Hi,

I am new to iClone, and I am finding it very difficult to have a character just walk back and forth, think of it as a guard walking back and forth along a corridor, so the floor space is tight, so he has to turn on the spot, and I want the character to get to the end of his patrol point, turn 180 degrees and walk back where he came from, and repeat.

I'm trying to do this with mocap motions purchased from Actorcore, but it seems very very hard to get the character to turn and look natural, and there doesn't seem to be any turn mocap animations, there's three from what I could see, but I don't want my character holding a gun. I assumed that this could be done nicely via iclone? 

I've watched the tutorials over and over regarding the motion correction and directional motion, but in those the character is not turning that much at all, so they obviously work well.

The motion direction seems to make my characters legs go a crazy, or he turns so slowly that everything just looks bizarre.

Am I missing something with how to make something that to me seems quite simple to do, but I am not getting nice results.

It seems to me that I need more mocap information to get this to look good, but I don't have a suit, I'm not an animator and there doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for on the Actorcore site?

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I don't know if its my lack of experience with this or if its just not possible? Because at the moment I'm thinking of just abandoning this as it isn't working for me

Just an FYI, looking at the motion director, the animations in that look a lot more fluid that what I'm trying to do with my character using motion direction control, is there a way I can have some of my motion made using Motion Director and then have some using actorcore mocap?

Thanks 

Aaron 

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/profile/Kp0v/AaronVFX

The new version, iC8 seems to have a major improvement over previous versions in avatar locomotion with the new Motion Director feature. It now seems that it will be very simple to have an avatar do exactly what you have described.



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Hmm yeah, I spent all morning in iClone 8 trying to do exactly this but it just turned into a fiddly mess  

I ended up using a tiny section of a male posing mocap anim of the character turning, and using just the turn, then it ended up with not very nice blending artifacts, blending walks going forward or slightly turning the character seem to work fine, even jumping etc, but it feels like if I want the character to turn more than say 45 degrees, it gets very robotic looking, I need more than that it seems to be falling over when I try to do this.

I hope its just something I have missed and it is easy, but so far, it's been like pulling teeth




https://dev.epicgames.com/community/profile/Kp0v/AaronVFX

Hi,
I think MD can achieve this scenario, is this animation that you want?
Sample by Motion Director:

Workflow:

PS. You can adjust settings to get your final desired result, such as path length, perform sequence...etc, and then turn on "Reocrd" Btn on Character list. and then press "Start" again, the character animation shown on the viewport will be recorded.

Another option is Deepmotion.com. It has facility to upload your iclone character. You then can act out the move you want to do on any recorded video, it then converts to your iclone character. You then just import it in

You could simply :
1: Make a video > perform the turn with a walk motion
2: Do another walk video > walk left to right. Id make a note of foot placement. You wanna walk left and right and have your foot easily line up for a constant looping walking motion. Your walk and stride should match what you do in the 1st video
3: i would link all these up using the the new features in iclone. Blend animations and the new motion direction + foot correction tools.

ive tried mix and match from different sources. Mixamo, actorcore and Motion Director. You wont believe how bad it will look. Every single person has a almost fingerprint unique walk pattern. If u blend 2 different mocaps together from 2 separate sources then your gonna experience the body shifting. Shoulders, posture, hips, you name it , it starts to oddly morph together. I was gutted when i found this out. Not seen a tutorial on how to stop this bizarre effect from happening, but it makes sense when you think about it. 

Hi Joanne, 

Thank you for such a detailed response, I am able to make the back forth easily enough with Motion Director.

Perhaps my original post was misleading to my goal, I would like my character to walk forward turn around walk back, then stop, do an idle(stretch or look around), walk back along the path again then jump off a ledge, as he is on a balcony.

So even though it is possible in motion director, it's ok for something in the background just doing something generic, but I would need to be a mix of motion director and custom motion. So motion director to get the nice turns but add custom mocap in between

If I record the motion director I assume I can then interrupt this motion with custom mocap anims, as that would be ideal?

Thank you 

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/profile/Kp0v/AaronVFX

Hi Armondtanz,

Thank you, I have been looking at Deepmotion recently, I think perhaps I need something specific, so Deepmotion might be my best bet here 




https://dev.epicgames.com/community/profile/Kp0v/AaronVFX

You can do this the long way for now.
In the video below, I explained how to combine MD animation with gun pose.
(It is subtitled)


Also there is free way to create animation from video. For this, you can check out the video below.



If the motions you need to take from the video are short and easy animations, you can do this with the video reference feature of iClone 8.









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Thank you Yepkoo!!

This is all really great information for me, I think that I have been trying to do things without really knowing what I'm doing, or knowing what is possible, everyones replies here have really opened my eyes to what is possible

Thank you  

Aaron

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/profile/Kp0v/AaronVFX