Cineversity

Hello All,

Again, thank you for your help with my learning how to make Rokoko, Mixamo, Toon Rig, and the Character tag play nicely together. Our little holiday kid’s animation got seen by almost 450,000 people on YouTube-hooray! Which means, I want to do more.

I have imported a facial motion capture clip from Rokoko as a FBX. It works great! Meaning the imported character animates as it plays back in C4D with no issues.

BUT…

What I want to do is transfer this facial data to another character. I have watched tutorials, it appears that it should be easy. I have gotten through the pose morph idea, setting up an initial keyframe across the new character so that it shows up in the dope sheet, and the next step is this: simply copy the correct track data from the imported character to the new character (making sure you are pasting into the correct pose morph). No, I cannot just select all the imported character’s pose morph tracks and copy them into the new character. I have to do it one track at a time for this character (and it seems, most). The new character is using Apple’s ARKit, it’s a sample from Polywink.

SO…

I find my new character’s track, it says something like “eyeBlink Left Strength”, and then I scroll up to find the same pose morph track on the imported character that has that data. I right click on that track, and copy it.

Then I scroll down to my new character and paste it into the correct track.

However, for some reason C4D has now copied ALL the imported character’s tracks and decides to past all that data into the new character. And chaos ensues. The resulting animation is quite disturbing.

I feel like I have missed some basic thing here on copying the track and pasting it into the new character’s track in the dope sheet. It has to be something simple, right? Any ideas?

I have attached a little journey screen shots 1-4 to illustrate. Unfortunately, the forum only allows 3 attachments, so for the 4th frame imagine you see the dope sheet completely filled for the new character (in orange), as if I had copied ALL the tracks from the imported character into the new one.

Thank you for your thoughts!

Patrick

Hi Patrick,

Congratulations on your success, being so timely, I have had even shared it on FB. People loved it.

There is certainly some work to do, as those Blend-shapes need a little more attention than drag and drop them. There are certain options to have them moving around an axis, for example, (Eyelid).

Two points, there are no images. (Max size 800x600). Images might be helpful, but most of the time, they do not really help. What is needed is an exploration of the Rokoko files, for example. The Facial tracker sounds similar to the Maxon option, but I might be wrong here. As long as I have no first-hand experience with a Rokoko suit and gloves plus face, I can’t really say anything with certainty.
I have explored it a little bit, perhaps more to the point to explain the problems.
https://www.cineversity.com/forums/viewthread/3961/
I hope it illustrates some key-issues.
BTW.: I can send you an upload link for the images. P.S. saw the image, but honestly, this is not really useful, other than to show that it is a lot information /end p.s.

Secondly, I think that the whole process should be turned into a tutorial series. I have to check with Rokoko if there is any interest, I love first hand information. However, would you mind to define your needs in the Tutorial-Request section?
Please allow for some time here, not only that we have a Holiday break at Maxon currently, but also a series takes some time to produce of course.

All the best and my best wishes for 2021.

Thank you! It could not have happened without you, Dr. Sassi!

I agree, these tiny images are not so helpful. I will add my request to the tutorial section and will check your thread reference.

In the meantime, I have found that if I do not “right click and copy” on the imported data track but instead click on its 1st frame, then shift click on the final frame of the track, I can indeed paste that into the correct new character’s track. It works! But it’s a nightmare to do, so many more things to go wrong. The Rokoko tutorial made it look quite easy once you got into C4D with the data, here’s the one I watched from them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRDJ7vAYll4&feature=emb_title

Relevant part of the Rokoko tutorial: about 05:30

Patrick,

Please allow for some time, as I really try not to work fully during the holiday break It’s my first time off for this year, and I’m typically online 16/7.  It doesn’t seem that there is currently a deadline on this.

Here is a file that might help to faster with this:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/3y2y8N4U78yqpsrQdX7LTqjIUTFHvFmPwRbZeaApOda

The Pose Morph should be in Animate mode!

I guess that is faster than selecting and pasting keyframes.

When you start with a new character, I would really encourage you to use the Rokoko set up as a guide, so things are not all over the place. Even if a single pose is not needed, just integrate it in the Characters Pose Morph tag.

All the best

Certainly! Yes- no hurry! I’m just figuring things out

I shall play more later today. You are right: I was NOT in Animate mode at all. I’m hoping that is the problem?

Patrick,

Thanks for understanding.

As always, without a project file, I can’t tell: I have come to the conclusion of the past 16+ years of mentoring and finding creative solutions for many thousands of productions that guessing is a waste of time on both sides. Yes, some stuff might be obvious, but things change, and so I try not to answer from memory or “because that is how it always has worked”. Doesn’t work that way to 100%, so I take more time to explore, and even then, it might be different on the other side.
So with files, perhaps in the new year, we can get a clearer answer to that.

Let’s have a look on Monday into this. Enjoy your exploration.

A small improvement to the work-around: if, in the dope sheet, I say “Frame All”, then I can at least grab all the frames in my 450 frame animation. I click on frame 1, shift click on the final frame, and copy those (not copy the track, but instead just copy the frames), then I simply paste into the new character’s correct track. It is still a “kludge”, not a good solution- I should be able to just click on the old character’s track name, have those frames copied, and then simply paste into the new character’s correct track.

I have also noticed that the Polywink sample face rig is exactly the mirror image of the imported data one from Rokoko. That is, left is right and right is left. Weird. But, fixable I am sure. Their sample is an old item. When I have an extra $300 and an appropriate model, I will ask them to make me a set of pose morphs from it. Perhaps their tech has improved in the meantime. They are the service recommended by Rokoko, so it should work properly, and it does in their demo. Although before I complain to them, I think I will bring all this into Maya to see if it’s a C4D-specific issue.

—-

Just for fun, here’s why I am doing this: my vision is to use motion capture (eventually streamed into C4D from Rokoko) to set up the basic actions and lip sync of my characters. Then, I will use the sliders (and… eventually… the toon rig?) to do my squish/squash/exaggerated expressions and movements. I have almost gotten the streaming plug-in to work from Rokoko in C4D (you need a suit), and I think I should be able to record one character and then have a new character interact with that one. One-sided interaction, alas, but I don’t have the money for a second suit. The deliverable will be a short Duck & Snowman type kids animated series.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Yes, let’s pick this up in 2021! Cheers!

Thank you, Patrick, I’m happy to look into it next week.

Example:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/gJOjVUE1dV64aoWlCTr7JAhxkwLv0lUKY4xUfEjXjTC
Note that once it is set up, the re-use is rather fast. Faster than key-frame copy/pasting.

As a side note: if you name the project-file’s PoseMorphs exactly as the incoming PoseMorphs from Rokoko, you should be able to use the XPresso Maker. I tested it in R21 and it works, I had no luck today with R23.

Happy 2021! Cheers!