Introduction
This week I finally did the last step of my collaborative project-animation! After doing this, I will export the animation to Zhu, and he will render the animation in UE4. To be honest, I did animation, it was really not easy, this project really took a lot of my time.
Animation
Originally, I planned to do performance animation by myself, but because my solo project is for performance animation, and I don’t have much time with the team members, I can only do mocap animation.
I have posted a blog about mocap animation before. This blog has a detailed process of making mocap animation, if you are interested, you can check it out:
Now I officially start to make my animation. The first step is of course to download mocap files from mixam. I downloaded six fbx files: walking forward, walking backward, walking left side, walking right side, idle, jumping.
I will use walking forward to illustrate how I complete my mocap animation.
First of all, of course, let the model be T-pose. In fact, I forgot at the beginning, so I had to clear the definition and re-assign.
How to create definition and custom rig, I have written very clearly in the previous blog. I am very grateful for the problems that I have encountered. I solved them and thought about why I did this, so I can do it this time. These tasks will be completed soon.
At this time, I encountered a small problem. In the outliner, I couldn’t find the group of my model, even if I used select by name, I couldn’t find it. I don’t know which button I clicked, but finally I found a solution in the show menu-just show all!
I did not forget bake custom rig, because I want to continue to adjust my animation in the animation layer. But in the base animation, I need to delete some keys first, because too many keys affect the normal standing of the character’s feet.
In addition, I need to adjust the character’s palm, because my character should be fisted (holding a weapon). Then adjust the direction of the eyes to let the character look at the audience. The last is the position of the knees and feet, which makes my animation look strange-the direction of the legs is changed and the feet cannot stand on a flat surface. 0809
Of course, I wanted to add details, such as these faces will move with the movement, but I found that the effect I made is not obvious, and I don’t have more time to adjust, I can only give up. I hope I can make the animation achieve better results in my FMP.
Let’s take a look at the comparison before and after the adjustment, it looks good! The character can walk forward normally!
At this time, I encountered the second problem, and I couldn’t open this file again! I opened the file with Maya2018, but my texture was lost, and even the model disappeared. I found it very strange. I saved my file normally and closed Maya after making sure that the file was correct. How could this happen? bug. Fortunately, after I tried a few times, I finally successfully opened it in Maya2020.
I wanted to try exporting my animation first, but my Maya not only got stuck, but the fbx file that I exported finally couldn’t be opened normally. I searched the Internet and learned that I should not only export the two groups model and deformation, but also clear the prefix. As a result, my Maya had a problem again. I decided to finish all the animations first, and I will ask Yann and Zhu tomorrow.
Now I start to do the second animation-walking backward. This is the same production process as the first animation, so I only post pictures.
Here I want to mention a very strange thing. When I adjusted the palm animation, I had already keyed all the frames, but my palm did not close, but first closed and then opened. Obviously I did not keyed. more frames! This is really weird. I think this may be a bug.
This is the comparison of the second animation. To be honest, this is the most troublesome for me to adjust, because the character is completely out of balance. Although the character is balanced in the original fbx files, obviously this does not apply to my character:
This is the animation of walking left side:
This is an animation of jumping. Here I adjusted Maha’s earrings. Although my friend and I said to create at least three controllers for the earrings, he forgot. So I can only use a controller to make the movement animation of the earrings, which looks very blunt!
There is a piece of knowledge that I learned during this adjustment! Luke showed how to export our definition, but I exported it and imported it again, but nothing happened. Later I found out that I need to select the bones completely and then import them so that the definition can be perfectly connected to the joints. So I can export and import xml file at will!
Finally came the thing that broke me the most! Once I adjust the knee controllers, Maya will crash. I have restarted Maya more than a dozen times in one night! However, after I imported the idle fbx file, my computer got stuck and I could only restart the computer. Even if I opened my file, Maya was so slow that I couldn’t adjust my animation. I guess it was because the idle animation had too many frames and the computer couldn’t calculate it. I can only save and playblast quickly before the situation gets worse.
Anyway, I have completed the six animations. I only need to successfully export the animations into fbx files and send them to Zhu tomorrow. It would be great if I could import UE4 smoothly. I hope I can be so lucky.
Export
After I sent the exported file to Zhu, he asked me why this is not a loop animation, and whether the rootmotion has not been adjusted. To be honest, I never heard this term again, so he sent me a link:
https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/74554876
I just understand that loop animation cannot make the character walk at different speeds or adjust the animation according to the action, so the animator can do the animation directly, and then let the game designer add rootmotion. I don’t understand how to do it. It’s the job of the game designer.
The main reason why my animation is not loop animation is because I don’t have switch on in place in mixamo! I really don’t know that this is an option to turn animation into loop animation. Although I regret it, there is no way.
If I want to export fbx file with animation, I have to bake simulation, because in UE4, animation is realized by judging the position and rotation of the joints, not the controller, and bake simulation can make the joints carry animation data.
Here, I did select geometry and deformation system, but the exported fbx file imported into UE4 turned out to be like this. There are only two meshes, one is a toe, the other is a face, there are joints but no animation.
No matter how many times I export, my mesh cannot be exported normally. As shown in the figure, the joints do not follow people, and the face mesh is missing! I have checked many times before exporting. I did select the face mesh, but the exported file just doesn’t contain this.
I found Yann and sent the file to him. In the end, the check result he gave was also very simple-this is not a game rig. That’s right, it’s as simple as that. My character’s face rig didn’t choose to use the game engine, which means it can’t be exported to the game. Even if Yann wanted to help me modify the rig, and planned that my friend’s Maya version was 2020, Yann’s Maya2018 could not modify the data of the higher version, so he could not.
I said that it doesn’t matter, I have learned new knowledge-I must remember the switch on game engine when I practice rigging in the future, and the rig imported into UE4 is game rig, which cannot use constraints, and can only have A root joint. The model that my friend rigged for me can only be used in Maya. Although it is a pity, it is also an experience.
The export of my project just failed, but Zhu and Yann and I have done our best to solve the problem!
Render
Before I export the fbx files, I have already thought about it. If the export fails, I will render directly in Maya. As a result, I only found out after logging in to VMware that I used Maya2020 assign textures, Maya2018 cannot be read, and I don’t have a lot of time to assign textures to the six files one by one. So I used my own computer to render.
Fortunately, I have learned how to use render sequences in zoetrope! ! ! I just need to render directly after importing HDRI. But I forgot to switch on resolution gate, which caused Maha to lose his head in the exported sequences.
If you are interested in my zoetrope, you can browse this link:
In order to save time and protect the computer, I just modified the resolution. I hope to learn other rendering knowledge during summer holiday.
Below is my animation. If you want to see my animation with more details, you can check out my other blogs:
Conclusion
This week I did six mocap animations again. Although I did not successfully export them to fbx files in the end, I knew that when I want to practice rigging in the future, I must pay attention to distinguish whether I want to do animation rig or game rig. In addition, I found that the rendering knowledge I learned in the solo project is also used here, but I still don’t know much about rendering, I still need to learn KK courses. Anyway, my collaborative project has been completed. This is not a mature project, but it allows me to learn the knowledge of concept, modeling, unfolding UV, texturing, animation, and rendering! I will summarize them in the next blog!