Greetings!
We as a company are fairly new to iClone (7 in this case). We are trying to use it for the following:
1 - Create characters.
2 - Use the Facial Mocap feature to record facial animations together with audio (quotes).
3 - Add minor body animations to these two tracks using the iClone library (and editing those animations a bit).
4 - Export the clips to Unity from where we can get them in our educational game.
The third step seems to be giving us some trouble though. Since we have a lot of quotes to cover, we record them in multiple projects, a project of 30.000 frames for example. That whole timeline consists of individual clips, each dedicated to a different quote. We would like to have each quote going with some form of body language, but not the same animation for each quote, since that would get repetitive real fast. By using the animations in the iClone library, and editing them here and there, we have created 8 animations to go with the quotes.
The problem is, that when we put one of the 8 animations under each clip, and play the timeline back, the character seems to change position (slide) between a lot of clips. We have already tested how this looks in Unity and the sliding happens there as well. We have tried to find a way to lock the feet of the character to the ground in the same spot, to make sure that the character does not slide in the environment when different quotes are being called upon, but the only way we found so far is to create two small objects beneath the feet and make both feet point/lock towards them using the Reach Target option. This was working fine at first, but after saving each of the 8 animations as custom animations in the library and trying to use them in one of the projects, the sliding between different animations still occured. We have also tried creating the 2 object for the Reach Target option in the project itself. This does lock the feet into place but now the body swings back and forth between different animations looking quite weirdly.
Attached to this post are two videos, one of a character imported into Unity that slides over the ground when swapping between two animations. The other of the same character, this time in iClone 7, where we added the 2 objects for the Reach Target option to see if that would improve upon the look of the first video. You can see that both videos don't give us the desired effect.
We would like to know if anyone knows of a way to "lock" characters in place (where they have their feet on the ground and the angle in which they are standing straight) and have them perform animations from there. The result we would like to achieve is a character that is standing in an environment using an idle animation. Whenever that character is called upon playing one of it's many quotes, the body animation going with that quote will play, but the transition from the idle animation to the new animation will look smooth, and not in a different place.
I hope I have made our problem clear and that someone knows of a solution
.
Thanks in advance!