Animation Smoother


https://forum.reallusion.com/Topic220373.aspx 		Print Topic | Close Window

By pumeco - 10 Years Ago

It would be great if, after recording some motion with any of the animation tools, there was a way to 'thin-out' the amount of detail that was captured. Recording motion with a mouse hardly ever results in the perfectly smooth believable motion required. When it's played back you can see it's picked up every nuance of the mouse movement - and that's a problem if you want fluid animation.

It would be cool to have an adjustable 'Animation Detail Threshold' so that we can dictate how much detail is captured in the movements we make with our mouse.

I suppose you could imagine it as a sort of 'Lazy Mouse' for animation, but it's the sort of thing that will make an animation look professional and smooth rather than wobbly and amateurish :)
By animagic - 10 Years Ago
+1

I have also found that creating animation with the mouse gives less than satisfactory results. Which is a pity, really.

By Artman009 - 10 Years Ago
Until Reallusion adds a graph editor in iClone, currently your only option is to export your animation out via a BVH or FBX file (which requires 3DXchange Pipeline) and do manual clean-up in another animation program like Blender or MotionBuilder, then re-import back into iClone.

If you're curious, the makeshift workflow I use to clean-up my iClone figure animations is to get it into DAZ Studio 4. By exporting the iClone animation as a BVH file, I can apply it to a DAZ Genesis figure in DAZ Studio do my clean-up there.

DAZ Studio has a nifty built-in scripting language that users can use to execute commands. A user named mCasual has written two scripts can reduce the number of keyframes of animation by any amount you want, thus reducing the shake or jitteriness of a character animation. This is SUPER helpful when dealing with wonky BVH animations or iClone figure animations done with a mouse or captured using the iClone Mocap Device Plug-in.

mCasual's two DAZ Scripts are mcjDecimate and mcjDecimateProps. mcjDecimate removes keyframes on the entire figure while mcjDecimateProps removes only the items or parts you have selected.

Also, having both the graphMate and keyMate DAZ Studio plug-ins help as they allow for a visual representation of your keyframes.

Obviously, this workflow is tedious and requires exporting and importing BVH files back and forth between iClone and DAZ Studio but as I mentioned, until iClone gets a graph editor, animation clean-up needs to be done externally.