creates a separate textures folder. Just connect them to the “base color” pin of the generated materials. Connect the normal maps etc. too.
I sent you a PM. I’ve private notes that could be used as base for a short tutorial.
non-bleeding skin
What do you guys think about this way to tackle the bleeding skin problem?
Sorry if this derail the conversation - look I have a very small team as well - yes we are using mocap as well I have made threads about this.
Look you can say a walk cycle is generic and not worried about copying what other games look like. That’s not what I was saying about unique requirements to the game.
No matter how many cookie cutter setups you have your gonna need custom anims, its just the way it is. Not always but more than likely. It has nothing to do with a walk cycle.
Does the character have something in there hands - is it big - can it potentially clip into the player - does this affect his walk cycle - does he interact with the environment.
Even if some cookie cutter gets you 75% of the way there, your gonna need some skills and understanding to complete your project. Thus if you are already going to have to do some customer stuff and you already have spent the time to get to that point, why wouldn’t you do it yourself?
Time… oh well game development takes time I agree anything we can do to cut down on that would be great. Do I think all the tools we have to use to do animation and combine everything is convoluted as ****, hell ya. There could defiantly be a ton easier ways to generate animations using tools starting with some soft of fill in the blanks rendering creation more natural than what is there right now with the frame by frame ****.
But then we are talking about making the tools to make animation better - not necessarily just saying here are your animations and handing someone a set. And again I didn’t say I was against the sets - go for it by all means. I just said I don’t get why until they make better tools otherwise your gonna have to do it yourself anyhow.
Regardless, most projects get hung up and blocked on animation WELL before ever needing custom anims. Usually around the point where you need full set of basic locomotion and interaction animations. If you’ve got a mocap setup and a team making animations for you, that’s awesome…maybe this thread isn’t really for you then, though? Not everyone’s got a team of animators and mocap rig in their back pocket, after all.
If we build a good collection of community animations then this will probably include “pick up”, “sit”, “walk with big sword”, “talking hand gesture” etc. before too long anyway… I really don’t think there are that many completely unique situations. With a working locomotion set up to start off with, we can easily make little tweaks to bend the arms a bit further away from the body etc. in minutes rather than days. Plus, we can use blend spaces, kinematics and scripting in the engine to mix and match animations and adapt them in real time for the game situations.
And, as n00854180t says, we can worry about all that once we have the game well under way and playable. Most games get derailed long before the point where it matters if a hand pokes through a body once in a while. When we’ve got the game kickstarted, greenlight, sponsored, published whatever we can always hire an animation team
Not to mention with a basic set like that, you can pull it into something like MotionBuilder and retarget it to new skeletons. That’s a lot of versatility.
For custom animations, crappy placeholder stuff works just fine. For your core motion and stuff, you want something that at least doesn’t make you sick to look at, and that you can show off to someone without them thinking your game is total garbage.
Assuming you can even get those locomotion animations set up, which many people get blocked on completely, especially one man programmer/scripter/level designers. Given that as a single developer you really need at least something basic that looks decent, with decent motion, to even recruit people to a project in a realistic fashion, I don’t think it’s a big deal to have generic anims.
Also you can always add some nice customization, or replace them later. That’s the point really. To just get on with making your game without getting stuck at the most basic things like animation.
It is a relief to know I’m not the only one who has big problems with this.
Well, one of the large walls that need to cross, and I think one of the more complicated for me because I am a programmer.
Every time I have to deal with animations I see more and more away my chances of finishing the project I am developing.
I also have this package when i was working with unity.
But I really can not adapt them to make them work in UE4.
If you managed to make it work, please, Could you point me the right direction to do this?
I believe the Rigify export option overrides whatever rig preset you select, so setting it to HumanIK may be unnecessary. What you end up with when you export a rigified rig from MakeHuman is something with 460 odd bones, even if you then export only the deformation bones from Blender to FBX you’ll end up with messy bone names and probably more bones than required (and I don’t recall if the bones are all properly parented and connected for rag-dolling and/or full-body IK purposes). The approach I’ve taken (though it’s early days yet so I can’t say it’s the right one) is to get MakeHuman to export a custom rig (similar to the standard Unity Mecanim rig) and a Rigify rig. I then run a script to generate constraints between the custom rig and the Rigify rig (while fusing/ignoring twist bones) so that the custom rig follows the motion of the Rigify rig. I then retarget BVH motions onto it using the MakeWalk addon, and/or animate the Rigify rig using the IK/FK controls. Once I’m happy with the animation I bake it using the custom rig and export the result.
That’s the theory anyway, I haven’t gone through the entire process yet, currently I need to implement a script to crop the BVH motions so it’s easier to extract loops (cropping is already implemented in BVH Hacker, but I’d like to be able to do it all directly in Blender). Also, note that if you use MakeWalk to retarget BVH motions it will automatically downsample to Blender’s current frame rate, so you don’t have to do that in BVH Hacker.
I know there are too many bones, but I’m not an animator and I have no f***ing clue what I’m doing, or should do, actually
Would you care to help me and others understand the process better? You seem to have in-depth knowledge about rigging and animating…
It’s really nice to see everyone else posting in this thread… it’s clearly a much wider problem and lots of us programmers are struggling with the animation pipeline. Making models is something you can pick up fast with lots of good tutorials on youtube etc. but animating seems much more of a dark art.
I’ve been careful about using stuff from Unity because I don’t want to get into legal tangles. Do you think the license allows Unity stuff to UE4? It does say you can use the assets in games, and I can’t find anything where it says the games must be made in Unity, but there are lots of other rules on copying and things like that so I wonder if they might try to claim we’re not meant to do that. Would be interesting to know if this is an OK thing to do.
Hey, I wonder… would it be possible to make MakeHuman export models with the same rig as the blue manikin in UE4 and right away be able to use all the motions and controllers from the samples? That might just solve our problem!
Looks like the UE4 blue dude has some extra twist bones (that have no weights it seems, so they don’t deform the mesh… don’t know what they’re used for in-game), and some IK bones (though again I don’t know if they’re actually used for IK in-game). MakeHuman doesn’t create those extra bones out of the box, so you either have to create them manually, automate it via a Blender script, or just ignore them. Then if you can import the original FBX animations into Blender you may be able to retarget them onto the custom MakeHuman rig, though I’m unsure exactly how you’d go about it. I’ve also run into a problem with importing the original blue dude FBX animations into Blender, I’m using Blender 2.70a and when I try to import the Idle.FBX for example it doesn’t seem to do anything (no error or message of any kind anywhere I can see). Maybe Blender 2.71 can manage it, but I’m on vacation with a crappy connection so that may have to wait a few days. In short, I don’t think there’s currently a straightforward way to do what you’re talking about.
I have been wondering this as well. Also I have been wondering if Unity has the whole animation pipeline solved a lot better? Or is it just all the premade stuff in the asset store makes it seem that way?? I’m a noob with animation so I honestly cant tell but they do have a lot of stuff in their videos that make it seem like its possibly easier in unity to share and adjust animations in engine.
You can simply send a mail to the developer and ask him or ask for his permission to use the asset out of unity.
n00854180t thanks for the info!
I can import the animation inside UE4, But the problem is associated with the way Unity handles his humanoid rig in the workflow (well, i think)
I’m neither a rigger nor an animator, but I’ve previously experimented with various approaches to getting a Rigify rig into Unity3d, and wasn’t really happy with any of them. According to the author of the Rigify addon it was never meant for generating game-ready rigs, and the best workflow he found for using Rigify with games was to duplicate the deformation bones into a separate armature via a script and bake the animation to that armature. So, my approach is based on that idea, except that instead of duplicating bones I use MakeHuman to export two armatures, one that is game-ready and one that is Rigified, then bind them together in Blender via script. You can find the Blender script (can be installed like any addon via User Preferences in Blender), game-ready rig preset for MakeHuman, and instructions in my repo.
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