I’ve been using MHA quite a lot over the last month and got some questions and feedback in terms of production workflow and working with lots of takes.
Firstly I think I might have found a fairly large workflow bug, when you export the animation directly from the performance file I assume it’s doing some kind of head stabilization as part of the export.
I’ve noticed that it looks a lot worse than if you export to a level sequence then export from sequencer as an animation. It still mutes some of the performance but no way nearly as badly as going direct. I can share some examples but the direct export is pretty unusable atm.
Another question I have which I suspect will be a no is, is it possible to fix the tracker and re-run if it gets confused. We are using TP stereo HMC but the tracker often gets the jaw line wrong. Rather than re-animate the jaw it would be great to be able to fix the frame and re-track?
On this point is there a recommended place to fix the animation. The curve editor seems like the best place but it’s only present in the animation editor which is missing the reference footage and the control board. Basically I’m finding it really hard to know which channels to work on. It also doesn’t help that the animation editor doesn’t support the timecode range, it always starts at 1, so I’m having to flick between the performance with TC frame which has the reference and control board and then the animator editor which starts frame 1 to make any changes.
I’m keen not to have to do keyframe fixes in Maya and would love to stay in engine if at all possible.
I’ve also noticed that projects can get very large when importing multiple stereo HMC footage. It would be great if as part of the import process you could set a frame range, maybe to include handles if the tracker requires them. This way it would only ingest the footage you need. I know you can not import the footage into the project but we work as a team using Perforce so having it in the project is ideal.
There are a couple of smaller niggles that I would like to raise.
When exporting a level sequence it always defaults to the whole take, it would be great if UE would remember, I’m not sure why you would want to export anything apart from the selected range though.
It seems a bit counter intuitive to have a capture source for each take. Would it not make sense to have a single capture source that can point to multiple folders.
Thank for any help and sugesstions
Tim Doubleday